Tinfinger screenshot

For those few of you who signed up for the beta and are still waiting, here is our first screenshot. This is an example of the news pages.

You'll notice that there is a directory system rendered in blue and brown up the top, which works the same way as the old Yahoo directories but is more easily navigable on our site using AJAX. Sports buffs will notice that there are stories from both the NFL (gridiron) and AFL (Australian rules) in the news list, demonstrating how it works: each category not only includes news about people in our database classified into that category, but also allows stories filtered upwards from subcategories.

Our next milestone is to add blog entries that link to news stories, which will be rendered in a dark pink colour (tongue). Plus there will be a bunch of functions in the right column. And Tai's working on the user account system.

Yes, it looks like a lot of other news aggregators at this stage, particularly Memeorandum. You will notice that each of the names mentioned in the stories are links, which will point to our person profile pages, which is where the site will really come into its own. More on that later when it's ready for public viewing.

There are also three search boxes: by person, category and tag. Those last two overlap: a person is classified by category but also has a number of tags attached to them, so that for instance Kurt Warner is in Humans/Sport/Football/Gridiron/NFL but also has the tags arizonacardinals and quarterback associated with him, so that you can search for news only about people with that tag or in that category. Registered users will be able to add tags to people and stories.

The interface is not finished, but since we've only just now got it to the stage where it looks something like a normal page with normal-looking results, I thought someone would be interested. Anyone? Not even my mum reads this blog any more. :(