Categories, Form and Function
July 20, 2007
[Posted by Thanos]
What beautiful anarchy I see here…
Just a few notes on mechanics, form, and function.
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1. Editing: since we have multiple editors the potential is very high that the one page will get edited simultaneously by multiple lizards, meaning someone’s edits will get lost in the overwrite — someone is going to get mad. There are a couple of ways around this, 1) create subcategories from the main page (a, b, c, etc, or A-H, I-M, N-R, S-Z) 2) Create a page per letter or alphabet section and leave them in the header. 3.) Create a checkout system: Put up a post that says “I AM EDITING NOW” , and delete the post when done. Sloppy but might work. So for function, form, and order’s sake I like option one or two: parent page with subpage categories. Lizards and Dictionator discuss please. [Note from zombie: I strongly disagree with this proposed method of organizing the dictionary; as mentioned in point 4 of the Let the Editing Begin! post below, the one aspect of the dictionary that I insist on keeping is that it remain all on one page. Thanos's option "3" of having people post "I am editing now" is a possibility, but my original proposal -- that everyone simply do their editing in a separate word-processing document, and then paste it in, will allow people to not lose any work in those rare instances when two people are altering the dictionary simultaneously.]
2. Photos and Space The other dilemma we have is that as the dictionary grows and illustrative photos get added, the page load time will become horrendous if it remains one single page. Beyond that with the free account we have only 50 mb space, so any illustrations should be optimized for web, and used sparingly (e.g. KT, you need to go to the picture editor and delete the trout pics you are not using as your avatar.) Lizards discuss please.
3. Categories for blog: I’ve added three — Nominations, Suggestions, and Tasks. Please use the category drop down to the right sidebar as you add posts to flag appropriately. I left “uncategorized” so if it doesn’t fit under one of those three, please leave it un. If we get enough “uns” that are similar, we can create a new post category. If you don’t like categories, overule me please.
4. Mechanics - this is probably great fun for some of you because you are learning the mechanics of blogging with one of the more popular applications for that. Please do some reading, you will be amazed at what wordpress can do. Note that for newbs to xhtml, you can select “visual editor” in your user profile, which makes things a smidge easier.
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1.
Thanos | July 20, 2007 at 7:57 am
Ok, I am going to make two test pages so you can see how it would look in sidebar and uptop.
2.
DesertSage | July 20, 2007 at 11:41 am
I have a suggestion. If someone posts a new thread can they sign their name to it?
New threads keep popping up here and I have no idea where they’re coming from. I’m pretty sure that this one was posted by Thanos. Hey Thanos.
3.
zombie | July 20, 2007 at 1:31 pm
2. DesertSage:
Yes, I have just updated the post to say it was by Thanos.
1. Thanos:
Here are my thoughts on each of your points:
1. Sorry to say this, but I’ve also updated your “point #1″ in the post to give my feelings about the “multi-page dictionary” concept. In short: I don’t like it too much. As I mentioned in one of the blog’s first posts, keeping the dictionary one single page is the main priority for me. Perhaps in the distant future, when it gets too big to be on a single page, we can redesign it, but for now and for the foreseeable future, it is nowhere near being too big to fit on a single page. And that includes having a few small illustrations, if that’s what people intend. Hell, the front page of any random blog contains several orders of magnitude more bytes than the dictionary does. Breaking it up onto several pages seriously degrades its usefulness to the reader, and introduces levels of unnecessary complication.
The dictionary needs to be optimized for the “user experience,” NOT for the “editor experience.” In truth, after a few weeks of a flurry of editing now, there won’t be much editing in the future: new words come along very rarely. Completely restructuring the dictionary just to possibly sidestep the highly-unlikely possibility that an editor will lose five minutes of work would be a big mistake.
The dictionary will be viewed by thousands of people as time goes by, and the vast majority of them (as I learn from the emails I get) simply read through the whole thing like a document, or like a list of FAQ questions-and-answers. It needs to be a one-stop-solution for all linguistic issues on LGF. Having it broken up would make it much less useful to our audience.
I’m not completely unreasonable, and would be open to hearing arguments for creating a multi-page dictionary, but so far I haven’t heard any substantive justifications.
2. As for adding photos, and if so, making them be a small file size: that is perfectly fine. But I think it’s an “advanced feature” that will only cause confusion at this stage, as many of the editors are still getting their toes wet with the whole WordPress blog system to begin with. Introducing a whole complicated new feature, at a time when some of the admins are still learning the rudiments of html and blog posting, may not be a good idea. Yes, eventually, we can add photos, but let’s hold off for a while on that.
3. The “categories” thing is fine too, but I get the feeling that most people won’t use it quite yet. Again, it’s overwhelming for new users. We’ll see how many people use the system. If people don’t use it, you can always go through each post and add category tags to them yourself.
4. I am one of those newbies! Learning computer code stuff really hurts my brain. I’m doing my best to upgrade my knowledge base, but I have a lot of sympathy for the non-tech-heads among us, which is why I want to keep everything as simplistic as possible for people.
4.
Thanos | July 20, 2007 at 1:49 pm
I am fine with the concerns, & I missed the part about one page, so I’ve removed the sample pages.
The page load and pic thing wont’ affect too much if doesn’t grow too much, so either way is ok.
If everyone edits external, then that will work fine. Just a head’s up that I am used to working in WP, so I won’t be … I will put up a warning note when I am in editing, and delete it when done. (Just from long experience, external word processors + WP == TROUBLE unless you edit completely in plain text — WP has text pre and post processing for xhtml code built in.)
On photos if it’s all on one page, I would recoomend as few as possible but honestly was just trying to think about how you could define “Islamic Rage Boy” or “Green Helmet Guy” without an actual photo.
5.
zombie | July 20, 2007 at 2:08 pm
4. Thanos:
As for the photos: they need to be kept really small, like in a real dictionary, and tiny photos are often only 8kb or something along those lines, or even smaller. Having, say, at some point in the future, 20 little 4kb or 8kb photos will not really slow the page down at all. It’s commonplace for blogs or news sites to have several large photos — 100kb or whatever — on the front page at any given time, along with ads and so on. The dictionary will load like a snap in comparison to most sites. So, yes, whoever takes on “Green Helmet Guy” and “islamic rage boy” can add photos to the definitions, if you know the technique for doing so. (I certainly don’t.) But for now, if whoever does it is unfamiliar with the photo uploading, just keep the definition to be text-only. Photos can always be added later.
And yes, folks, Thanos is correct: if you edit “offline” in a word-processing document, use a really basic program like “TextEdit” for a Mac or “NotePad” or whatever, that is “plaintext.” The hated Microsoft Word tends to insert crazy secret code to documents, and should be avoided.
6.
Killgore Trout | July 20, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Where’s the picture editor and how do I know if I have multiple trout pics? Where are they?
7.
ChenZhen | July 20, 2007 at 8:08 pm
You have the option of adding any image as a thumbnail, which keeps it small, but with the added benefit of being able to click on it to reveal the full size. You just select ‘thumbnail’ after you upload the image and before you send it into the editor. I think that would be ideal for your dictionary entries like ‘rage boy’ or the green helmet dude.
8.
zombie | July 21, 2007 at 8:34 am
6. Killgore Trout:
Sorry to say, I know nothing about “the picture editor”, nor do I know the location of your trout pics! I haven’t looked into that side of things yet.
7. Chenzhen:
Maybe eventually I’ll experiment with adding a picture to an entry, to see how it looks. It must be placed in the exact perfect location. Once I (or someone) gets it right, we can create a template and post it for all to use.
The default picture location and size (or whatever) may not be to our liking.
9.
ChenZhen | July 21, 2007 at 11:11 am
zombie-
I gave it a shot with the thumbnail image and definition tags on my own site here. I noticed that you aren’t using the dd, dl, dt, tags for your dictionary, but I think with the thumbnail image you can use the hspace and align attributes and make it look pretty darn slick having an image in selected entries. I posted the code in there so you can see exactly what I did (I didn’t use the “big” tag, but I’ll admit it would probably look a little better with them.
-CZ
10.
ChenZhen | July 21, 2007 at 12:21 pm
OK- Scratch that…I kinda realised that you’re not going to add def tags to all your entries, so I figured all you have to do is use the thumbnail image and add an align tag in there.
The image code would look like this:
<a href="http://chenzhen.wordpress.com/files/2007/06/godzilla.jpg" title="godzilla.jpg"><img align="right" src="http://chenzhen.wordpress.com/files/2007/06/godzilla.thumbnail.jpg" alt="godzilla.jpg" /></a>
Just plop it in there towards the top (I put it in after the first sentence) and you should be golden.
-CZ