About a month ago, we quietly added a personalized page feature to BlufftonToday.com.
Personalization has been around for quite awhile -- it dates back to March 1995, when Jeff Boulter announced CRAYON (named for "CReAte Your Own Newspaper"). Newspapers haven't done much with it, but just about every portal and search engine has a my.sitename.com feature.
We've wondering whether a "my page" tool could contribute anything significant to frequency-of-use numbers, and there's no way to know without trying it, so we did.
It's too early to tell one way or another, but we're going to bundle this tool into the blogging/social networking package we're rolling out to all Morris newspapers.
And as of this afternoon we're releasing the software under the open-source General Public License.
Called Mysite, it's a module for the Drupal content management system. Ken Rickard, who is part of our Strategy and Innovation team, wrote it (fairly quickly) and has uploaded it to Drupal.org. A tarball should be available tonight or tomorrow.
Others are welcome to try it out and use it. Ideally we'd like to see it improved and extended. It already has some interesting features:
- Users can choose blocks of headlines, or headlines with summaries.
- Content can come from the site (stories, blogs, forums) or from RSS feeds.
- Users can add RSS feeds of their choice.
- Users can let other users view their custom pages (or not).
- The backend is "pluggable," so adding new types of content should be a snap.
Biggest item on my wish list would be drag/drop page reordering, via AJAX.