Feeds in social networks provide users a sense of motion and activity on a social networking site. Facebook's redesign made a user's home page simply an activity feed for that person. Ning also boasts an activity feed but it is not as sophisticated as Facebook's.
Last night I created an event on TechHui. Because Ning doesn't provide you a preview option before publishing, I had to edit the event several times before it looked right. But in the Ning activity feed logged each and every edit. I think there were five or six of them. Facebook is smart enough to remove multiple log entries in the feed that look redundant in a short window of time.
The web application that I write also has an activity feed. Right now only administrators have access to these activity logs. I might make them published to the general user. However, to make them more palatable to the normal user, they should somehow be "massaged" to remove redundant logs.
Does anyone have advice on best how to do this? My idea is to set a cronjob to run every minute to select the recent non-redundant logs and insert them into a secondary table which is used only to display logs to general users. But what if a edits the same record five times in five minutes there would still be five logs. Ideas?
Tags: