Request: a way to find posts more easily :)

psonice's picture

This is a feature request for the site. I think it's a bit too hard to find posts easily.. there's the forum, which is pretty good, but there's also the comments on the various patch pages etc., which are a real nightmare to find. The search helps, but only if you can remember something specific from what you're after or where the comment was.

I reckon it's pretty easy to solve - the 'recent comments' and 'recent pages' bits are very handy for it. If there was a 'more' button there which linked to a page showing say the last 20 posts, with the option to see older stuff.

The other thing that would be handy is a way to see a person's recent posts, at least for your own account :)

cwright's picture
concordant

I have found myself thinking the Exact Same Thing a lot lately... Thankfully, I've got one of those memories that can often pull out unique chunks of text, but it's still difficult at times.

I'm not sure what a good solution would be (I'm more of an app developer than a web developer), but I'll try to see what can be done (i.e. bug smokris ;)

tobyspark's picture
...drupal

i've had similar issues with drupal sites.

out of the box drupal has what you need to show content you or others have submitted, tho' i can't remember what the module is called.

the main problem is there is a duplication in purpose between forums and the release / beta / feature request threads. i'd lose accessing the site's content via forums.

psonice's picture
Comments as a forum?

Having comments on patches and the requests appear as a forum would make it pretty easy to find everything from the forum page, that could also be an option.

franz's picture
plug --> forum section

or having each plugin to have its own forum section would definetly help.

cwright's picture
I agree

I like this as well -- I'm not sure how feasible it is in the near future, but I think having everything accessible in one huge forum-tree would make things somewhat easy to find.

Having a full Recent Comments page would also be handy for me personally as well.

Unfortunately, a lot of the Beta release pages aren't as well-structured/cross-linked (I'm too lazy to polish them nicely, since they're pretty transient), which might be a cause of this issue... If this is the case, please let me know, and I'll do what I can to better integrate beta stuff into the site for easier reference.

smokris's picture
Extended "Recent Nodes" and "Recent Comments"

I've added "more" links to the "Recent Nodes" and "Recent Comments" blocks in the left sidebar, which link to multi-page content lists.

psonice's picture
Great!

That's a huge help, and pretty much covers it for me I think. One small request though - it'd be handy to see the poster's name on those pages.

franz's picture
...

... and poster's name on RSS feed too please. (if it is not too much of a hassle)

yanomano's picture
Thanks smorkis!

Very cool feature ! I agree with psonice...poster's name :)

smokris's picture
Poster's Name

I added the Poster's Name to the two extended lists. There isn't really enough room to display the Poster's Name in the sidebar, however... So I themed it to display the Poster's Avatar instead. (You may need to clear your browser's cache for the CSS to update correctly.)

So --- psonice, franz, yanomano --- please upload avatars! (You can do this from your user "edit" page.)

By the way, franz, the RSS feeds already contain the Poster's Name. It's in the dc:creator tag. You should be able to configure your RSS reader to display this information.

yanomano's picture
I'am not very crazy about those mickeys...

I think all those avatar disturb us for read.... And the r"ecent articles" typo size is too little for me... Smorkis be carefull you will kill our eyes !...:)

yanomano.

psonice's picture
Thanks :D

I've added an image. I think that's about perfect now :) There's even a list of topics in the account screen!

Yanomano: I find avatars like this are actually really helpful, so long they don't take over. If people have a distinctive image, it's so much easier looking down the page to pick out what you're looking for, or posts that you know will be worth reading because the author has good views.

When you start getting huge, ugly flashing pictures though, that's when it turns bad.

cwright's picture
author

hey franz, I've been fighting with the RSS author too (I'm guessing you're using apple mail, which doesn't seem to show the author for some reason).

A solution smokris pointed out was to right click the rss feed "inbox" title bar, and enable the "Author" Column -- then the poster's name is displayed. Hopefully this helps :)

franz's picture
thx

edited:

found it... thanks

bbinkovitz's picture
Other Drupal modules...

Views has some pretty amazing sorting/filtering capabilities, especially in d6 where everything has optional AJAX settings built in. Have you guys upgraded this site to d6 yet?

Also there's at least one module that helps you put Google search on your site.

And there's always "site:kineme.net your search term" in regular Google.

cwright's picture
d6

not d6 yet (very unfortunately ...). smokris keeps waving his hands about it being hard or impossible, or relying on alpha/beta modules or something (as if OSS ever gets out of Beta....) -- In all reality, I'm sure there's actually a totally sound rationale behind his decision, I just like giving him a hard time. ;)

google search might be handy -- I'll look into that when I get a moment. Thanks for the tip :)

smokris's picture
creeping googlism

I vote against the google search thing. I think search isn't really the problem here --- we have a decent search engine for kineme.net already, one that indexes the site both more frequently and more comprehensively than Google. I think what we need is better structure (as we've been discussing for some time).

Please bear in mind that Phase II is nigh upon us.

toneburst's picture
Camel Case

This CamelCase-auto-link thing is getting to be a pain, I think. It's surprising how often compound words crop-up, and it's very rarely the auto-generated links actually point to anything on the Wiki.

alx

Quartz Composer Blog: http://machinesdontcare.wordpress.com

Music Site: http://www.toneburst.net

cwright's picture
definitely

I've noticed this (a lot) as well.

If it was up to me, wiki links would only happen from double-square bracketed things, but I'm not the only decision maker around here... At least that way there are no accidental links (unlike camelcase, which also has a large set of bizarre rules that usually don't work as expected...)

smokris's picture
Agreed. Fixed.

I agree, this is annoying. Adjusted settings so that CamelCase words don't create links automatically --- only double-square-bracketed text links now.

dimitri's picture
Just an idea - for the composition repository

I'd love to see the Composition repository organized is such a way that distinction is made between:

  • Input (UI & Automated control macros)

  • Logic (Math macros & Javascript)

  • Visuals (Compositions that effectively render)

Second thought: Why not group each user's compositions on his personal page here on kineme?