Introducing Inquisitr iQ Alpha

It’s my pleasure to introduce the latest member of the Inquisitr family, Inquisitr iQ, a summation of the days best reads.

This was actually the first project I started building for The Inquisitr, and it also spawned the Q branding that other services have since adopted. Steve Hodson spotted an early version in the wild back in May, 3 scripts and way too many grey hairs ago.

Naturally, any site like this is inspired by Popurls. As the first to create a page like this, they are the bar from which everyone sets there standard. I’m not going to even pretend to compete with Popurls, but I knew I wanted something that delivered that sort of service, but covered sites and things I, and hopefully by extension the readers of The Inquisitr like. One noticeable difference is visuals (well, the occasional CSS bug aside) which are based on my own likes in terms of readability. Small, blue links on a black background may look trendy, but that doesn’t make them easy to read. The fonts here are a reasonable size on purpose.

The site launches with three pages, a front page that offers a summary to some of the best news blogs in the 2.0 space (and the Inquisitr of course, but I’m allowed to put my own link in). The second page offers a summary of the best news in the blogging world, an early passion of mine. The third page is a summary of all the major meme trackers, so users can quickly glance at what’s hot across the web.

The original idea was to do more pages, and in future weeks and months I will roll out more. However as I’ve quickly discovered, despite hacking some php to make each page fairly easy to create, RSS feeds are never a particularly clean affair. One wrong stroke, or different meta data in the XML, and all of the sudden things don’t work, or they take a lot longer than you’d hoped for.

There’s another project that needs my attention now, so by getting this up and taking feedback it frees me up a little. It is alpha, and despite it passing some basic scalability tests, the real test will be as people visit it. If anyone has any suggestions for new pages, for example in topic areas that aren’t being covered (I’m not trying to clone Alltop either with this, I want the mix to be different and where possible unique), leave a comment as well.