A new version of Meta-Press.es will soon be released (but maybe just after the end-year celebrations). A lot of things happened this year, including during the last 3 months.
2021 seen 9 releases of Meta-Press.es publishing 541 commits from 14 forks on Framagit.
4 people worked with me on Meta-Press.es in my Deux-Sèvres' office :
-
Christopher Gauthier (apprentice)
-
Marin Portet (intern)
-
Hugo Porchet (intern)
-
Aurèle Motard (intern)
We went from 500 daily users to 750 daily users in average over worked days, with more 1100 downloads of the WebExtension in 2021 and more 400 kilometers run with Christopher.
6 online presentations of Meta-Press.es (some french-speaking replays are available here) and 2 on-stage presentations occurred (I wrote about the B-Boost one in Linux Pratique #128, available online here behind a paywall).
All the previous NLnet-bound roadmap was covered, and the NLnet renewed its support to me for one more year.
During this year, a Patreon page was opened in addition to the Liberapay one. 22 recurrent donors are giving a total of around 120 € by month to the Meta-Press.es project, and I thank them a lot !
A Meta-Press.es non-for-profit association was created during the summer and it allowed to open an HelloAsso one-shot credit-card donation mechanism. Contributions are coming from here also.
It’s time to publish a new roadmap for the year to come :
-
First, the v1.7.9 (to come soon) will bring some cool features (mainly from Hugo Porchet’s internship work) :
-
users will be able to generate feedback about deceitful sources (off-topic results, inappropriate content, broken source…)
-
a better source cherry-picking feature, with personal collections
-
support for a CSV format in import/export operations
-
better support for relative dates in results (e.g. "1 hour ago", "yesterday"…)
-
-
Then, Meta-Press.es will be fitted with a child mode to comply school needs (limiting sources to advised ones for children)
-
The general purpose news loading feature will be reworked from RSS feeds to get more news from the sources, and more stability over the time (as the biggest news presentation is what changes the most in newspapers)
-
Then come big things, such as a source creation dynamic form, to help regular users to add new sources to Meta-Press.es. It will allow automatic creation of RSS served result sources, and point-and-click definition of regular sources. It’s Marin Portet whom spent it’s whole internship prototyping this ambitious feature.
-
Improving the source testing framework, because the current one takes around 10 minutes to tests 300 sources.
-
End to end testing of primary features to ensure stability of features over the time.
But the best is to come, with business models that start to outline themself for the Meta-Press.es project :
-
Port of Meta-Press.es for Android platform to install it like regular applications (might be a Progressive Web Application) because around 80% of the world population uses a smartphone, and 80% of them are using Android for the moment, while the best WebExtension of Firefox (the add blocker uBlock) is used by around 5 000 000 users (so 0,1% of the internet users).
-
A standalone server-side version of Meta-Press.es, because it’s what the general population is expecting, and because too many people still report me that the internal Meta-Press.es blog search feature did not returned results for hot press topics…
-
An independent press review hosting platform, with good integration from Meta-Press.es, to easily push selected results to your paid hosting account, with private and public reviews and the possibility to show your press review on your website.
To finish, the Meta-Press.es project is seeking partnerships in the context of a French administration funding support.
Don’t hesitate to contact (at meta-press.es) me about it and to spread the news around !
Wau Holland Stiftung
Région Nouvelle Aquitaine
