Micro posts/Live blogging

[SamuelmdLow]

This will take some time and we should consult with editors before developing too much. Would love to have it for AMS elections but if not then should be a summer project.

The verge and the new york times are two news websites which do the web the best. They both have a quick post/microposts/liveblog feature that I would LOVE on our site. Newspapers used to contain many short articles. These days journalists write their "short articles" on X for free for some reason and then write long articles for print and websites. I think this is bad and I want to change it. Our website should be able to house both live reporting through micro posts and the longer articles we are already doing that give more context and reporting. I know live blogging can take a lot of work which student journalists might not have the time for, but I think we should develop this feature anyway because if an organization structure exists which can support this then it would be MASSIVE for building a reliable audience. More students would be checking our homepage or liveblog articles before reddit and X.

How would it work

Model
My thought right now is that we have a model for microposts with these fields

• Headline (optional)
• Body
• Author
• Media streamfield (image gallery, video, link)
• Tags

Should this be a page or snippet? Snippet appears to make more sense but what if we want to create a list of microposts and articles ordered by publish time. We would need to join the tables in our database query. But if we inherit from the page model that would be weird. Maybe its not that weird though. I'd need to look into the page model and think more about it.

Views
We will have an api for serving microposts. We would also have an rss feed for microposts. Using activitypub to federate them would also be awesome. We need to look into libraries for doing this.

Block
We will have a block available on our home page and article pages which displays microposts. The block will have a required tag field. Only microposts with this tag are severed. It will use react to do an api call to update regularly.

When logged in, there should be an interface for writing and publishing microposts attached to this block. That way they won't have to go into the CMS. Very important that it is good on mobile.

[SamuelmdLow]

If microposts are only attached to one articlepage or the homepage, then they could be a page model and we use the site hierarchy for gathering the pages, no tags necessary