Just Talk About Web

Techniques Behind Modern Web

Archive for March, 2008




A few months ago, I told one of my friends, Bill Aue, that I was really tired with going tens of websites to read tech news everyday while my RSS reader had been overloaded with hundreds of feeds. Sometimes it’s very hard to find what important news is.

Idea and Implementation

Then, Bill had an idea of creating a weblog which pulls news/posts from all top tech websites/blogs (via RSS) and organizes them like a magazine so that readers can capture hot news, featured articles etc. The most important thing is that we won’t have feeling of reading them in an RSS reader which often leads to loosing focus to unrelated news or getting bored quickly.

Recently, we could sit down together to get it done in the way we like best, and TechMacro Magazine comes out now. The mag, as a syndication hub of daily tech news, includes several categories from news to design, SEO that we think most of tech-savvy readers and bloggers like to read:

  1. News: daily news from BetaNews, InfoWorld
  2. Tech Blogs: articles from top tech blogs like TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM etc.
  3. Design: ariticles from top design blogs like Smashing Magazine, Noupe.
  4. SEO: SEO news from high ranking websites and blogs like Search Engine Journal, Matt Cutts.
  5. Online Marketing: like SEO category which contains posts from Online Marketing Blog, Pronet Advertising.
  6. Wordpress - Blogger: resources for bloggers, especially those who are building online communities on Wordpress platform.

Of course, these categories are not all things for all people and we may change sources over the time but from our point of view, they are just enough for a kind of daily magazine (don’t ask me about print version now :) ).

home-page.gif

Not Just a Feed Reader

Probably you’ll ask what advanced TechMacro DOT com is over an online feed reader. Here are some features I think you would like:

  1. You get natural reading view provided by elegant magazine style theme (instead of narrow, hard-to-read display panel given by most of feed readers I’ve used).
  2. You can see “Related Posts” over the categories. For example, you can see related articles from Mashable and ReadWriteWeb on “Imeem” music social network posted by TechCrunch (see image below).
  3. You can rate an article and promote it to font-page like DIGG ;)
  4. You can keep track with all daily tech news via single RSS feed. You’ll no longer have to add and organize feeds. I’m personally fed up with this routine job.

related-article3.gif

Among the above points, as a bloggers who have to read many articles from variety of sources, I found “Related posts” and “mixed RSS” the most useful features.

Copyright

Copyright may be a controversial point but we try to do no evil things. All posts and articles have big direct link to original ones; FeedBurner’s FeedFlare items embedded in RSS feeds are kept untouched so that readers can Digg or add article to del.icio.us using original link while all images are cached to avoid hot-linking.

In addition, we put copyright notice in all articles to make sure there would be no misinterpretation of the sources (see image below).

copyright-notice.gif

Read daily tech news on TechMacro DOT com and spread it to friends if you like it. Please put any suggestions/comments for the mag here or drop Bill a mail. Cheers.


Recommended Reading: This site recommends Website Magazine for 'Net Success

Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future posts!

Building a Mash-up with SynthaSite

In a recent post reviewing service from WebNode -- one of players in rather a crowded market of online site builder -- I mentioned SynthaSite as a serious competitor in the field. A few weeks ago, Monique sent me a shout about SynthaSite's upcoming release with a lot of improvements in site builder and new widgets like Form, Map and ...

Here are a few things I discovered while playing with Google search. Did you know already? Search in Search Searching "Microsoft", I got the result as image below. Now you can search within search result. It seems only news portals have this functionality as I got similar embedded search button when trying with "New York Times" and "Washington Post" keywords but just got ...

  • 1 Comment
  • Filed under: Google
  • A few weeks ago, I posted a comparison of Dojo ShrinkSafe, YUI Compressor and Jasob Obfuscator. Then, I received comment from Brian introducing an interesting project: Include; some day later it was covered by Ajaxian with a few good comments that are worth a read. So, I decided to integrate into one of my projects to have hand-on experience with ...

    My Blog After Two Months

    Every journey begins with the first step and after the first two months I can say I've passed the first step of a very long trip. So, I want to show a summary of my blog stats as a milestone. Visitors and Site Ranking In the passed 2 month, "Just Talk About Web" (JTAW) blog has welcome about 19,000 visitors (i.e. 367 ...

  • 0 Comments
  • Filed under: Misc
  • Yesterday, I subscribed to Website Magazine - a magazine which covers a variety of categories of web business from website management, online advertisement, SEO to web design and development. This magazine is an excellent source for people who are interested in doing business on the net of any kind. I'm very fond of the digital edition of the magazine powered by ...

  • 7 Comments
  • Filed under: Book Reviews, Misc
  • Rush & Jam

    In search to make my blog more popular via link exchange services, I've found BlogRush and registered for the service. BlogRush states itself as a "Cooperative Syndication Network" -- a network of blogs that run a small "widget" on their pages. Each time this widget is loaded it will contain 5 clickable headlines which are the blog post titles to other ...

    "I'm sure what most of you care the most about are the facts, and so I've compiled the results of the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test for each of the different browsers. All of the tests below were performed on the same Windows machine, and the Firefox 3 nightly builds definitely came out on top." reported Ryan from CyberNet.   "It's important to ...

  • 4 Comments
  • Filed under: Misc
  • Premium Sponsors

    Career Opportunities

    Advertisements