The Open Source NewsCloud Community Starter Blog

Host NewsCloud for Free for Six Months

The great folks at Rackspace are offering six months credited hosting (aka free) for anyone that wants to startup a NewsCloud community using the Rackspace cloud.

Goals of NewsCloud's Design Updates

We're currently working on an update to the NewsCloud design with our friends at Blink Interactive in Seattle. Here are a few of our goals:

1. Improve the last major design upgrade (as seen on The Needle). We want to tune the widgets so that they better use space and encourage interactivty. We also want to tune the aesthetic of fonts and spacing. We really want to hone in on the specific set of default widgets for a social media home page that encourage participation and sharing. You can check out some early wireframes on the update from Blink.

2. We're creating two new themes so that open source users will have three themes overall to choose from when launching their site. And, of course, they can use any of these as a starting point to customize.

Read up on our current Knight Foundation grant to make Facebook-connected communities easy.

Run NewsCloud at Rackspace for $45 per month

If you're looking for an affordable way to run NewsCloud, we've just released an installation script which works great with Rackspace's $45 monthly 1 GB cloud server. It also should work with any standard Ubuntu 10.04 server. 

Release 3.2 stable offers the Ubuntu installation script which we've tested at Rackspace. With this script, you should be able to get your NewsCloud community up and running within 30 - 45 minutes.

While this installation script is primarily aimed at open source developers, by the end of June we plan to offer an automated Chef-based installation which will drastically simplify this process for non-technical folks. 

You may want to review our installation support FAQs which offer a checklist of setup prerequisites. Three things you'll need to run your community are 1) A domain name or subdomain 2) Registration for a Facebook application and 3) a server for hosting, such as at Rackspace.

Please let us know if you try out the script. Post your feedback and questions at http://support.newscloud.com

This work is funded by our May 2011 Knight Foundation grant: NewsCloud to Make Facebook-connected Communities Easy and Affordable.

 

 

NewsCloud Release 3.1 Runs on Rails 2.3.11

Great news. NewsCloud's open source platform is now running on Rails 2.3.11. This should help developers interested in deploying sites and getting involved with our community.

Release 3.1 Stable is available for download at Github now.

Over the next month we'll be focusing on trying to fit NewsCloud into Amazon's AWS Cloud micro-instance, which offers free hosting to new accounts for one year. Learn more.

Release 3 of NewsCloud Facebook Community Platform is Now Available

Today, we're announcing the third stable release of the NewsCloud Ruby on Rails Facebook-connected community platform. You can download the code at Github now. This release was generously funded by our 2010-2011 grant by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Read the feature summary and our community building guide to using the platform.

• Follow the readme for detailed instructions. The setup and installation have been simplified since Release 2.
• If you use Ubuntu, you can follow the Ubuntu installation script we've provided

Read the sneak preview of our open source work planned for 2011 - 2012. We're going to keep making this platform simpler and more affordable. Follow@newscloud on Twitter for announcements of our continued work.

Post your questions and feature requests at http://support.newscloud.com.

 

Coming Soon: Release 3 Stable

Stay tuned to @newscloud on Twitter as Release 3 Stable will be by the end of April. It includes all of the features you see on our Seattle showcase site, The Needle.

NewsCloud Release 2 is Now Available

NewsCloud's second Ruby on Rails-based release is now available! Our release 2 is a stable version of our current code. Download the code and read the getting started instructions at Github.

This is the same code that powers the Your Boston Facebook application for the Boston Globe. You can also use the application as a Facebook Connect website, e.g. Your Boston or The Needle.

Read a summary of our current feature set for the NewsCloud Facebook platform.

While our platform still requires a developer with some knowledge of Ruby on Rails to install, configure and manage, we are continuing to simplify the process and make it easier for non-technical community moderators to manage. Read our FAQ tutorials and ask questions of our open source developer community.

We plan at least one more major release before the end of our current grant April 30, 2011. We plan to continue to improve the capabilities of the platform with a few new features and will continue simplifying the installation and administrative requirements of the platform. 

All of this work is generously funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Current Features of NewsCloud's Facebook Application

You can check out a current list of our open source Facebook application's features here.

Seven Reasons to Download NewsCloud's Open Source Facebook Application Code

Since you're here, you already know about our cool little project ... perhaps you are already forking our project on github ... no, need a reason or seven?

Release 1.0 of NewsCloud Ruby on Rails Code is Available at github

We've release the final version of our 1.0 codebase for Ruby on Rails for our Facebook news community application. You can see an example running at The Charlotte Observer's Insight application.

You can fork or download the code at github - grab the Release I Final branch. This is an excellent opportunity for open source developers to try out the platform. We're giving away 5 $25 iTunes Gift Cards to the first five developers to install an application. Email us with details to claim yours.

Going forward, you can participate in our open discussions on the evolution of the platform at our TenderApp support site (thanks TenderApp for donating your service to open source projects like ours).

We'll be adding new features again - some exciting stuff will be coming soon. Stay tuned.

Thanks again to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for funding this project.