Posted on August 14, 2011 and filed under Uncategorized.
I am suspending new posts at this Word Press Blog in favor of a custom blog engine currently under development. This will be the last HPB posting here.
You can resume Headline Prophet blog posts at my personal blog (pre-filtered from this link to present postings related to my personal projects including Headline Prophet) until the new blogging app is up and running.
Posted on December 6, 2010 and filed under Uncategorized.
The latest Facebook changes are now going through the process of “ritualistic rejection”. Witness one example of countless as it appears in the New York Daily News today, “Facebook’s New Design Has Some Feeling Unfriendly“.
CBS 60 Minutes on Facebook Profile Changes
Ritualistic rejection is that phenomena where after a major release or change to a popular website or application, a body of users organize to “reject” the change.
Statistically, of course, there is likely nothing unusual about bodies of a given user population rejecting changes. At an individual level we all have our customizations in place and our preferred path in using applications. When they are abruptly changed we tend to be very skeptical and even critical of anything that interferes with those established protocols.
What makes ritualistic rejection tangible is the combination of the predictable “balk” in combination with the mainstream news media’s eagerness to find and amplify it.
If, as a dedicated Headline Prophet, you had logged something similar to “Facebook Users Upset Over Facebook Profile Changes” before the changes were let loose today, you would have easily garnered points and mystified the public with your abilities.
Posted on November 22, 2010 and filed under Press.
Finally some adult press! The good people at Joonbug New York checked out Headline Prophet and deemed it worthy of mention today in their New York Cool Sh*t spotlight. Check out the blurb and smear this cool sh*t allll around. 
Posted on October 24, 2010 and filed under FAQ News and Maintenance.
I’m putti
ng nearly all my attention into polishing important subsystems and quashing last minute bugs. Documentation is taking its usual backseat, but, that being said, I’ve whipped together the first FAQ for Headline Prophet which folks are free to download.
You will notice that I’m relying on a simple text file to compose and distribute the FAQ, just like back in the days of dialup BBSes and the early Internet. Maybe it’s nostalgia, but I also happen to find it the fastest way to express the details of a project when resources are as slim as they are.
I’m blasting e-mails to various people and groups in an effort to drum up interest in the project. Maybe you’re here as the result of one of those e-mails, so, if so, extra thanks for dropping by.
I’ve also deemed the currently available site as Service Iteration 1.0.
Posted on October 21, 2010 and filed under HP Development,Site News.
The site is now being hosted independently, rather than in a staging environment. I had to change some hard-coded lines that referenced the hosting environment, and, also port over this entire blog. It’s been an approximate 2 day project but as I type this I have pretty much everything accounted for except turning “off” the staging version. That’s going to be a pain because many search engines have already absorbed it and its initial beta prophecies. (sigh)
On the plus side, it’s all toward fame and gain from here on out!
Posted on October 21, 2010 and filed under HP Development.
The one absolute section I need to finish before moving Headline Prophet to its own dedicated hosting schema is the profile account maintenance section. This is the section where you do things like create a bio for yourself, change your password, etc. This weekend, I’m happy to say, I made good progress on that. I hope that within the next 2 weeks the “account” section will be good enough for launch, taking the entire project right along with it.
Meanwhile, I appreciate the support and testing those of you dropping in are assisting me with.
Posted on October 21, 2010 and filed under HP Development.
For better or for worse (usually the worse) people who land on Headline Prophet are taken aback by the amateurish flat site design. There’s a good reason the design is the way that it is, which is that it costs money (whether in dollars or labor) to really develop a fresher and more aesthetically attractive one, and I have neither.
That being said however, I also have a genuine appreciation for sites that popularize more based on functionality than anything else, including good looks. I try to make sure that being ugly forces me to concentrate on something that works and engages, and spreads by word of mouth based on that. Many sites, big and popular ones today, would be just as effective if they were built little more grandiose than the old Gopher interface was. Craigslist and Google are two examples of powerful websites that keep it simple, and, yet, command a sizable quarter of the daily web traffic (if not more). Headline Prophet will be of neither caliber, but the point is, once people are having fun and truly reaching a website’s goodness, a modern look is a surprisingly expendable component. So why panic?
Also, Headline Prophet is supposed to be a sort of play on the newspaper’s generic makeup of ink and white newsprint. If I had the resources to spend, I don’t know how more authentic I could make the comparison without becoming gimmicky. I mean, I could turn the front of the site into a fake newspaper with “Headline Prophet”, but I like the newsprint characterization as something more subtle than that.
Posted on October 21, 2010 and filed under HP Development.
It occurred to me that users who land on Headline Prophet’s home page might really be more interested in what prophecies already exist in the database, by keyword, rather than in logging a new prophecy or referencing a list. On that probability, this weekend I created a front-facing search bar which maintains the functionality of the authenticated user search tool except that it instead produces links to the non-authenticated matching prophecies. Now, all visitor drives should be addressed.
Admittedly search is still pretty crude. It boils down to a simple tag system which means it will only search on the word or phrase you enter exactly. There is no and/or logic, but, hopefully, in that typically one-line strings of text (headlines) are being searched this will actually not hinder a free exploration on the predictions of others.
I’m gearing up to pay attention to account attributes (stuff like bio information and such), which will put me in the stretch of a real public release.
Posted on October 21, 2010 and filed under HP Development.
Despite an apparent bout with cluster headaches (what the hell is up with those all of sudden?), I managed to dig into Headline Prophet and get a few things done. This weekend’s work included the implementation of real pagination to the active prophecies list. Nothing fancy, I just took some open source tutorial solutions and applied them to Headline Prophet. Now when viewing all prophecies, the list will paginate into groups of 20. This isn’t a big relief today, but, if Headline Prophet becomes active (and we have to assume that that is the goal to make it so, right?), we certainly can’t be spilling out hundreds if not thousands of prophecies on to one page.
I also corrected the “Most Recently Fulfilled” feed so that it shows off the latest fulfilled prophecies as reported by users – no matter how many fulfillment entries are logged for a given prophecy. This is a logic issue that will have to eventually be addressed. Should a prophecy be regarded as “fulfilled” just because one person says so, or should it be based on some other rigorous formula that takes into account reporter karma or perhaps the number of fulfillment reports filed? We shall see but for now a straightforward “a fulfillment has been logged so it’s a recently fulfilled prophecy” approach is fine.
Posted on October 21, 2010 and filed under HP Development.
Here’s the fruit of this past weekend’s work on Headline Prophet:
More to come!
Headline Prophet Headlines