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davidortinau / Xappy

A mobile app to track Xamarin news and explore all the goodness that is .NET for Mobile developers
MIT License
350 stars 106 forks source link

Community Blog feature proposal #3

Open techduggu opened 5 years ago

techduggu commented 5 years ago

Hi Team ,

First of all, loved to see such a great initiative and putting all the feedback collected into an action.

I just saw that this app "Xappy" has a Blog page in plan and wondering how are we planning to design it to show the latest and greatest blogs written for Xamarin. Are you planning to create a separate API endpoint to crawl the web-content etc.?

I'm also excited to let you know that past couple of months inspired by the PlanetXamarin web application, I have been working on the same concept i.e. Community Blogs aggregator mobile app for Xamarin which has the following core and enhanced features:

  1. Aggregates blogs using the list of RSS feeds provided by the authors who write blogs for Xamarin
  2. The JSON list can be updated by Authors or end-user can suggest a new blog page directly through app (this further creates an issue using Github API for pull requests).
  3. The blog page will also have search feature so that end-user can search for a term and he/she will get the relevant community blogs (Currently this is the main problem as it is not being served by anywhere and one has to google it out, which has an impact on the blogs which are new with great information but don't show up under search engines).
  4. The blog page will use Reactive extensions and Akavache caching for smooth user experience.

I'm not sure if this is the right platform to propose this idea but love to see such kind of Community blog feature in our Xappy app. I've the prototype with simple UI ready and can share the code (or work together) if it makes sense.

davidortinau commented 5 years ago

I think some kind of aggregator is going to be needed here as well, probably with some level of curation. I suspect we have some level of liability for content that will appear within our app. BUT perhaps we can allow anyone to add their own feeds?

Initially I think we will consume the Xamarin blog, but definitely including content from the larger community is important and should be part of the plan.

It is called blog, but would it be worth while to also include video content, twitch channels, etc?

Can you share what you have here? Or if you prefer, shoot me an email: david.ortinau@microsoft.com

techduggu commented 5 years ago

Hi @davidortinau ,

Thanks for the response. I've shared my git private repo with you, please check your inbox. Currently, the code written is just playing around Reactive extensions with few blog feeds for aggregation. The app has feature for displaying all the latest blogs and search for a term. However the feeds URL needs to be moved to JSON file as well (refer Feeds.json for an example). Please take a look and let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

Regarding your question to allow anyone to add their feeds - it makes sense to open this feature for only blog authors so that they can connect their blog with the app.

And yes, it would be worth to include other content (like video, twitch channels etc.) but I guess as now we have our new Youtube channel in place (for all community videos in one place), it can be done via Youtube API (no need of any aggregation).

techduggu commented 5 years ago

Hi @davidortinau ,

Just wanted to follow up, Did you get chance to look at the implementation (repo shared above)?

Just curious to know that whether it's useful to use with our Xappy app's blog page or need any improvements? Happy to rework on it and contribute!

Thanks!