Well, for better or for worse we’ve got Topics on this site now. I’ve run through and made lots of changes to get it all working, as the history of RecentChanges can testify (even though I made all the changes to CocoaDiscussions and CocoaDevUsers without telling RecentChanges), and it looks to be working well. I’ve added HowToUseTopics, but this page remains for now to discuss what people think of the new system.
Is it well-formulated? The actual topic tags \%\%BEGINENTRY\%\% and \%\%ENDENTRY\%\% are fixed in stone, but I can mod the format of it very easily (one of the benefits of the system), so comments there would be appreciated.
I’ve made CocoaDiscussions “float” recent changes to the top, so (as I said on HowToUseTopics) we can refactor/remove old discussions. I rather like this idea, as I frequently find old conversations on information pages that should be removed, but it does rely on people flagging every new conversation with a CocoaDiscussions entry. Is this reasonable?
This is a site for everyone, so don’t be shy.
– KritTer
Testing it on the “Omni” part of this site, at the moment i only have a cosmetic complaint, i can hardly read the entries at the top of the page without getting close to the screen, does everyone else here have better eyes or monitors. I like the fact that WordsJammedTogether work within the entry and the topic listing, thanks for the work KritTer ? – HaRald
I made it that small to make it obvious the text should not be read as part of the main page. I guess on some monitors the fact it’s double-small would look a bit poopy, but alas I only have an iBook to compare.
A nice feature you may want to take advantage of is that \[Topic\] will not expand inside an entry, it will expand on the topic page that entry is for. Check out MemoryManagement, for example.
– KritTer
I don’t want to sound heretic but if it should not be read then don’t show it, if it is shown it would be nice if it were readable … – HaRald
(A heretic! Burn him!) I can read it. I didn’t realize others might not be able to. If people want, I will fix the problem, no worries. A single small will probably do the trick. I’ve suggested to StevenFrank that he make the changes. – KritTer
Well, the text’s a bit bigger now. Does that look better? – KritTer
Loving the topics. Absolutely. Anyhow, are multiple topic entries supposed to work? If so, they should probably work for multiple sections within a single topic; see AppleScript and CocoaGlossary. AppleScript only shows up once on CocoaGlossary, but it’s entered into both the Technologies and Languages sections. Just some thoughts. – RobRix
It works faster as it is. The next revision caches HTML, making speed less of an issue, so I’ll see about adding this. Glad you like it otherwise! – KritTer
Okay. – RobRix
The next version won’t be up for a while; I want time to muse on everything, so the changes I’ve made since the last revision will stay on my hard drive. I’ll also be away from Cambridge for three months, so no more test runs from my computer for a while :) – KritTer
You’re teasing us, KritTer. Geeks don’t like being teased like this ;) – RobRix
Well, in case you don’t feel sufficiently teased, among the changes I’ve implemented are single-page indexes; I’m seeing how to mathematically close all the ideas, hence the pause. Automatic code parsing and coloring would be nice, too… :p – KritTer
One issue I want to address is how to make large changes to the new topics. Running around from page to page is not my idea of a good way of correcting a typo or splitting a topic; it also swamps RecentChanges with, essentially, incorrect page modification warnings. Ideally, the only page that is marked as changed in such cases would be the topic page itself, and it would store the old listing in its history.
I can do all this easily, but I need an interface for it, and I need to overcome my natural aversion to large changes to the site’s Wiki script. Unlike all my previous changes, this would have to be more than hacking in a \[Topic\] command or whatever; it would need to be a different editing page, and it would need to be darned simple. In HTML, that’s no mean trick. Perhaps a pair of commands, one to rename subtopics and the other to split out pages into a subtopic or new topic, would be relatively easy to construct.
Or I could just resign myself and everyone else to the horrors of the current moving-mountains approach ;)
Anyone got a view here?
– KritTer
I’ve orphaned this page - no real useful information. However, I haven’t forgotten my promise to “mathematically close” the ideas. Check out http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiMultipleDefinitions for the inspiration that came to me, and to discuss it. – KritTer