Re: [Gnumed-devel] Web Site

[David Grant]

Tony Lembke wrote:

> (Ian Haywood)
>
> > > My only nitpick is the FAQs: the text appears as one huge paragraph, 
> > > although its formatted properly when you click on
> > > "More..." This text is the summary, just far too long, is there any 
> > > way to shorten it?
> I have fixed up the FAQ page.
>
> > >
> (David Grant)
>
> > I agree.
>
> Hang on, David : ), I'm confused.  The complaint above was that there 
> is too much of an article on the index page, which should be shortened 
> in a summary. You can't at the same time suggest we have one large 
> file with the whole article :)

Ian's complaint was about the FAQ which I agreed with.  But my ideal 
solution would be something completely different than the "...more..." 
system.

> > I also think there is an overuse of these "...more..." things all 
> > over the site.  I don't think this is a great UI technique, and 
> > involves too much clicking.
>
>
> > I'd rather just see either everything in one HTML file, or a bunch of 
> > hyperlinks linking to the individual things (news, FAQ) not this 
> > "...more..." thing.
>
> Actually, I disagree. Jacob Nielsen is fairly adamant in his 
> guidelines that the correct way to have a news index on a home page is 
> to have the headlines and a short precis with a 'more... ' link so 
> that users can know what they will get when they click on a link.  
> When we get more contributors to News : ) it will be impractical to 
> have one long page,although with the current system it is certainly 
> easy to have all the news on one page.

I prefer something like http://www.kuro5hin.org, or http://www.kde.org, 
or http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/.  In kmymoney's case they have all 
the news right there no clicking.  I like that.  In kde.org's case, you 
can click to read the whole "announcement".  On kuro5shin.org you can 
click to read the "full story".  The gnumed says things like "On Dec. 
13th 2003 the first German Gnumed conference took place in Leipzig, 
Germany. 9 people attended the meeting on Saturday. The group consisted 
of four Gnumed hackers, people from related open sou..."  It's not a 
complete set of thoughts which I think it should be.  My first wish 
would be for it to cut off after sentences, not in mid-sentence.  My 
second wish would be to have two articles, one a summary and the other 
the whole article.  The summary should be allowed to be arbitrary in 
length, depending on how long it takes to summarize the news item.

I think this is probably more like what Jacob Nielsen had in mind.  I'm 
glad you know about this guy.  I had never heard of him.

Sorry I didn't specify exactly what I had in mind before.  Instead I 
said: "I'd rather just see either everything in one HTML file, or a 
bunch of hyperlinks linking to the individual things (news, FAQ) not 
this "...more..." thing."  The reason I said that was because those are 
probably the easiest to implement.


> > I'd also really like to see a phpbb (http://www.phpbb.com) forums 
> > system instead of the current forums.  It could be customized to our 
> > current colour scheme.  It's probably fairly easy to install.  
> > Features that I like are, ability to see headers only be default, and 
> > ability to receive emails when someone replies to a thread you are 
> > watching, and many more...
>
>
> Currently, there is the ability to allow user comments to be posted at 
> the bottom of each article. You can subscribe to this so that you will 
> be notified by email if someone else posts a comment - and you can 
> reply to their comment by email and it will be posted on the web page. 
> The author of a page selects whether this Discussion opportunity is 
> enabled or not by simply checking a checkbox when he adds the page to 
> the Wiki. One advantage of this that any comments posted are 
> automatically included in the main site index and are therefore 
> searchable.

I'm still getting familar with the system, but I'll look into it.

> This system is really designed for annotating pages rather than as a 
> stand alone forum, and I could add phpbb if desired. It may be unwise 
> to add a forum if there are not many postings and the development team 
> do not check regularly as it all can look rather empty.
Yes it does make more sense for annotating pages as opposed to a full 
fledged forum.  My stance would be, that if traffic ever starts to 
increase on the current forums, or if we feel a strong need to have a 
forum that we go with phpbb.

> Regards,
>
> Tony
>
>
>
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--
David J. Grant
M.A.Sc. Candidate in Electrical Engineering
a-Si and Integrated Circuits Lab
University of Waterloo
Room DC3707
519-888-4567 x2872
http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~djgrant