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Improving the website
Corie Lok
Wednesday, 05 December 2007 17:02 UTC
2008 planning for Nature Network is underway. Have your say!
What part of the site do you think needs the most improvement and why? Groups, forums, user profiles, blogs, something else?
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I was going through a couple forum posts and I must request that the text span across wider. The text seems to be constrained to a very tight column that makes reading longer replies a bit unpleasant.
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The text editing mechanisms online can be divided into:
- Richtext boxes plus HTML
- Plain text plus HTML
- Plain text plus custom formatting marks
- Plain text plus custom formatting marks plus HTML
The first one provides an MS-Word-like richtext box for the users, with a toolbar text formmating buttons. You can also alter the richtext editing state into HTML editing, then the formatted text is converted into HTML. In the richtext box you can change the fonts, insert images, table, flash animations, videos, etc. And it provide professional paragraph formatting. I don’t like that because usually it converts the text formatting in a bad HTML coding, especially when the formatting is complex. And when it comes to HTML standards, not all richtext boxes convert their formatting into W3C standardized HTML 4.0. And the toolbar control add too much JS or ActiveX slowering the loading time and lowering the security of the web page.
The second mechanism provides very limited user-friendly formatting toolbar including text style, text size, links, etc., but full functionality can be access via HTML coding. This avoid most of the conversion problem. HTML geeks like me can directly write HTML code of any text formatting. But for users who are not familiar with HTML coding it seems too restricted.
The third uses a simpler language than HTML to mark the formatting in a plain text stream. Being simpler however it is a looser language than HTML, so bugs cannot be easily eliminated. The biggest problem is the coincidence of the marking symbol with texts. HTML uses < and > for tags, and it provide a list of special entities which include alternative representation of < and > to avoid coincidence with the keywords of the language. But in a simpler formatting language which use texts that are easily typed out on the keyboard such coincidence is hardly avoidable. NN is using this mechanism right now.
So I recommend the forth mechanism which based on the third, it provide limited, inline HTML coding in the text stream. You don’t have to start each paragraph with (and remember to end with , but if you wish to you can, and if you do so it is more accurate and reliable although it is more complex in style. You can use either the tag or the underline symbol to indicate a italic style. Then when the simpler formatting language convolutes with the content of you text (e.g. when you have to make italic a text with_ many_ underlines__) or the simpler language cannot meet your need, for example you want to enter some Greek letters, you can use the HTML 4.0 code instead. So this mechanism conserve the advantage of the third while it can still provide strong functionality as the HTML.
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The blogs page should have a meta data of rss feed. For example:
This allows Internet Explorer 7.0 or Firefox or other applications to identify an RSS-containing webpage and provide specific options for feed subscription/management. It also allows search engine crawler to include this in their search result of rss feeds.
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Andrew’s right. All pages that have an associated RSS should have a meta tag along the lines of
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” href=”http://www.sciencebase.com/feed/”>
enclosed in angle brackets, with straight quote marks, and substituting the actual RSS URL of course…
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Corie,
Improved forum admin/moderator tools. Right now, it’s just way too many clicks
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The new network snapshot page is an improvement – but the associated RSS feed is quite useless. For instance if a contact creates something new, all I see is their name and a link to the main site. What I want to see is a summary of what they did and a link to what they created.
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Hi Neil,
Yes, the RSS feed for the new snapshot isn’t quite complete. It’s being worked on now. The updated RSS feed will be released next week.Everyone else,
Thanks for all your feedback. Once I get a chance to review it all in detail, I’ll post responses. -
What about group pages for societies and organizations? This concept has been relatively successful on Facebook (and it’s growing quite fast). If, for example, the American Chemical Society had a home on here and linked to it from their page, it could bring many more users onto NN. I just hope it wouldn’t take away from the other group pages already on NN.
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Tailoring of what appears on the network snapshot page. It’s great seeing what other people in my network have posted/commented on, but it’s tedious in the extreme seeing what they’ve tagged, as it’s almost always tagging the item they’ve just written…
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... and some people have 5 separate tag entries for the same post, taking up half the screen. It’s too much (and unnecessary) information!
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