Welcome to Workspace!

If HAL can't break it, it can't be broke.

Honestly, we're still tuning this thing and have a list of revisions as long as my arm, but we wanted to get 1.0 in front of some trustworthy eyes (and Oz, too) before we got too far down the road. I'm curious to see if you break it in the same spots we do.

by dklippert Oct 24, 2005

I'm glad to see a forum devoted to polishing TechRepublic.

It's a relief to know there are users who care enough to help us whip the site into shape. We can't let those mangy kids over at Slashdot have all the fun.

by dmambo Oct 24, 2005

I like the projects page. I created a couple just to try it out and it seems pretty convenient. Why do we need to add a tag to everything? That just adds an extra bit of typing after adding a title and description.

It would be good if you could limit or toggle the display of the number of items such as Suggestions and History to 0, 5, 10 etc items on the page.

A general comment on the discussions, it would be nice to see a "Return to Top" or "Next New Post" button for some of the larger threads. Either that or frame the discussions so the text can be read while still seeing the location in the overall thread.

The keywords you use to tag your Project dictates what items will be suggested in that project. The keywords you list in your Profile will dictate what you are offered in the main suggestions. Tagged Projects let you focus on narrower topics, ratehr than the whole gamut of your Interests and Technologies.

The Suggestions display preferences is an interesting idea. I'll pass that along to engineering to see how much of a bear that might be.

As far as the Discussions view goes, that entire page is slated for a major redesign early next year, and a Next New Post option is definitely on the short list of likely new features. If you have any other strong opinions about the Discussion page redesign, feel free to start a new thread in the Insiders forum and we'll get the discussion going now.

by surflover Oct 24, 2005

and a more persistent status of what you'd already read would be nice too...

Some of the posts I started would lose the status of the posts I'd read when I'd get back to them (espescially if it had been a few days since it had been addedto, like the "major innovations" one...), and I'd have to guess what I'd read and not... (and some were fairly long and consumed a lot of time looking at posts I'd already seen)

by charliespencer Oct 24, 2005

The layout is cleaner and easier to read. Unfortunately, I don't see much else to get excited about.

I'm not sure what the purpose of Projects is. It looks like a text file. I've already got Word, Notepad, Wordpad, Outlook Notes, and OneNote and a blog if I wanted them too. What's the advantage of another place to capture text data?

Most of the Workplace page is taken up with Suggestions and History, topics that have their own tabs. Why duplicate them here?

Suggestions looks a whole heck of a lot like the New Discussions page.

History looks like a cross between My Discussions and My Links with a face lift. I never used Links, since I don't know what the advantage is over just adding the URL as a Favorite or Bookmark.

Will the new features eventually replace the old ones they apparently duplicate, or will they be additions?

What would I use Workspace for? Probably nothing, but maybe I'm missing something here. I'm sure my fellow members will explain it to me.

I'd love to see a way to drop topics from the My Discussions page. I dislike having an ancient discussion reappear on the list when someone posts "Me too" six weeks after everyone else has abandoned the topic. I'd really love to see an option to spell check something before I post it.

"I'm not sure what the purpose of Projects is. It looks like a text file... What's the advantage of another place to capture text data?"

Projects is intended to be a place to organize your Web-based research, so that it's always accessible from any Web browser. You can assign any saved Link to a project, and also have the project suggest new links to you. It's sort of like a Web-surfing secretary that helps you keep track of certain subjects. Later, we're going to add collaboration tools so you can open up Projects to multiple members.

"Most of the Workplace page is taken up with Suggestions and History, topics that have their own tabs. Why duplicate them here?"

The layout needs work, we agree. The Workspace is intended to be a dashboard of the other new components, but the design probably doesn't communicate that very well. The Suggestions and History on Workspace are abbreviated--showing only the latest/best stuff--while the Tabs show a complete view of both lists.

"History looks like a cross between My Discussions and My Links with a face lift."
History doesn't track all your site activity yet--we have some cookie issues to resolve--so your results are probably a little unsatisfying right now. In the future, History should allow you to backtrack to any item you read or downloaded at TR and, a little further down the road, any third-party content that TR suggested to you. Not to worry though, you will be able to shut off the tracking at any time by logging out.

"I never used Links, since I don't know what the advantage is over just adding the URL as a Favorite or Bookmark."
Two reasons. One, so the Favorites aren't locked up in any one browser on any one machine. Links can be reached from anywhere with a Net connection. Two, we're going to start using Linking behavior to evaluate Web content, so if large numbers of TR members save a Link, the implied value will be made visible and will factor into the Suggestions algorithm.

"Will the new features eventually replace the old ones they apparently duplicate, or will they be additions?"
A little of both. For the last eyar, we've rolled out several new Community features and let them soak. We learned a lot from that, and Workspace is where we take that knowledge and use it to *integrate* the new features into the site, rather just jam them onto the list of features, like we did with Blogs. I know that doesn't precisely answer the question, but the honest answer is that we don't know yet. Some features will be replaced, some won't, but everything will center on Workspace. Which feature falls in which camp will largely be determined by you guys.

"I'd love to see a way to drop topics from the My Discussions page. I dislike having an ancient discussion reappear on the list when someone posts 'Me too' six weeks after everyone else has abandoned the topic. I'd really love to see an option to spell check something before I post it."

This goes along with our Discussion Page redesign scheduled for early next year. We plan to make managing your subscribed discussions much easier, and you are far from the first person to ask for a spell check (Hi, Oz). We should definitely start a separate thread on that redesign so we can get all these ideas into the conversation.

by charliespencer Oct 24, 2005

Based on your replies and appy's post, there's more going on here than I'm comprehending. I'm still not sure how these pieces are fitting together. I've never worked with a collaboration tool, so I'm not getting that aspect of Projects.

Would I seem too ignorant if I asked for some screenshots or examples of how this all ties in together? Am I the only one who can't figure out how to come up with relevant, meaningful tags? How about a system of anti-tags, words that when specified cause a topic to be rejected / blacked out / not appear?

Is there a way to switch a project from Private to Public, or is that choice locked in after creating the new project? How do I access someone else's Public project?

If linking activity is going to be a driver of future content, is there any way to speed up the process? I frequently bookmark articles but only tried Links back when I first joined. I found the process to be too slow. I usually only visit TR from work and don't take advantage of the multiple machine aspect, but I'd hate to lose the opportunity to provide indirect feedback to the suggestions process.

by maxwell edison Oct 24, 2005

.
At first glance, it looks nice. But I haven't delved into it to give a lot of feedback. I'll get back to you.

But thanks for the efforts to make the site better.

We really appreciate you finding time to help us, especially with your busy schedule of avoiding detection by Unmarked Helicopters.

by maxwell edison Oct 24, 2005

http://tinyurl.com/anf95
Black Helicopters spotted on Google Earth

by jdclyde Oct 24, 2005

Overall, it seems easy to use.

I will start with my "Wish list" stuff first.

Where activity is listed, you have a place for "type" on if it is discussion, tqa or blog. How about the Topic?

There is also the date the discussion started, how about adding the date of the most recent activity?

And a biggie, the ability to REMOVE discussions from these pages. This would make it easier to stay with what we are interested in, if a discussion that we popped into once doesn't keep coming back to haunt us.

I will play for awhile and get back after I had a chance to kick the tires.

In our own testing, we've already asked for ways to remove items from the Suggestions lists. Obviously removing items from your History kind of defeats the point of History.

Great points about adding additional data to the lists. I'll see about getting more metadata surfaced in the Suggestions and History lists.

Holy crap, it looks even more like Windows XP!

Ahem. Okay. I'm over it, a bit. Still, that's awfully disconcerting. Everything's big and bulbous, y'know, and sorta done up in Fisher-Price primary color. Perhaps more corners for a more efficient appearance and more subdued (either "faded" or darker) shades would be more to my taste. Certainly something that looks less like it's trying to scratch my eyes out with its soft, cottony edges would be better.

Suggestions: I don't know yet. This is something that's going to take some time to come to some kind of grips with. I only hope it ends up being better aggregated than the stuff in "My Discussions" is. I find that the generalized Discussions section is highly useful, and the My Discussions section is largely ignorable. I think the "My Discussions" thing is just sorta difficult to parse and manage because of the way it's (dis)organized. In any case, if any lessons can be learned from my opinions of those two site features for purposes of helping guide the way Suggestions is handled, you must be more perceptive than I. On some level, though, I feel like there's some kind of underlying principle that might be applicable here.

History: This one can definitely take some cues from the successes and failures of functionality elsewhere, but I won't have much specific to say about it for a while, I think. It requires some attention over time.

Projects: Brilliant. Finally, a useful application of the tags capability. I mostly thought of tags as being largely superfluous and gratuitous until now. This is a good way to help aggregate stuff: create interest groups defined by tags, and use that to view project-targeted suggestions for possible saving to the project. I've already started using this, a little bit, and become disappointed with the lack of relevant materials pertaining to VPN technologies and practices. I'm also considering creating a Project that is used basically just to aggregate stuff that I tend to wish I hadn't forgotten how to find when involved in other discussions on TR. I think I'll make that one "private", and paraphrase relevant passages from earlier posts, or link to them, when appropriate. There's much potential in this.

I've mostly been attracted by the Projects, out of History, Projects, and Suggestions, so far. I guess the user-configurability of it makes it just that much more likely to be useful, since TR members can tailor it to their needs rather than just look at an unconfigurable feature and decide whether or not it's useful as-is. Of course, with the way Suggestions changes to meet the expectations of Projects when in a Project view, it becomes an integral part of that.

Here's a thought: Perhaps there should be some way to select a Suggestion for permanent exclusion from a current Project view. That way, when you've decided you don't want "save" it for that Project, you don't have to look at it any longer and room is made for more Suggestions to appear. The same could be done with Suggestions in the main Workspace view, thus enhancing the usefulness of Suggestions for the individual member.

by stephen howard-sarin Oct 24, 2005

Apotheon said: [b]Suggestions: I don't know yet. This is something that's going to take some time to come to some kind of grips with. [/b]

Suggestions is based on an analysis of the text in stuff (discussions, white papers, news articles, blogs, etc.). Right now, we're not pouring all of this content into the Workspace Suggestions soup -- but we will. And then your VPN content should get a lot richer.

(As least as populated as this: http://technology.updates.com/search.aspx?kw=vpn. Maybe minus the PR stuff.)

And like Jay said earlier: We hear you on "Remove Suggestions."

Stephen

That sounds highly spiff. I eagerly await richer content.

by stress junkie Oct 24, 2005

One thing that I wanted was a longer history though I never mentioned it. Someone else must have thought the same thing. I like the longer history under "Your Private Work Tools". I'm not sure that I participated in all of the linked items but maybe I did.

Now, about getting the title of the post that you are reading to turn orange instead of battleship grey... :D

And while we're at it I've thought of another helper in finding posts of interest in a discussion. How about having the title of each of your own posts show up in green? That way you can scan a list of posts in a discussion to easily find all of your own posts. I think it should be a medium green, not green like a pine tree. That's too dark.

by jdclyde Oct 24, 2005

Or is this not available yet?

If we could look at the other public projects, it would help to steal ideas from others.
[b]
(I am really hoping there wasn't a huge button somewhere for this and I just missed it!)

by tony hopkinson Oct 24, 2005

It would also be nice if you could invite other members to contribute. I've had some interesting peer chats with people kicked off by a discussion point or a response to a question. Some of them could easily end up as a discussion / tutorial on a useful topic and in someways a better way of going through the achievement process than some of these constant downloads.
Being able to manage your my documents equivalent would be a definite boon as well. They are many posts on mine where the point of initial thread was lost and I'd like see that back of it and have easy access to ones of more note but less frenetic activity.

Overall I like the look big simple and blue is a design mainstay of mine.

P.S. thanks for the invite.

This is Workspace Beta 1, which is basically a skeleton of where we want the public release to go. Workspace Beta 2, which is only weeks away, is built around collaboration (and a much better interface). You'll be able to do exactly this sort of info-sharing and organization.

It may seem a bit premature to include you guys this early in the process, but we wanted to get user feedback every step of the way.

by itgirli Oct 24, 2005

I made mine private. It's kind of nifty.

by jdclyde Oct 24, 2005

and your project will be MINE, all MINE!!!

As of right now, you can't view someone else's projects. They are all Priavte right now. As we bring in the group functionality, the Public/Group/Private levels will appear, and you'll be able to view Public Projects.

Actaully, we're hoping you'll be able to copy Projects as a set, so if you find one you like, you can copy it to your Project list and modify it to your needs.

We're going to do the same thing to standalone links in the near future, so you can copy someone else's individual links--tags and description included--into your list. (To get really wild, we have similar plans for search queries, but that's a barely-on-the-drawing board issue right now).

by itgirli Oct 24, 2005

I like the group idea. I may want some people to see it, but not everyone. Will we be able to set up our own groups via invitation or how would that work?

We haven't surfaced the public option yet. That will come once we bring in collaboration.

I feel you pain on the performance lag with some of our features. We're looking at speeding up everything, both through some database tweaks and (fingers crossed) a hardware upgrade. We'll keep you informed of these uprgades as they happen.

As far as meaningful tags, well, some popular examples include:

Windows
Security
Linux
Career
Network
Geek Trivia

I'll see about getting you some screenshots. In the mean time, bug sMoRTy71. That's his department.

The person who started the project would have the power to grant and block access at will. Some of this is still on the drawing board due to the complicated use cases involved (Is it all or nothing? Can you have access to some project features and not others? Can a project creator resign and hand-off the project to a new leader? If you copy a group project, how do we copy the permissions, if at all?).

That said, group access will be on an invitation-only basis. Plus, we'll allow you to invite non-TR members (they would have to become members to join the group, of course). We're dreaming up Contact-list-based tools to simplify this process, but if you've got a wishlist, now's the time to start sharing the dream.

by oz_media Oct 24, 2005

Little TR geek gangs! I'd think it would be interesting to trial, but it should be monitored for a while. Last thing you want is hacking, cracking groups showing up. [i](sacasm alert)[/i]Or perhaps the idea of more porno ads and shoot the monkey would make TR a little more common ;)

I've had no experience with collaboration software, but this sounds like a light weight wiki.

Thereare definitely some wiki influences, but we think some of the automated research aids take this a step further, while we don't give you quite as much page control as a pure wiki (That's not to say we couldn't, given a sufficient groundswell of desire for such). Still, as an unabashed fan of the Wikipedia, the notion of WIkitizing TR does warm my heart.

by m_a_r_k Oct 24, 2005

I guess I'm slow, but what are projects used for? Are they just a way to use bookmarks?

Has anyone played around with projects yet? I found these two things: 1) The "http://" part of the URL is automatically inserted when you create a new link . So if you enter "http://www.seamonsters.com", you will end up with "http://http://www.seamonsters.com". 2) I am unable to edit my project items. I had to delete my ill-fated seamonsters project item and create a new one without "http://" in the URL.

I created three or four, but I couldn't see any connection between my project tags and the suggestions generated. This is probably due to my poor choices for the words I use as tags.

I'm going to use it initially as a search tool, letting the tags drive the suggested links. If I begin to see more correlation between the tags and the suggestions than what I'm seeing now, I'll try some longer-term projects.

by hal 9000 Oct 25, 2005

I've opened a couple of different projects and on each occasion I've been given the same suggested links. Topics like Dumping MS and going all Open Source and then Migrating from NT to 2003 and the exact same suggested links have appeared. None of which actually applied to the stated project.

Hopefully things will improve at the next upgrade of the Beta release.

Col

by jaqui Oct 24, 2005

maybe after I finish waking up I'll be able to take a serious look at it.
since it's now me weekend. I may be able to have the time.

had some time to take a look.
rushed to get it tested? ;)
the link in the suggestions tab to view more is broken. it pulles up a new page, with only the head of the page displayed.

one of the suggestion links has only http:// for the url.

when viewing all of the suggestions, the same discussion is in the list, one on top of the other.

( small bug to fix there )

the workspace itself needs to have more capability than just to store links to really be of use.

the interface is a slight improvement over the grey for readability.
( I still much prefer my black background with cyan text, very easy for me to read [ resetting browser to use my default colours ] )

the history was covered already by others, :) the expansion of it is nice.

the search for tags with the exclude option would also be great, searching for.say firewall / security and linux, use something like -windows, -macos to remove all results from the set for those 2 os.

Hmm, I'm betting we had a server hiccup for some of these. Could you tell me what time and time zone this happened? I'd like to have our gurus check teh logs and see if you got half-formed data.

As far as the duplciated discussion, was one a Discussion and one a Link to that discussion, or were two of the same content types suggested?

The Boolean includion/exclusions you asked for are already on teh drawing board. Glad you agree.

Ooooh, I like anti-tags a lot. Good idea.

My biggest problem with tags is that it's too open-ended, thus making it difficult to guess what tags will feed me the best content. That's why, until now, I haven't seen any particular point to make much use of tags for searching for content. I've tried it out a few times and been almost universally disappointed with what I got. The Projects functionality seems to add some potential use to tags, but the open-ended "soft specs" aspect of how tags work still strikes me as problematic.

As of right now, we'll concede that the Windows tag is of only limited value since it is overly broad. That said, we have big plans to allow Boolean searches using multiple tags, so you'll be able to get value from the broader topic tags. Windows might not be useful, but Windows + Security + VPN should have some real potential.

My concern is more that someone very good at writing something useful might turn out to be very bad at coming up with appropriate tags, and thus my tags-based search for certain content might totally miss some of the best stuff available -- and, likewise, that I might not come up with quite the right tags to properly categorize what I've written for others to find based on subject matter.

See, the problem is that different people categorize stuff in different ways inside their heads. That translates to having different ways of tagging things, and of searching for tags. Thus, the tagging system seems almost too open-ended to be useful, at least sometimes.

Boolean searches would make an immediate positive impact. Would you be able to search for say Windows + Security - 98?

by hal 9000 Oct 25, 2005

I've been reliably informed that Boolean no longer exists by quite a few people at different MS partner meetings so how dare you use that nasty word here. :^O

You are so Anti-Microsoft that it isn't funny now I'm going to have spill the beans on you. :p

Incidentally I'm waiting to the end of the month as I'm slightly over my upper limit this month on downloaded data so they have cut back my connection speed. I brought an unlimited account which to my ISP means 10 GIG and currently I'm pushing somewhere around 30 GIG for the month so they are more than a bit peeved off with me and cut down my connection speed several times now so I'll leave it till next month to comment on the speed of the opening of pages as it wouldn't be fair at the moment. :D

Col ]:)

http://www.agilemanifesto.org/

You're verging on agile software development techniques, there, with that whole "feedback every step" thing. Heh.

You'll spook the engineers!

Actually, our head software guy is a big Agile proponent. Glad you noticed.

Point him at Ruby on Rails, then. If he's such an Agile proponent, and knows good development frameworks when he sees 'em, he'll love it. I recently got my hands on Dave Thomas' and David Heinemeier Hansson's [u]Agile Web Development with Rails[/u], and I'm in love. I'll probably be redesigning all my websites using Rails, now.

It's that good (and includes built-in AJAX support, among other neat toys, that doesn't actually require you to write any tedious XML crap the way Struts would).

by thechas Oct 24, 2005

I took some time and played around with the features a bit. Here are my comments.

I like the look and feel of the interface.

I don't like that every item that I click to save ends up in My Links.
At a minimum, Links need to be split into multiple categories.
Some suggestions are:
TR Articles, TR Threads, Other web sites.

I assume it is caused by the server being used to host Workspace, but the pages are taking a long time to load.

Otherwise, it looks like another good change for TR.

Keep up the good work,

Chas

Next-gen versions of History adn Suggestions will have filter options so you can sort against content type, source, date, and a few other factors.

We're aware of the load performance issues and are working on them.

If you want to save something to a project but exlcude it from your Links list, just mark the link as Private during the save process. That way, only you will be able to see it.

by jmgarvin Oct 24, 2005

Could you have it more horizontal though? It is a little hard to scroll through the entire thing...

Perhaps a menu on the left that opens that section?

by oz_media Oct 24, 2005

It's been a while, I was wondering what happened to TRI. Good to hear from you again!

First off;
1)I like the concept for once, this is a good organizational idea, compared to some previous ones that I have found redundant, this is a whole new interface and an interesting layout.

2)I don't care for the button styles (I always pick on the styles used here for some reason)it needs some new colour, you have black in your logo too, perhaps some outlining or button shading would get the cold blue feelin gout.

3)Not too sure, explanation below.

4)See above...then below. :)

It is either a congested server (odd because it's evening in North America), or simply because it's not a full rollout yet, but I found it really sluggish.

I didn't get to play with Workspace beause time is of the essence. I haven't been too active here lately and have dropped WAY down the list now because I'm so damn busy and don't spend much free time online these days. I'm getting so lazy that I use the Print preview to read threads just to make it quicker, I'm just so damned wiped out now that I can't get into the typing stuff (You'er lla welmoce) :).

I will spend some more time with it, and you know I'll add comments, but for now it just seems really cool..well done everyone!

TICK, TOCK, okay ...

I played around with workspace a wee bit, um, pretty much the same as the blog isn't it? Sure it's a bit different but its the same overall objective (uh oh, here comes the redundant bit,...does that make this redundant too then? :^O ) I still think workspace is pretty cool, but no big deal really. Kinda like blogs, they're okay...if you like that sort of thing, I suppose.

One more thing I would like to see is A) spell checker or B)Preview post button (not a forced preview but a button option) it would save more time because you have to: [i]return to the discussion, scroll down to your post, click on it and then notice a typo or sentence that doesn't read well. So you click edit>submit>return to discussion>scroll>open post>find typo>click edit> submit....[/i]

But hey, great to see you have all been working hard and it is a pretty cool idea overall.

by jardinier Oct 25, 2005

A number of discussion websites which I visit do in fact have a preview option.

However I use a very simple alternative. Any posts longer than a couple of sentences I copy into a Word document and look for the squiggly red lines. After making the corrections I simply copy it back into the "post" box and submit.

Another advantage of this method is that it is much easier to preview a post in the much wider format of a Word document.

by jdclyde Oct 25, 2005

why not START in the word processor? Say what you have to say and then only copy it once?

It is always the little things that add up.

(don't you feel silly? :^O )

The other side is, MOST of OZ's typos are "fat fingered" from being in a hurry, and adding another step might push him over the edge as he sits in the local pub with his laptop.

I have used that method for college "blackboards" that require you to do your work directly into the board, but your session times out before your done and you could lose all your work. ( only get burned by that fire once, let me tell you )

I type and go, that's it.

I was waiting for someone to mention IESPell, not that I would use IE anyway but still.

A tool ONSITE would be beneficial, an option to PREVIEW or just POST when your done would be great.

Hey Julian, how many screen names have you gone through now, mate?

by beth blakely Oct 25, 2005

I'm sorry, Oz, but I don't understand what you mean. Can you be more specific about how Workspace and blogs are the same?

Thanks for helping us test!

Not that I would dream of putting words in Ozzie's mouth, but I had the same initial reaction. At first glance, Projects looks like a blog. You type text, you go back and edit it. When the public feature kicks in, others can view it and possibly comment.

Obviously, a blog doesn't provide links to suggested reference materials when you post it. But I'm still not too clear on the advantages of Projects. I guess I'll have to see it in use.

by oz_media Oct 24, 2005

The pic of Portsmouth doesn't have littleblack helicopters but I'm sure that's Guru of DOS drinking a pint and fishing off the dock!

Or , it's Portsmouth Virginia! Oh well, I still think that's Guru fishing.

Hey, why don't they have a global Google Earth competition. Just like where's Waldo, they could do a "Where's Bin Laden" contest. See if you can spot the camel jockey hiding somewhere in the Black Hills of North Dakota.

by maxwell edison Oct 25, 2005

.
....are in South Dakota (and extend into Wyoming), not North Dakota.

that you aren't disputing that it's Guru though. ;)

I threw the Rocky Racoon bit in for you. Guess it's time to brush up on my Beatles again.

by jardinier Oct 24, 2005

Quite likely this is technically unfeasible but in 1927, Frederick R. Barnard made the observation: "One picture is worth ten thousand words."

There have been many instances in the discussion forums in which a picture would have conveyed a lot more than a big lump of text.

In other instances a photo or other graphic could embellish the post.

Has this question ever been raised before? Would it be technically feasible?

is in the file size for the graphics.
I agree is can often make a responce easier, but i have also seen size issues.
like a 1600 by 1200 image posted.

or a 3 meg image
the data transfer costs increase dramatically, and the layout gets screwed by it.

then to combat this, limit to 400 by 400 max
and under 200kb.
and the image can lose a lot of what makes it usefull.

by being invoolved in several graphics communities I have seen problems that are caused by the images. not even concidering the content of the image issue.
( child porn image..beastiality image ) both of which are illegal almost everywhere. it adds a reqiurement for moderation that TR has managed to not impose so far.

( just playing devils advocate on it, even though I agree on basic premise. )

by jardinier Oct 25, 2005

Well thanks, Jaqui. This is totally unmapped territory for me -- just a stab in the dark. But there have been occasions when I would have liked to add an illustration to a post.

So what you are saying, I gather, is that it is technically feasible, but that there would have to be fairly strict guidelines for both content and size.

I don't actually anticipate that any TR member would even consider posting a child porn or bestiality image.

(Although it didn't take us long to find a way to trick the naughty words censorship)

And I am sure that the website could find an easy way of keeping images within a reasonable size range.

http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12371&LockMessage=2447819

adding image upload to a post is very simple to do.

check the links I have in my profile, there are some graphics community sites in there, free memberships for all of them, which all allow uploading images into posts. and have had to deal with the issues I mentioned.
the busiest has limited the number of images any one member can post a day, to save data transfer costs.
( they use over 4 terabytes a month )

all these sites have free downloads available, usually hosted by members own service, which all members can post link in the downloads area to it. site not responsable for content of download.
I'm sure that Tr would be able to get specific data from the administration of the sites about image posting if it's something they are concidering.
lets face it, a "Graphics Community" is going to have a lot of specific knowledge about allowing image uploads and the problems thereof that most communities ( like TR ) don't have.

as far as image content, that is a delete after posting when it's in violation. there is yet to be a tool that can recognise image content for filtering out unwanted content. this is why allowing images usually requires moderators on the boards.

I doubt that the two specific contents would be posted either. but graphic sexual content in some of the "Friday Yuk" threads...quite likely, they are often quite "off colour" discussions. ~g~

a perfect example of how image uploading can be a benefit is a regular occurance in the Rhino forum on renderosity, screencap tutorials on using the application, posted by members. extremely usefull to the members using rhino.
nothing objectionable in the content.
and they show exactly the use you were thinking of, passing on usefull information to people.

Rhino = Rhinoceros N.U.R.B.S. modeller.
McNeil and Associates.
Seattle Wa.
( yes a lawyer who became a programmer )

N.U.R.B.S. = Non Unuform Rational B Spline
a mathematical expression of geometry, where shape can be affected by weight at any point ( node ) on the line.

gads I'm just full of trivia on the subject. ;)

editing to add:
this is the latest tutorial thread that shows great use, not sure if viewable without membership in renderosity.

Technically, adding graphics to discussions isn't hard. We already allow this on blogs, so long as the image is already Web published (for liability reasons--like those mentioned by others--we don't host images).

The reason we've not extended this to discussions is that it's caused some major headaches for resurfacing blog content. Including images in blogs has entailed integrated HTML content inside the text field, which we have to scrub out if we surface the blog somehwere (like, say, Suggestions). That's a lot harder than it seems, and our Blogs door has been broken by strange image code more than once. Until we get better at escaping images, we probably won't include them in Discussions.

That said, you can always point to an image with a live URL. It may not be in the post, but it's close.

by jardinier Oct 25, 2005

I can live with that. Thanks for the suggestion. I would merely have to post the image on one of my own websites, and link from there.

https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5254-6257-0.html?forumID=99&threadID=180502&messageID=1870881&id=4212131

yes, you do have a small issue with it :)

Misadventures in linux

I put up a discussion about this here; ...
Date: 10/25/05 | Source: TechRepublic.com | Type: Blog

which leads to this blog:

so, definately the stripping of tags isn't working completely.

It would make the Friday Yuk more interesting wouldn't it? We coud be posting pics from 'some peers' many sites to emphazize our adult humour.

And just think how much more colourful the Marc Emery thread would have been? Or when I argue with Max, we could post some pretty heavy graphics to emphasize our point!

the last friday yuk in network administration.
>:)

Could you tell me what tags you used, and what "odd" items are being suggested. If the algorithm is buggy, we want to get working on that.

https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5265-6257-0.html

Please see my test projects at https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5267-6257-0.html?projectID=20459 and https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5267-6257-0.html?projectID=20444

None of the suggestions for either project seem to be based on the tags used.

by hal 9000 Oct 25, 2005

Every Item that comes up in th suggestions for the ones that I have there is exactly the same be it for dumping MS or migrating from NT to 2003. Could be that the Tags that I used weren't right or something like that but I've deleted it now I opened a Workspace Item on Ducati Hot ups and got exactly the same suggestions. I put that down to being not related to IT stuff and dumped it.

I've just been playing around for a bit so I haven't done anything really serious just started off some thoughts to see what would be thrown up as possible suggestions.

Col

https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5208-11193-0.html?forumID=4&threadID=183277&start=0

I just checked.
it was 2 separate discussions, posted by same person
( doubled posting.

#
Driven to distraction by technology
Driven to distraction by technology
Date: 10/24/05 | Source: TechRepublic.com | Type: Discussion
Related tags: windows, linux, administrator, os, networks, apple, unix, technology
Save this item to your Links list.

and

https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5208-11189-0.html?forumID=3&threadID=183282&start=0

and the time was about 3am pacific time for the other bug..with the partial page loading.

the bad link I put into the site feedback as it may show up elsewhere, not just in the workspace pages. :)

We have a secret project (read: don't repeat this outside of the TRI forum) called "Tags R Us" that is being prepared right now. We're going to run a natural language analyszer over all of our content and auto-tag everything, including stuff like Tech Q&A that users can't tag themselves (yet). The criteria for Tags R Us will be very stringent and consistent, so we'll get the best of both worlds: a reliable, pervasive set of in-house metadata that is augmented by user input. Whatever teh auto-tagger misses, the user base will be free to insert, and vice versa.

Hope that allays some concerns.

A couple of nice features to add to Projects would be the ability to filter & group suggestions by content type (ie blogs, discussions, tips, etc)

It would be much more user friendly to be able to save multiple suggestions at once rather than having to navigate back to the suggestion page.

Overall I like the additions; especially the history. History would be a good place to be able to sort by date and/or type.

Filter options are arleady in the Beta 2 spec, as is the multi-save. History will ideally repalce My Tech Q&A and My Discussions, with some useful sort options to drill down into each content type (and, for Tech Q&A, filter by open/closed, answered/unanswered, points, etc.). Glad we aren't planning stuff no one wants. :)

related to a bug in the posts from my contacts.
showing content in suggestions now from TPG.

while it's right on for interest area. it's not content that I have access to.

as with right after the posts from my contacts was implemented, when I would see posts from contacts in restricted access forums where I didn't have access.

When we build collaboration, we're going to have to implement a fairly robust and pervasive permissions infrastructure. If everything goes according to plan this should allow us to prevent you from seeing private/hidden/restricted access stuff that you can't view. As it is, each view component has its own code, so covering every instance is quite the task (and often it's deemed a non-priority by engineering to fix). We're attacking this from the infrastructure rather than the presentation side, so it may take longer, but the results should be worth it.

the infrastructure the right way to tackle this type of bug?
:)
a query will need to be run against the db, with the permission bits enabled for only those sections the member has access to.
ie:
level 1 basic member
level 2 tri
level 3 TPG
level 4 inclusive
level 5 admin
when it's level 1 only what is accessable to the member is pulled in the query.
level 2 will pull from both tr i and basic
level 3 will pull from TPG and basic.
4 from all lower levels
and 5 is obvious yes?
but that means re-encoding both the queries and the db for the permission levels.
takes time.

I know you pull the suggestions from my profile; but are they based on my Interests or on my Current Techonology Implementation (or both?)

That will make a difference on how I edit the profile.

So make them both accurate, if you please.

I prefer it that way; and it also explains why when I added tags from my implementation to my interests the suggestions didn't change!

Would it be possible to have the suggestions pull only from certain tags?

by charliespencer Oct 26, 2005

I'm not sure what in my profile is causing Suggestions to include multiple links to gaming and Linux articles. I haven't mentioned these subjects by name anywhere in my profile. Are Suggestion entries driven by something other than profile Interests and Current Tech? Maybe they also include articles related to discussions I was foolish enough to participate in?

Also, I've got a couple of Suggestions that appear to be duplicates.

We've got a massive sub-project for revising the Tag Results pages (what you see when you click a tag). Instead of the siloized views you get now, you'll get a Suggestions stream powered by that tag. More importantly, there will be tools on the page to add/subtract secondary tags to create a Boolean search, which will redraw the Suggestions list on the fly. Every tag thus becomes a gateway to customized Boolean search.

The real kicker? When you get a result set you like, you'll be able to instantly save the Boolean query as a Project.

Obviously, we're a ways away from this yet, but it's in the pipeline. With any luck, the Boolean query component will be available in Projects before we rebuild the Tag Results page, if for no other reason than to test the code. We're just as excited about it as you are, but we have a limited engineering bandwidth and have to prioritize.

After we've got a firm handle on potential Beta 2 features, we'll publish a list and let the TRIs voice which items we should prioritize (if possible). If you feel strongly about Boolean queries, I'd make that known when the time comes.

by debuggist Oct 25, 2005

I'd love to hear about your experience with ROR. I've been reading about it for months now (just read a magazine article that described the installation and setup of some simple pages).

It sounds great for form handling or other tools on a low activity site. Like the author of the article that I read though, I'm concerned about scalability. I wonder what choices are available for optimization.

Youse guys rule, truly. Thanks.

This all sounds almost too good to be true. Any chance of some of this making it into an open source project?

I'll probably end up blogging about it at some point.

I don't know how extensible Rails is on the back end, yet, though if it is fairly extensible I'm sure it could be adapted to technologies that would make it potentially as scalable as anything else. I guess I'll find out as I go. Considering web development isn't my main career focus, I'll probably never be writing web apps on the order of Wikimedia and Google stuff, so Rails is probably perfect for me even if it does suffer a little in the scalability department, but it would be nice to be sure of its capabilities in that regard.

So, yeah. I'll let ya know, I guess, when I know more.

I think full-on wiki functionality is probably not desirable for anything you're currently doing, but this pseudo-wiki kind of functionality for the Workspaces is great.

Your main Suggestions are based on your Profile data. If you want a narrower view, just create a project and include only those tags you want to see. The Project Suggestions will draw content based only on the specified Project tags.

Hopefully, our second-gen interface will make this more intuitive.

by charliespencer Oct 26, 2005

I just love it when someone uses the word "intuitive" when discussing anything to do with computers. It's like when people use the words "squid" or "alternator" when discussing sex.

Exactly, you type whatever you wanna yak about, you can provide links in blogs too, they just aren't hyper.

It's "Here's what I want to talk about" blog or workspace.

by jfpsf Oct 25, 2005

Rails is great. Unfortunately, not great enough to make us rewrite everything, though.

by maxwell edison Oct 25, 2005

.
I did miss the connection. But the song just mentions Dakota, neither North or South. I guess Rocky lived a long time ago, when Dakota was a territory, not a state.

By the way, there was a movement a while back with some people wanting to combine North and South Dakota into one state called just Dakota. Personally, I liked the idea. It would have spelled the end for a couple of U.S. Senators!

by maxwell edison Oct 25, 2005

.
I recognized him the moment I saw it.

"Black Mountain hills of Dakota.."

I was thinking "Black Hills of North Dakota..."
In my defense, it is like a slurred British accent trying to be American and pretty quickly at that.

But yes, time to dig out the White Album again...well maybe not quite yet, saw Judas Priest again the other night, with Anthrax (that'll flag homeland security)and Sunday night is Alice Cooper, so it will be a while before I can slow down to Beatles headspace again.