The ReportingOn Blog

It’s alive.  ReportingOn — the Django-powered open beta backchannel for your beat, not the Twitter account — is up and running.

[UPDATE 10/21/08: Most of what's on this list has been added to the new ReportingOn feedback forum.  Check in there to vote for features, suggest new ideas, and report bugs.]

Here’s a brief glance at my list of the first additions and revisions to be made, not necessarily in order:

• On individual beat pages, a list of related beats.
• On individual beat pages, a list of the users who file updates on that beat most often.
• Add e-mail signals (optional?) when a user comments on an update.
• Add redirect from /comments/posted to the single update page.
• Direct messaging, or a way to indicate how you want to be messaged. (Twitter? E-Mail? Carrier pigeon?)
• Users input a few beats on signup.
• Friends
• Suggest friends on sign-up based on your beats.
• Address book import option.
• Groups?
• Add location metadata to each update. (By user location or by option to add a location to each update?)
• Post your update to Twitter.
• Implement standard microblogging API.
• Add Terms of Service (Written as of 10/8/08, but considering whether it’s necessary.)
• On user pages, links to recent comments they left. (Done 10/08)
• Add permalinks for each comment. (Done 10/08)
• On user pages, a list of the tags they use most often. (Done 10/27/08 8 a.m.)
• Move this list and all feedback to uservoice. (Done 10/21/08 11 p.m., added list items, added Feedback widget to RO template, changed /contact template.)
• Translate the FAQ into Spanish. (In progress on 10/10/08 with both unsolicited and solicited help.  Posted at reportingon.com/faq_es on 10/21/08 5 p.m.)
• YUI autocomplete for tags. (Done 10/20/08 5:00 p.m. although only works with the first tag in the beat field for now.)
• Merge the updates-by-user page with the profile page. (Done 10/17/08 noon.)
• RSS feeds for all updates, users, individual tags, what else? (RSS for latest updates added on 10/12/08 11:30 a.m., RSS for users added on 10/12/08 10:00 p.m., RSS for every tag added on 10/14/08 9:00 p.m.)
• Repair the stylesheet of this blog, which was nuked when I accidentally deleted and then restored the database recently. (That was awesome.)  (Switched to a different theme for now, 10/9/08)
• Permalinks for individual updates. (Done 10/4/08 11 a.m.)
• Comments on individual updates. (Done 10/9/08 12:30 p.m.)
• Add Google sitemap functionality. (Done for updates at 10/7/08 8:30 a.m., but still could use additional maps for static pages.)
• Add Creative Commons license (Done 10/7/08 1 p.m.)
• Yikes, tags with multiple words — as in “global warming” in quotes — are broken at the moment. (Please use underscores to connect multiple word tags for now, like so: “global_warming” — Use as many single word tags as you’d like, such as: awesome, cool, excellent OR awesome cool excellent.) (Fixed on 10/14/08 8:00 am)

OK, maybe that was in order after all.  Not really. As I think of easy-but-necessary things, I’m adding them to the bottom top of the list.

Either way, please report any bugs using the feedback form and I’ll add them to the list to be squashed!