Announcing Ora-Click.com – The Digg Site for Oracle Stuff
I like to think of myself as a pretty good follower of the Oracle news world, I spend at least an hour a day going through blogs, tweets, google alerts, etc. to make sure I’ve got a finger on the pulse of everything going on at Oracle. Honestly, its never enough, and for the many Oracle customers who’s job isn’t to keep up with every piece of Oracle technology its a confusing world right now.
Every other week we are seeing a new acquisition, new great code examples, etc. and there is no time to keep up with it. Also, its hard to find the best content through all the different sources. I’ve been using sites like Digg and Reddit to keep up with non-Oracle news. While Oracle is huge there is no way Digg would ever create an Oracle category, so I began my search to create my own Digg clone for the Oracle community. Luckily someone already had the same type of idea and created the open source software package, Pligg. All I had to do now was come up with a new design, deploy the site and tweak some of the settings.
So without further ado here it is http://www.ora-click.com the Digg clone for Oracle news. Feel free to join the site, submit some stories and contribute some comments. Right now I’ve got it set so that it takes three “Clicks” for it to appear as Popular News, obviously over time as more stories are submitted we’ll have to bump it up, but I think three is a great start.
If you’re looking to submit your own news all you have to do is log in and go to http://www.ora-click.com/submit.php put in your URL, story title and description. If you’re looking to embed the Ora-Click buttons in your own site I’ve created two sets of buttons to add to your posts.
The small button:
which can be added with the code:
<script src="http://www.ora-click.com/clickit/button-small.php" type="text/javascript"></script>
And the large button:
which can be added with the code
<script src="http://www.ora-click.com/clickit/button.php" type="text/javascript"></script>
It’s that simple, feel free to Click this story and try it out. The site has full RSS feeds for the entire site and also the categories individually. If you have any questions or comments please let me know either through comments here or via email at matt@matttopper.com.
Have fun and enjoy, for those that have asked the virtual machines site isn’t dead, I’ve just been working a million hours and haven’t had time to bring it up to my standards. Look for me to launch a new VM tomorrow on this site as a trial run for it.
Friday, December 28th, 2007 @ 11:09 pm 
Oracle, Personal
RSS 2.0
Trackback
December 29th, 2007 at 3:45 am
Great idea Matt. I look forward to watching Ora-Click grow.
CM.
December 30th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Matt, I notice neither of the buttons for Ora-Click are showing correctly on this blog post. I’ve checked it out in both Firefox and IE. Is this a problem at my end or an issue at yours?
Cheers,
CM.
December 30th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
Chris, one of the problems with the URL method is that it picks up the URL of the page you are viewing. If you go to http://www.matttopper.com right now my front page has this post on the top, the actual URL I “clicked” is http://www.matttopper.com/?p=66 which shows the proper 2 votes. Dan Norris had “clicked” my main site with the basic name so thats why it only shows one vote there. Its kinda confusing, I agree. Over the next week or two I’m going to work on a wordpress plug-in so that it uses the actual URL of the blog post for the images instead of the current page.
I assume this is what you were talking about, if you’re unable to see the actual images let me know, thats an entirely different issue that I haven’t seen.
Thank you for the feedback,
Matt
December 31st, 2007 at 1:36 am
I think it’s that later case, I’m just seeing the wrong images for the button.
I’ve included a screenshot here of your webpage: http://members.iinet.net.au/~chriscmuir/image.gif
You’ll note the small button image just isn’t showing, and the large button image appears to be part of the Ora-Click website’s top banner, but not the logo.
BTW, couple other things:
1) It would be good to include step-by-step instructions on how to install the buttons for both Wordpress and Blogger on the site somewhere. This will increase the adoption rate.
2) On registering on Ora-Click, can you include a privacy statement stating what your policy is on the registered email address usage, namely whether you will keep them private, or reserve the right to on distribute the addresses. I was somewhat hesitant in signing up because this wasn’t stated.
Cheers,
CM.
December 31st, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Nice work dude.
Can you set the home to upcoming, a la Digg? Right now, it shows popular, but only 2 stories appear.
January 1st, 2008 at 8:30 am
[...] Matt Topper heeft een website gelanceerd: ora-click.com Op basis van pligg, wat een open-source digg-systeem is. Nou volg ik oracle nieuws aan de lopende band, heb een leuk bloglines-profieltje gemaakt, waarin ik alle, voor mij relevante dingen in verzameld heb, dus ik krijg het meeste wel mee, denk ik. Dus wat is de meerwaarde van ora-click.com (niet echt een briljante domeinnaam trouwens :-/) ? Helemaal nu ze alle orana.info posts hebben geïntegreerd… Het blijft even afwachten. Weet je wat er ook gebeurt nu? Al die webloggers hebben vaak overeenkomstig nieuws. Dus stel dat je geaggregeerd bent via orana.info en je post iets wat iemand anders ook gepost heeft, of je reageert op een ander z’n post. Beide posts komen automagisch in ora-click terecht, waardoor mensen dus op beide items kunnen gaan stemmen. Op Digg.com heet dit ongewenste fenomeen blogspam en dat kon nog wel eens een probleem worden. For the time being is het wel aardig om vast wat content te hebben. [...]
January 1st, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Chris, can you give me your browser type and versions. Its working on my XPSP2 machine in firefox and IE, but it might be another combo. The HTML is just an iframe with some javascript in it that I should be able to tweak.
January 1st, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Jake, I agree, we should probably change it to be upcoming until people start “Clicking” more. There isn’t a default setting in Pligg to do that so I’ll work on coding that after some of these family things calm down.
January 1st, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Klaas, I agree that by aggregating OraNA.info into the site it’s kinda spam like, however, over a couple tweets with Jake / Eddie we felt this was the best way to get things rolling and content added to the site quickly. As soon as more people start “Clicking” their own stories and adding buttons to their personal blogs I’m fully planning to drop of the feeds. I don’t read dutch, but thats the gist of the message I got through babelfish.
January 15th, 2008 at 5:50 am
Hi Matt
Regards browser type and versions, I’m currently using:
Firefox 3 Beta 2 (3.0b2)
Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13
The issue occurs on both. For the record I’m also running XPSP3.
As follow up if you’d like to email me instead.
Cheers,
CM.
January 18th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
[...] 18, 2008 by David Haimes I’m not a fan of digg, just doesn’t do anything for me, but Matt Topper has created something which I like the look of. Ora-Click is like a digg but specific to Oracle [...]