Many of you will have noticed over the last couple of weeks that Nerds of Steel is changing. I wanted to explain what has been going on and to ask you for feedback on the changes that have already taken place and those you would like to see in future.
The most signficant change is in the amount of content now resident on the site. Up until now the news stories fed from news sources like Google and Yahoo! News have simply passed through the site like a very slow moving ticker.
A couple of weeks ago, we changed that. Nerds of Steel is now able to store the headlines and summary content from those news sources so that when you go to search for a key word like “ArcelorMittal” or “stainless steel”, news stories from the outside feeds show up in the results along with our posts. This makes the site search function much more useful. We’d like to be able to build an increasingly useful resource if we and our server can take it.
In addition to the news aggregator feeds, we are adding the press release feeds from those steel producers that provide one. Each feed is directed to the producer’s own category, for example Producers or Gerdau. The items from those feeds will also show up in site search results.
These changes have not come without pain. Some of you will have noticed that the RSS feed linked to from the header is bust. We have a new feed called ‘Nerds Only’ which is available here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/NerdsOfSteel-The Steel Industry Blog Nerds Only. This is a clean feed of only the NoS posts so it should work fine. If you were subscribed to the old feed, you should point your reader at this new feed. Apologies for the inconvenience.
The e-mail bulletin sent out when we post has also been disrupted. Apologies to those people who have received more emails than they expected (or wanted) and for the patchiness of the content. We’re hoping to settle that service down too, so that you’re not inundated.
All this talk of content and news feeds makes us sound like publishers. In some sense we are. But that is not our ambition. At some point, I will post more extensively about our motivations here, but Mike Pennington’s comment on a recent post gets to some of the intent. In a nutshell, we want to build a place that brings together large amounts of steel industry information in a way that makes it linkable, save-able, usable, searchable, copy-able, share-able, tag-able. That will help us and, hopefully, a lot of you too, to know more about the industry and what’s happening in it with less effort.
Thanks for your patience with our tinkering. This is a work in progress and I ask you to add to it. Tell us what you think.
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