Making a Tech-Nostalgic News Site. Would Love Your Thoughts

[phaxmohdem]

First off, just want to say this is NOT a shameless plug to get hits, I really am looking for (constructive) criticism, opinions and suggestions on a site I'm building. If a forum moderator feels otherwise, please feel free to do what you will, I'll understand.

A while back I wrote a little google-bot script that can auto search for relevant articles for a given search date, and for several hundred tech-related search terms I have saved in a database. I initially used it for my own amusement to find old school tech articles, but it dawned on me that if I enjoyed reading the results, some other people might as well. So I took a couple weeks of spare time and threw together a site using basic PHP, and MySQL stuff and decided to report on tech news/reviews that are 10 years old to the day. (Though I can set my search script to go back any length of time I want)

It has been live now for a couple of weeks, and is still very much in "beta" mode. Since you guys on here on the forums seem to be way above average knowledgeable on tech related issues, and perhaps even a little tech-sentimental like myself, I thought you'd be the perfect people to ask for opinions, and comments.

The site is: http://www.TechTimeMachine.com (Same as my profile site)

I would very much appreciate any feedback you could give... overall impressions for both content and design, features you think should be added, anything that didn't work/look like you expected it to, if you think "it's great idea!", or "you're wasting your time!", etc, etc. I realize it's not your guys job to critique websites, but any help would be appreciated.

I'm hoping that if it's a good enough idea and enough people like it, it will eventually be able to be a self sustaining hobby. I don't care about making profit so much as just covering costs of hosting/bandwidth in the future.

[t140568]

The design is good. Very cool concept. I always enjoy perusing older technology. The quotes at the top right are pretty good too.

Maybe implement an RSS feed?

[phaxmohdem]

Do you know how to go about that? (or at least a good starting point to start researching the topic)

[BillMorrow]

Do you know how to go about that? (or at least a good starting point to start researching the topic)

uhmmm...
google..?

but set your date to zero years ago..

depending on your nhosting company they might have cpanel and the scripts library that contains setup scripts and so forth (i am not totally clear on these) for RSS feeds, blogs and more..

[phaxmohdem]

Right now, it's hosted on my own WAMP server in my home since there are not enough users to cause a bandwidth fuss yet... so no such CPanel love. I'll do some snooping more around the nets though. So far it looks like a fairly simple matter of writing a script to generate an XML file from the latest content in my database.

[Harryc]

Technically since what you've posted I'd consider spam, we'll let you get away with it if you agree to write an RSS feed script for this site after you figure it out on yours . There, how's that for blackmail and bribery Bill...LOL.

[phaxmohdem]

haha fair enough. I'll happily post my findings/a little tutorial once I get it all up and working on my end.

I honestly hate posting these kind of things, because I agree it looks like link spamming... but I really don't know where else to get somewhat objective critiquing/opinions. Most of my real life friends don't know the difference between HTML and a snow shovel So I guess thanks are in order for bearing with me here.

P.S. Harry, How do you like your Ideapad S10? I'm in the market for a solid little netbook, and am rather lost in the bog of options.

[RealBlackStuff]

@Harryc:
phpbb3 RSS feed http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=1214645

[ArtShapiro]

Do the headlines come from you, or are they somehow extracted from the original content? I was somewhat jarred by the incorrect "its" in "3Dfx: Making it's Chips and Selling Them Too"

Art

[killer]

Oh blimey, the ill-placed apostrophe again. When will the diabolical head-whacking of people, who don't know the difference between a personal pronoun and an elision, be reintroduced into society? Aint it time?

Your's sincerely

A Postrofee
Kelsey Grammar School

[phaxmohdem]

Yes I write the headlines myself, based off of what I read about gear in review articles. I'll take another look at that one to make sure I'm not totally off the mark there.

And killer, you're correct. There are not nearly enough apostrophes in my abstracts, I'll get to work adding some more right away

edit: I revisited that one and tweaked it a bit to be a little more accurate. Thanks for the catch.

[killer]

Thanks, phaxmohdem.
BTW, I liked your site but it all seemed a bit shambolic. How about a 'By Decade' menu at the top. There is some really fascinating stuff from the 1940s that has been released to the public in the last few years by the British Government. (It was all top secret for 50 years )
The stuff on Colossus is really quite amazing.
Also the 1960s and 1970s saw some huge leaps forward in technology.
All the best.

[killer]

Here a link to some info on Colossus: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7713003.stm

[phaxmohdem]

I like your decade idea. I've been trying to think of a good way to possibly incorporate older news, since a heckuva lot happened in the industry prior to 1999 to be sure. Perhaps a drop down menu with options to go back 20, 30, 40, 50, and so on years. I was fortunate enough to be on a production team that video taped several interesting interviews with Jean Jennings Bartik, one of the original programmers of the ENIAC computer, so I would love to be able to report on those kind of achievements as well.

I'm trying to gear the site more towards that of a daily news blog/quick read entertainment site rather than an encyclopedic historical resource. Partly because those who are truly interested in a topic will probably research it on their own in greater detail elsewhere, and mostly because I simply don't have the time to do much more than scour through my search results database and write a few quick synopses for the more interesting tidbits that pop up each day.

Thanks for the feedback so far guys, you've been very helpful.