Randy Cassingham's Blog

I mentioned in my author's notes recently that I was working on a new site. It's been in beta testing by Premium subscribers, and I'm finally ready to open it up to a wider audience.

Ever since True's start, I've allowed readers to send me story leads, especially encouraging you to send me stories from small town papers that maybe haven't hit the national wire services like AP and Reuters. The result is a lot of leads from readers, and many of the stories end up in True. But there are a few unfortunate side effects of this system: I get a lot of duplicates, I get many more story leads than I can possibly use (which is not bad for me, since it gives me plenty to choose from), and no one gets to see the rich variety of stuff that I don't have room for.

So about five years ago I came up with a neat site idea that allows my readers (or anyone else) to register and post links and story descriptions that everyone else can see. It was a multi-tier design with the lowest tier being "just anyone" who could see the posts and follow the links to the "approved" stories, then registered users who could post story links, and finally paid users who would have special privileges, be able to view all the submissions, have significant say over what was "approved", etc. And registered users would have a place to discuss the stories, too. Fun stuff!

But the resulting behemoth would take about a year to program and debug, and would cost between $20,000 and $50,000 (not counting any overruns, which were likely). I shelved it.

Meanwhile, several other sites went online with similar designs, the most successful being Digg.com, which concentrates on technology links. The only thing it lacked was that paid subscriber part, but it's a very democratic system where the users vote on ("digg") the stories they like, which helps push it to the front page -- the more votes, the more people would see it.

Meanwhile, a clone of the Digg software was released for public use, called Pligg. I've checked in on it from time to time, and it has grown to a pretty good system. Enough so that it does nearly everything that the software I mapped out did (except the paid membership part). I have decided to forget about that (the paid membership part) and use Pligg for my site.

It's set up with a variety of categories, each with its own RSS feed so you can easily know when a story in a category that particularly interests you is posted. I'll probably add e-mail notification to that too, for those who prefer that to RSS feeds.

Rather than being supported by a cadre of paid members, it has ads (but, like all of the rest of my sites, they do not flash in your face! Just like the ones right here.) I started with about a half-dozen people to register and take a look, then opened it up to the Premium readers. An astounding percentage of them have registered: there are already more than 500 registered users. Registration is free, and is required to be able to submit stories, vote on stories, or to comment. Registration is not required to see the stories and follow the links.

The name is Groxx, a play on "It Rocks" and "I Grok", and is at Groxx.com. Let me know what you think of it.