₦airaland Forum

Hi Nairalanders,

I'd like to share an app I've been working on for a while now. It's an Android client for Nairaland. It's currently in beta.

Although it's far from finished and perfect, I'm releasing it to receive early feedback.

The beta is open to the first 1000 users. You can find it
here. It's 100% ad-free...



Feel free to share your thoughts - feedback, comments and criticisms are welcome.

Kudos

DisturbNot:
Kudos

thanks

Keep it up.

Wow love it

sirliu:
Keep it up.

OLUWABIG:
Wow love it

Thanks.

Will continue working on it. The next update would support functionality to read pages in any order; better transition after creating a new topic/comment; ability to edit profile; save posts offline..... and more.

Stay tuned.

Hi testers,

I've added new features and fixed a couple of bugs in the latest update.

Please find the app here.

So cool

thatareaguy:
Hi testers,

I've added new features and fixed a couple of bugs in the latest update.

Please find the app here.

This is freaking impressive. Well done.

Even though its still a rough cut, I absolutely like it! Looking like what a forum app should look like. Love your guts at building this despite several previous failed attempts. Keep it up. I hope the oga at the top don't ban this. You can work with him regarding ads and you both will be fine. Na when you wan try monetize am for hin back na hin yawa go dey. I'd say tone the green down a bit. Make it somewhat similar to the shade used for "Nairaland Forum" at the top which is somewhat in sync with the shade of green of the Nigerian flag. If you want CMYK or RGB values for that shade do a Google search. Once again keep it up and faya dan

Nice one man. Where do you get your data from? The last time I checked, nairaland did not have an API

airsaylongcon:
Even though its still a rough cut, I absolutely like it! Looking like what a forum app should look like. Love your guts at building this despite several previous failed attempts. Keep it up. I hope the oga at the top don't ban this. You can work with him regarding ads and you both will be fine. Na when you wan try monetize am for hin back na hin yawa go dey. I'd say tone the green down a bit. Make it somewhat similar to the shade used for "Nairaland Forum" at the top which is somewhat in sync with the shade of green of the Nigerian flag. If you want CMYK or RGB values for that shade do a Google search. Once again keep it up and faya dan

Thanks... I'll look at the color thing. Hopefully it doesn't get banned .

dotman27:
Nice one man. Where do you get your data from? The last time I checked, nairaland did not have an API

Thanks! Data is retrieved by scraping the site... parsing html, storing cookies for logged in users.

Quite Wonderful. Nice One Bro!

thatareaguy:
Thanks! Data is retrieved by scraping the site... parsing html, storing cookies for logged in users.

Oh, how is it able to post comments and follow users and like comments and stuff?

MasterPDON:
Oh, how is it able to post comments and follow users and like comments and stuff?

When u log into nairaland, the cookies for the site looks like what is shown in the first attached image. So, I store this in a local database and use it for every request made to nairaland.com. This is how nairaland knows you are logged in.

To post comments, for instance, I first posted some comments on nairaland, and inspected the contents of the http request - header and body (examples shown in the second and third attached images). Then I tried to replicate this in code.


The same goes for liking, sharing, modifying comments and others.

I don't know if I answered your question.

thatareaguy:
When u log into nairaland, the cookies for the site looks like what is shown in the first attached image. So, I store this in a local database and use it for every request made to nairaland.com. This is how nairaland knows you are logged in.

To post comments, for instance, I first posted some comments on nairaland, and inspected the contents of the http request - header and body (examples shown in the second and third attached images). Then I tried to replicate this in code.


The same goes for liking, sharing, modifying comments and others.

I don't know if I answered your question.

Wow.

Do you use any library for scraping?

MasterPDON:
Wow.
Do you use any library for scraping?

I use Jsoup for scraping.

Hi testers,

Sorry, this is not to inform you of an update.

I'll soon release one... ( blame coursework )

I'd like to integrate chat messaging. This would replace the mail functionality... which is currently disabled in the app.

The problem is... I don't know where to put it. The plan I currently have, is to move "recent posts", "mentions" ... (all that is in d 1st image) to the section that currently houses "featured", "trending"... etc (2nd image). Any suggestions?

Thanks for trying out the app.