Echodemic

Ecodemic was a Custom PHP development project done for a client in USA in mid-2000s. The application had a vast number of dynamic features, and this Project really helped our PHP team to grow their skillsets into Custom PHP development. The project no longer exists, But it still exists in our memory as a delight.

• Website details: A blog site with social community features and user management functionalities in it.
• Challenge: Basically, the clients wanted a social community website, with more importance given to the blog content, and various options to provide user-interactivity in the website.
• Result provided: A complete blog site with various user-interactivity options
• Impact: A very well furnished and organized blog site that also includes social networking facilities in it, is what turned out from the efforts that were put by Macronimous

About the website

A social community content website where thoughts, opinions, and creative writings are posted and voted by users. The site gives more importance to content first, social networking second. It is a website that gives more prominence to content first, social networking second. Echodemic is a place for people to express themselves, be heard, and be judged by fellow readers. That is the reason the site has its punch line as “Be Heard”

Business Needs

Macronimous was posed with the following business needs in the Echodemic website:
The site had to be basically a blog site, wherein registered users could post on their blogs. The management of the website needed a feature to be incorporated into the website called Content Pluming, wherein RSS feeds from other websites could be posted into Echodemic.

They also wanted user management functionalities, as the site was also going to be a social networking site.

Another functionality that the clients pressed about was to classify the various contents according to the category in which they fit the best.

An Echodemic threshold had to be set up for all content categories. When the limit is exceeded by any blog content, that blog should be reflected on the home page of the website.

Solution

Macronimous provided the following solutions to the challenges that were put forth by the clients.

• Content Pluming: We implemented this module on the website, wherein RSS feeds can be imported into the website from external sites, and posted into Echodemic. Here we also provided an option in which the registered user can also archive the feeds that have interested him a lot and later can publish them onto the site.
• Taxonomy: For simplicity, we classified the content into various categories, so that the contents can be posted according to the category that it perfectly fits in. Under each category, the blog that has the highest number of echoes or votes would be presented in the beginning, followed by the one with a second higher number of votes.
• Echodemic Threshold: A particular limit is fixed, like a number of hours and particular vote counts, so that if this particular threshold is met by any blog on the website, it would appear on the home page of the website, in a separate highlighted area. This threshold is common for all the categories and would be fixed by the administrator.
• User management: For making the site a complete social community website, we included user management functionalities into the website. Features like
  • Creation of buddy list.
  • Inviting users to the same group to read a new blog written by any one of the same group.
  • Importing email ids of friends from Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Lycos, and MySpace.
  • Commenting options for each and every blog.
• Rating: Depending on the overall interaction that each user has on the website, including posting of blogs, commenting on others blogs, receiving comments from other users, and the likes, the rating is given to each user.
• Karma: A functionality called Karma is included on the website. This page has details like
  • Score – The total rating obtained by the user.
  • Posted Articles – The number of articles posted by the user.
  • Top Posts – Top posts published by the posted articles.
  • Echoes- Number of comments received for the posts.
  • Echoes/Published Ratio.
• Search options: Dual search options are given on the website. One is an Advanced search option, wherein the search is carried out with normal keyword searching. A Scheduled search option is also provided, wherein, if the user wants to search for something, but has time constraints at the moment, then he can schedule a search giving the necessary search criteria, with the results showing up in the scheduled time, as per the user’s need.
• Top series: In each category, the top series would be highlighted as:
  • 24 Hours – Blogs that have got a maximum rating for the past 24 hours.
  • 7 Days – Blogs that have got a maximum rating for the past 7 days.
  • 30 days – Blogs that have got a maximum rating for the past 30 days.
  • 365 days – Blogs that have got a maximum rating for the past 365 days.

  Also, Top 10 blogs are also shown below each category.

• Other features: Other features on this website include:
  • Register – The users need to be registered in order to post articles or comment on any blog.
  • Comment reply – replying to comments for blogs.
  • Flagging – Flag content which not follow the blog rules.
  • Report abuse – Directly notify the admin that content is offensive.
  • Email forwards – Forward any blog of the user’s interest to their friends, thereby increasing the awareness about the website to others.
  • Cloud Tags – For helping in SEO functionalities.

Benefits

Few of the many advantages include:

• Importing of RSS and ATOM feeds from any external websites
• Simplified User-management functionalities.
• Complete social networking options, like any social networking site.
• Importing friends’ email ids from Gmail, Yahoo, MySpace, and the likes.
• Perfect classification of blog categories.
• Display of blog with higher votes and rate, on the homepage.
• Search engine friendly.
• Top series in each blog category.

We at Macronimous had opportunities to work with simple websites to large scale web applications for clients across the globe since 2001. We have developed Web apps like CRM, Custom CMS, Payroll. Accounting, Hospital Management, Video conferencing, SaaS-based apps, and many more. We have several web development case studies to share with you.

We would love to capture all of them and place them here, But due to multiple restrictions such as time and confidentiality – we restrict ourselves with a few that we could share here as client project case studies.