Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Your favorite DG interfaces? Editing Context.

Author:Phil Wolff
Posted:1/8/2000; 11:37:02 AM
Topic:Your favorite web-based DG interfaces?
Msg #:14246 (In response to 14160)
Prev/Next:14245 / 14247

What do I mean by context?
Aside from thread and chronology, how does this story fit in with the rest of this site? This is what I'm referring to as external context.

It is best for me-the-author to capture context at creation time when I'm thinking about the story and it's fresh. I'll never catch up and don't want to spend my time categorizing my posts and those of others. Here are 3 types of external context I'd like to see in Manila and an implementation suggestion.

Related Posts and Citations.
Combine a little natural language processing with full text search: screen out noise words from my post and search the DG for prior related work. Dino Morelli stated the problem:

btw, I did a search on UserLand for Wiki and only then realized that this topic was covered on the DG a couple of times before (1999-Feb-02 and 1998-Dec-22). I should've done a search first and appended posts to those discussions. :/ I know adding new topics should be done with care.

From the search results, let me put a checkbox by those posts I think are closely related to this story, so I can:

Categorize.
I also want to be able to provide some context at edit time relative to the site structure categories. Use the structure's categories to generate a pull-down menu or a mover dialog. Let me pick those places in the structure I think this story belongs. Revise the site structure accordingly.

Story-Specific Metadata.
While Prefs lets me set site-wide keywords and descriptions, an individual article might stand on its own. Metadata tags can be used in searches, labels for cross-references, etc. Here are some of the medata tags from the San Jose Mercury News describing the content and the story's lifecycle.

You can imagine how they use this throughout their site to draw people to the story in various ways, and to manage story lifecycles.

Implementation?
How do you do these non-intrusively? Make them options of a preview button. Let me see what my page looks like before posting and embarrasing myself ith typos, spelling errors, etc. While I'm there, let me add citations, metadata, and categorize the post.






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