Import jQuery

Weekly Bracha Futures: Mockups

The Weekly Bracha is a series of posts highlighting the good blog posts in the Messianic blogosphere each week. It’s been going strong for a year now.

A few months back I mentioned that I wanted improve the Weekly Bracha: move it to its own website, build a community around it.

To that end, I’ve been busy!

I’ve been doing a few mockups of what I want the new website to look like. Been doing a bit of coding as well to play out some ideas on the web. Here’s my current thinking:

WeeklyBrachaSketch

In the picture above you see 2 of 5 categories:

  • Popular: top clicked from any category, ordered by date. Blogs with many comments on them are granted more points, rising higher on the popularity scale. Users can up- or down-vote items; up-voted items will increase the popularity as well.
  • Fresh: new posts from any category. The idea here is to have fresh items here every time you visit the site. To that end, I’ll seed it with the RSS feeds of the 200 some Messianic blogs I’m aware of.
  • News: items from any category tagged with “news”. The items here are biblical archeology and news items from the Jewish and Christian worlds.
  • Podcasts: items from any category tagged with podcast. If mp3, we provide an inline player.
  • Video: items from any category pointing to YouTube. Inline player. Considering seeding this with some of the well-known Messianic YouTube channels out there.

The purpose of the site is to quickly see what’s happening in the Messianic world: blogs, news, podcasts, videos. And I don’t want to dump a boatload of links on the person, information overload; I don’t want a cluttered, hard-to-navigate site. So I’m experimenting now with the oversized, clean design: few links, only the essentials.

That’s my current thinking! So keep an eye out for the new bracha site. Should be fun! And hopefully useful!

10 comments:

  1. "Another ridiculous post from Shlomovich"

    LOL, love it:)! I am looking forward to this "Weekly Bracha" site. Get moving!

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  2. Put that in there just for you, buddy. :-)

    Glad you like it.

    I've actually got part of the site working -- the "fresh" links part. I'm fleshing out the rest.

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  3. Looks great so far, Judah. Thanks for always investing so much of your own time to make our community better.

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  4. Pleasure is mine! I love working on stuff like this. :-)

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  5. There is a divine Messiah but there is no "Messianic Movement." Just a bunch of hodge podge crazies....

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  6. Keep up the good work, Judah. I can't wait to see how this all pans out.

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  7. Judah:

    That looks like a great format. I will keep the latest craziness coming!

    Derek

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  8. Shalom Judah, it seems we may have some things in common on multiple levels. I would like to talk with you. Also check out Scoopit I think it does what you are trying to do and is community based, it is quite good. please contact me so we can chat.

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  9. Shalom Judah Gabriel. I just found your blog, and I'm already listening to Chavah Messianic Radio. Great! I have an idea for you: When a user clicks on a link, it should open an overlay window, such as the one in this demo http://jquerytools.org/demos/overlay/external.html

    This way, your user won't go away from your Weekly Bracha !

    Shalom from El Salvador!!!

    ReplyDelete

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