If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard of the Lincoln Log. However, you may not have heard of Lincoln’s official BuzzFeed clone. There are fun quizzes, helpful articles, and a very real view of what it means to be a student at Lincoln. If you’re interested in helping out, they meet bi-weekly in room 437.

I talked to Callum, Co-founder & Technical Engineer of Lynx Feed about his views on his website!

What is LynxFeed to you?

“Lynx Feed is an outlet to express all of my goofy opinions about Lincoln High School.”

Why did you make it?

“‘Cuz the Lincoln Log was taking too long and we [the JCWYT team] liked the idea of Lincoln-specific quizzes and satirical articles.”

Was it difficult?

“Mmm… I don’t… not really. A lot of obstacles came from the more high-level features of LynxFeed, such as data-driven quizzes and populating the homepage with the newest articles and quizzes. In fact, as we’re reviving LynxFeed this month, some of these more advanced features still pose a challenge, because we need a system where people who do not know how to code and are scared by curly brackets can write quizzes. Right now, we’re considering using YAML [a data-storage language which doesn’t use scary curly braces].”

How would you recommend others get involved with LynxFeed?

“We have meetings bi-weekly on Tuesdays in Mr. Long’s room (room 437) on the fourth floor, that unfortunately, I am required to attend. Be there and we can tell you how to contribute. Also, if you’re interested in coding, I can explain how the backend of it all works. In fact, I can do that right now. The backend architecture runs on Python with the Bottle web framework, using a custom-scripted data-driven storage format for dynamically rendering quizzes at runtime.”

There is a lot of technobabble in that, and, to summarize:

-Callum made roughly 50% of LynxFeed as Co-founder

-Callum likes to be goofy

-Callum is impatient but likes satire

-LynxFeed is currently improving itself and would love your help

-It will soon be super user friendly (for those of us who don’t understand a smidge of code) to write quizzes for LynxFeed

-There are bi-weekly meetings in room 437 (Mr. Long’s room, if you know where that is)

-If you want to contribute in anyway (i.e. writing articles, making quizzes, helping with code, etc.) they’d love to have you!

And to finish this off on a positive note, Ava Halada, a junior at Lincoln, after hearing about LynxFeed, checked it out immediately. “I must say, LynxFeed is pretty cool.”