MightyFunk Design News

I decided late last week to revise a web­site that I had lying around for some time and more or less fin­ished it today. Years ago, I had cre­ated LunarLog to be the LunarStu­dio blog. Instead of blog­ging on-topic, I found myself over time writ­ing mis­cel­la­neous pieces and posts. I decided that I needed a new blog, Mighty­Funk to han­dle some of my more off-color top­ics. But with main archi­tec­tural ren­der­ing busi­ness run­ning the show, I didn’t have much time to jump from work to blog to blog. Mighty­Funk was mostly just stand­ing still with­out any new con­tent. Keep­ing in touch with my friends via Face­book in some ways put the prover­bial “final nail in the coffin.”

This com­plete web­site revi­sion will hope­fully bring new life to an older stag­nant blog with­out com­pletely alien­at­ing my pre­vi­ous audi­ence. I’m really excited because Mighty­Funk now serves design-related news excerpts from some of the best design-related web­sites and blogs I could find on the Inter­net. I wanted my own com­pre­hen­sive place instead of a RSS reader that I could go visit, and quickly skim the head­lines for new, inter­est­ing design-related arti­cles. I felt that shar­ing my own per­sonal list (which num­bers close to a hun­dred) would be ben­e­fi­cial to the entire community.

My new aggre­ga­tor is work­ing  much bet­ter than expected. I kept the over­all web­site design sim­ple because I wanted it to be pri­mar­ily a news source for read­ers, and didn’t want flashy graph­ics and back­grounds to inter­rupt their read­ing. Instead, the arti­cles would do most of the talk­ing for them.

I think it’s a win-win sit­u­a­tion for all the web­sites involved. A com­mon mis­con­cep­tion is that Google penal­izes web­sites for dupli­cate con­tent from a spam per­spec­tive. It actu­ally doesn’t. In fact, hav­ing these excerpts on Mighty­Funk lead back to the orig­i­nal author web­sites helps pro­mote their work, adds a sig­nif­i­cant amount of back­links which can improve search engine rank­ings, increases their read­er­ship, and can also lead to increased rev­enue (if that’s part of their goal.)

From a tech­no­log­i­cal per­spec­tive, the web­site is very plain. All the text and images are pulled from RSS feeds which can be found through­out the web. The images them­selves are off-loaded onto a Con­tent Deliv­ery Net­work (CDN) so that traf­fic spikes will not impact the orig­i­nal author web­sites. Plus the CDN (I’m cur­rently using Max­CDN) also works to help spread the loads through­out the coun­try which ends up speed­ing up the web­site which Google has hinted at improv­ing search engine results.

My main con­cern right now is to pre­vent dupli­cate feeds com­ing into Mighty­Funk. I’ve set up some macros and cron jobs to help elim­i­nate these dupli­cate posts, but a few always man­age to still get through. While I’m not (nor any­one else) is going to get penal­ized for these dupli­cate excerpts, it still remains some­what unsightly from a read­er­ship per­spec­tive. I think I have it cur­rently set up to remove dupli­cate feeds every 1/2 hour and it will need to be tweaked more over time. On the other hand, it would be even bet­ter if some­one could come up with a plu­gin which would fil­ter out dupli­cates even before they went to post. If I was capa­ble of writ­ing such a thing, I would.

Last but not least, I hope that post­ing 50 excerpts per page is a rea­son­able fig­ure for most peo­ple. Because the list is fairly large, I didn’t want peo­ple to have to jump from page to page con­stantly. Most of us are on decent Inter­net con­nec­tions. I’m priv­i­leged with a 50 mb/s stream here so the load time is min­i­mal, which makes my test­ing page load-time more dif­fi­cult for others.

If you have any com­ments or advice regard­ing the new Mighty­Funk Design News web­site, I’d be happy to hear from you. As always, links back are always greatly appreciated.