Buffistas Building a Better Board
Do you have problems, concerns or recommendations about the technical side of the Phoenix? Air them here. Compliments also welcome.
To-do list
I wrote the search engine. It took me time.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to diminish the work you'd done.
But if someone wanted to know some searchengine-type thing
right away
and it was important, you could actually log in and get it from the command-line just with a one-liner, couldn't you?
Fundamental point still stands. The workings of this site, the database contents, the storage setup are not hidden from us the way they used to be.
To write Mister Pointy, I had to get all the transcripts one by one from the site in Germany, and do some complicated scripting on them to count all the words, sort the counts, list the sorted counts by document name, blah blah blah, and why? So I could reduce the contents of those pages to something I could put into a database -- because a database is the best way to look stuff up quickly ... here everything's already
in
a database.
if someone wanted to know some searchengine-type thing right away and it was important, you could actually log in and get it from the command-line just with a one-liner, couldn't you?
Well, yeah, but the premise behind constructing and executing a single SQL format and coming back and telling the results isn't the same as making a search engine, which is what your post described.
We have more direct access to the data, but it would be misleading to imply that adding a tool is trivial. Jon B designs the HTML, we go back and forth while I get it right, it gets fully integrated with the existing template, etc, etc.
Sure it can (and probably will) be done. We're out of hacking, is all, and into production.
Again, sorry to make it seem like it was trivial to do all the wonderful work you've done, and I know its not -- all I wanted to do is make people aware that we finally have a board where the workings are not
obscure
to us.
This should really be divided into two parts:
- People are asking for cool site features. They should respect the fact that those features will take work to implement.
- They're asking for them in a way that almost makes me sad, because they seem not to understand the complete coolness of what you've already done, that we have taken control of the data once and for all.
So plaintively asking "can we have a search engine?" or any other feature, makes me want to do the evil laugh thing -- of
course
we can, because we own the data and we know where everything is.
"Can we have one right away?", different question.
It's just happened to me again that someone has posted a URL so damn long that it's stretched out my screen so far I can't read the end of posts.
If I was thinking straight I'd actually post some kind of fix, but what we obviously want is, when replacing
http://something/really/long/
with
<a href="http://something/really/long/">http://something/really/long/</a>
we need a subclause along the lines of "unless it's longer than eighty characters, in which case replace it with a truncated version" so you'd get
<a href="http://something/really/long/">http://something/...</a>
I noticed your example stretches out my screen -- looks like I get about 65 characters to a line.
Is it possible to add the HTML that makes us able to do the pretty links to the lovely HTML instruction pop-up? Because every tim I do one, I think that I have to go to the FAQ and cut and paste, and I am to lazy and end up with a long ass link.
Just thought I'd say that now that this board has been live for a while, I totally love it. A big thanks to everyone who was a part of creating this user friendly and beautiful place. I love you all!
John, that would be a really neat thing.
t cough
Someone-- ita?-- mentioned the Neat Thing that you can request a full view of the entire contents of the thread (s/he also talked about a feature where you could ask to see posts 40-150, which would be even cooler, but I think that one was still in hypotheticality?) -- is that a feature right now? I thought they said it was, but I can't find the button on the page
That was all hypothetical, but there is already a facility to dump the contents of threads to flat HTML.
It's not something every user can do, presumably because if a hundred people clicked on "Save This Entire Thread To One File" out of curiosity, that wouldn't be very good for the server or the amount of total bandwidth. ita certainly dumped threads from the pre-launch version of this board, I remember seeing one of them.
