With one picture I will sum up what is wrong with Digg.

Shout spam sucks. I setup an account to see how having friends on Digg could help you get on the front page. My 992 friend sample was made up of a random sample of all active users I could find online over a 2 day period.

In the last 48 hours 992 people on my friends list have made 12,227 shouts and then 9,321 other actions making shouts account for 56% of everything that goes on Digg. If every digg in the upcoming section is from shout spam then 1 digg results from every 3-4 shouts.

The front page of Digg needs to change. If a submitted story doesn’t get enough diggs to qualify in 24 hours it will never get to the front page. This leads to the annoying 24 hour viral marketing spam that is prevalent on Digg.

Its been about 10 days since I started my cool pictures project. I’ve added a lot of new features like an RSS Feed, sitemap, stats and easy navigation. I still want to give people the ability to upload and create their own niche communities. I have a few other ideas that I’ll keep under wraps for now.

In the last 3 days over 9,000 unique IPs have been to the site and viewed 66,000 images and consumed 10 gigabytes of bandwidth. The majority have come from Stumble Upon which is a really great tool bar. I’ve been using it for about a month already and I usually read things before they ever appear on the other big social bookmarking sites. Personally, I think SU is what Digg should have become.

After looking around the net for a way to execute cakephp scripts via a crontab I became fed up and made my own solution. I simply added a function to my existing controller and then executed it via a wget.

class PostsController extends AppController
function crontab {
// 404 if the request isnt from the localhost
if($_SERVER(’REMOTE_ADDR’) != ‘127.0.0.1′))
{
$this->cakeError(’error404′);
exit; // dont know if this is needed
}
// execute the cronjob
doSomething();
exit; // dont want to use a view
} // end controller

Now we just make a cron job to run every five minutes

wget –spider http://mydomain.com/posts/crontab

My first proof of concept project, cool pictures has been added to the sub domain of this website. The site is fairly simple and most of the magic comes from behind the scenes to easily post images in a single click. I used the CakePHP framework to complete it in about two days.

There is still a few changes I want to make and features I want to implement. I’m planning on releasing 3-4 more small projects of similar scope before I move on to the three main ideas I plan on implementing.

I’m hoping to have one of my other projects out next week.