My problem with Digg is that it has seemingly abandoned the sections that would most appeal to technical/web professionals, the people who made Digg great.

State of the Union

Digg has seen a plateau in its number of visitors to its site, resulting in recent staff cuts . Although layoffs are normal to this economy, it doesn’t explain the leveling off of users.  And I’ve noticed a drop in my usage too, when Digg shut down the API key for Eventbox (an app which I’ve already blogged about here), I decided to just see if I could live without my digg addiction.  I have gone on living just fine and am quite happy.  And that sparked my “investigation” into why I wasn’t affected by cutting out 300 articles a day from my RSS diet.  My research led me to the sections that I care about most.

The Programming Section

There’s currently only 2 pages of frontpage articles an the 2nd page just has a handful.  On the Programming frontpage (see screenshot below) there are the typical stories you would expect to see – jQuery 1.3.1 and the Rails/Merb merger.  But the programming industry is extremely volatile and there are new technologies coming out everyday which should make it here (read Ajaxian.com).  Where are the .git tutorials and the WCAG 2.0 articles?

Most of the posts that get promoted are are titled “30 Essential WordPress Plugins” and “100 Essential Firefox Plugins”.  The words “Essential” and “Plugins” must be key to getting your story promoted by the Digg Algorithm.  

The Design Section

This section is desolate as well. Although it has 4 pages of articles, by page 3 I noticed there were articles I read when submitted 19 days ago.  This is unnecessary because there are thousands of people churning out new web/print/illustrative designs everyday.  There are also designers out there looking for inspiration cruising countless inferior CSS gallery sites that don’t have the comment engine and user base of Digg.  Now, there’s a digg clone just for design and the only limitation of the site seems to be the low number of users.  Like the Programming section, Design is extremely fluid and changing everyday.  Design inspiration isn’t too hard to come by (see FFFFOUND!) and with modern/retro/web/print/UX/interface design all being sub-genres of this catagory, the well is clearly not being tapped.

Articles in this section tend to be titled “50 Free WordPress Themes” and “20 Free Icon Sets”.  I guess “Free” will always be successful.

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Rework Ur Algorithm Plz

Digg was an awesome+awesome alternative Slashdot and was a great new home for Slashdot refugees to participate in tech topics and discussion and feel like they’re on the cutting edge of web technology…  then came the high school kids… and Ron Paul… If there’s a reason I’m not going to digg now it’s because I’ve already got XKCD and Smashing Magazine in my Google Reader.

So, I’m pitching the usual whine of most digg users: “rework the algorithm”. Give me more stories that don’t have to reach the impossible algorithmic threshold to compete with “X Essential Plugins I need for Y”.

After countless hours of using these mind-altering codes, I -authoritatively- present to the Top 4 Behaviors that everyone should be using in their apps… or else…

#4 Containable

This is hot off the shelf and new to CakePHP 1.2 and it makes a world of difference. When querying items in the database, Cake likes to SELECT records wtih all it’s belongsTo, hasMany, and HABTMs (“habtems”) auto-magically associated. With the Containable Behavior you can stop all that nonsense and speed up your app by having it contain the JOIN to a “short list” of approved “models”…

The Containable Behavior is like the bouncer at a fancy Hollywood club where if you’re not on the list, you get kicked to the curb and have to watch all the other “approved” models go by. Hot, hot models.

More concretely, let’s say you had a Posts table and you wanted to get only the comments in the view, while simultaneously ignoring all the Author, Tags, Categories, etc.

/app/models/post.php
[sourcecode language="php"]
class Post extends AppModel {
  var $name = "Post";
  var $actsAs = array(‘Containable’); 

// forgive the over-simplification of these.
  var $hasMany = array(‘Comments’);
  var $belongsTo = array(‘Author’);
  var $hasAndBelongsToMany = array(‘Tags’,'Category’);

}

[/sourcecode]
/app/controllers/posts_controller.php
[sourcecode language="php"]
function view_a_post_with_only_comments($id = null) {
  if(!$id) {
    $this->Session->setFlash(‘You forgot the ID number.’);
    $this->redirect(‘/’);
  }
  $this->Post->contain(‘Comment’);
  $this->set(‘posts’, $this->Post->read(null, $id));
}
[/sourcecode]

It’s that easy! now you’ll only be pulling the Post and the Comments! ka-chow!  This

#3 Tree

I love trees. My wife has a particular affinity towards them. If you like trees then you will be a fan of this behavior. If you do not like trees, I suggest you eat a bowl of hair because you are a du-mmy. Over the course of the last year I’ve made a few category systems in my apps and all of them left me feeling like i did something wrong and/or patched the code together in a terrible way.

Enter Tree Behavior! It’s been around forever and a half, and I don’t know why I didn’t use it, but it makes organizing things like categories, forum posts, comment threads, etc a whiz! All you need is to add another couple of fields to the database and then add one line to your model.

categories.sql
[sourcecode language="sql"]
create table categories (
  id integer 11 auto_increment,
  name varchar 50 null,
  parent_id integer 11 null,
  rght integer 11 null,
  lft integer 11 null
); engine=MySAM encode=UTF-8
[/sourcecode]

app/models/category.php
[sourcecode language="php"]
class Category extends Model {
  var $name = ‘Category’;
  var $actsAs = array(‘Tree’);

// ideally categories should describe something,
// so this is just an example association.

  var $hasMany = array(‘Post’);
  …
} ?>
[/sourcecode]

Now you’re cooking with grease! It will automatically keep track of your tree structure – who comes before this, who comes after (“left and right”), who is the parent, etcetera. Couldn’t be easier.

Move on to the next page for the Top 2 CakePHP behaviors:

Today GoDaddy unveiled a redesign of their homepage.  It’s incredibly “web2.0″ with a whole bunch of slick gradients.  Too bad it’s like 5 years too late.  We use GoDaddy quite a bit for domain registration (matter o’ fact, I personally bought 2 domains last week) so the Need for a redesign was quite apparent (view the waybackmachine).  However… this one is a couple french fries short of a Happy Meal.

I’ll start with the cons:

Cons

• It’s still a complicated mess.  A cluster-[insert 4 letter word here].  At one glance I can’t find anything I want to… except Danica Patrick.  Who is hott/hawt/xxxHOTxxx, but NASCAR Indy doesn’t make me want to buy a domain.
• UPDATE: After looking at the code again, I noticed it’s a TABLE LAYOUT!  SINNNNNNERRRRR!
• The rounded corners are doing nothing.  Rounded corners are supposed to sooth the reader and the content into place, make it “feminine” if you will.  
• The <title> tag doesn’t even have the company’s name in it.  Granted this may be a GOOGLE HAXX, but it’s generally assumed you should include the Company Name in there.
• A brief look under the hood exposes a conundrum of inline CSS, bloaty non-obfuscated javascript, and (according to Safari’s Web Inspector) 11 Errors.
  
• I get Dale Jr. and Danica, but I don’t know who Amanda and Candice are and/or why I should choose them to help me buy a domain. I’m pretty sure they’re strippers.

Pros

• Danica Patrick is hott/hawt/xxxHOTxxx(?)
• The login form is more accessible than it was before.  Good Job Go Daddy!