12/3/08 Update: Home Page, CSS Fixes, Pingback and more

December 3, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

We released some code tonight that we’d been working on this weekend that should fix a number of CSS display bugs in specific browsers. Because these browsers like to interpret the same code a number of ways, this means we may have created other bugs while fixing the previous ones, and though we tested for them we may have missed a few. If you run into a bug, please let us know through the contact us link in the footer.

We also released a rough home page widget for logged in members, to display the account and preferences more prominently and to include the latest blog post, so that you don’t have to check the blog as often.

And lastly, we released some code that performs pingbacks and trackbacks on linked blogs, meaning that when you comment on a site on able2know, it will ping the site using those protocols. If you are a blog owner and notice anything funky in our implementation please let us know.

Featured Topics

November 25, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

Another quick release of code we already had lying around almost ready: featured topics. On several grids we are now displaying a list of featured topics in the grid sidebar. The topics are selected by tags and votes, so if you want to promote a topic up vote it or tag it and as always let us know what you think.

Next/Previous links on posts

November 23, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

We had some code lying around to put links on each post to jump to the next or previous post. It wasn’t live because it still needs some work, namely it needs to skip over collapsed posts. But while using a trackball without a scroll wheel today I quickly dusted it off and pushed it live to make it easier to peruse the topic pages.

It still really needs to be able to skip collapsed posts to work well, but is something I found useful enough as is to push live. Give it a try.

Tags on profile page

November 22, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

Tags are user-created forums, and as with anything open to all users some will abuse the feature. While tagging is intended to serve as a way to categorize and recommend content it’s also sometimes used to rate the content and criticize it.

This is expected, and with enough good user activity it will be overridden but we can also do more to highlight its intent and perhaps convince some of the pranksters to use the feature more constructively. Tags are supposed to be forums, not anonymous comments, and are tagged threads are supposed to be the ones you recommend, not the ones you think are lame.

So with that in mind, there are a lot of ways tags are going to be used to highlight user recommendations. There was already a tags page in the user profile, that lists 100 of the users most used tags and the threads they tagged with them but we will be doing more to emphasize the use of tags as a way to categorize, save, and promote content instead of comment on it.

One of the first changes we are making is to also list a tag cloud on the user’s profile. This way, if a user gets his kicks by leaving vulgar words on other people’s threads they will also be front and center on the user’s profile.

We will also be doing more to make tags a socially useful feature, like listing what users tagged a tread on the thread itself, and by featuring the user’s tagged content in more locations.

Tags can be very useful, and we are going to continue to respond to the less useful tags by emphasising the ways they are useful and by giving the community more insight into who is using the tags in malicious ways.

The Raven’s Realm closes next year

November 21, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

An MSN group called TheRavensRealm eventually evolved into able2know, and for this reason we are announcing here to the members who first were part of that group that Microsoft is closing MSN Groups and the group will no longer be accessible next year.

They offer a way to import the group into different services, which I’ve tried to do but my admin accounts to the group have long since expired from inactivity (deleted hotmail and yahoo email accounts) and the group can’t be saved.

I’ve saved a lot of the site for personal reaons, and others here may want to save photos etc that they want access to after the group is no longer available online.

UI Overhaul: New layout and design

November 19, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

Tonight we launched a design update that we’ve been working on for over a month now. The goal was to fix some of the aesthetic deficiencies in the previous design and improve the layout and navigation. The main goals of our update were:

Design

We wanted a less “washed out” look, and though the color scheme is still far from perfect (like the oversaturated colors in the header that have been pointed out to us) it’s at least less colorless and better frames the content. We don’t have the designer we had been working with prior to launching the new a2k, so this is still just the best Nick and I, as opposed to a real graphic artist, can do for now and we’ll be on the lookout for design help in the future to bring a real graphic artist to the table.

Layout

We wanted to ditch the two column layout because we didn’t yet have the things we planned to put there built, and there was a lot of wasted space in the mean time. When those widgets come, we may change things but for now the layout is more streamlined and we moved from the vertical side tabs, to the horizontal tabs within the main content area.

Navigation

Topic Grids

We wanted to remove some of the confusion of the sortable grids. Some users were not understanding what they needed to do to see the topics they wanted in the order they wanted. So now there are dedicated pages for things like “New Posts” and “New Topics”. This means some of the sorting and filtering abilities we had launched are no longer available (e.g. sorting by most replies within the last day) but we’ll work on ways to bring them back (possibly in the search feature).

So the first thing you may notice is that you now should click “New Posts” in the header to see those, instead of the home page, which is now a directory listing of tags.

We’ve also ditched more ads and put the listing of tags in the topic grids on the right side where the ads used to be and listed more of them with their related tags. We’ll need to bring some ads back (right now we probably don’t have enough of them running to pay the server bill) so please be patient with us if some return. They are what pays for the site.

Tag Directory

Speaking of tags, with all the tagging the members have done since we launched, we now have the related tags needed to display them as a directory listing. So the home page now has a directory of tags and their related tags. You can browse the top couple hundred pages of tags (they are ordered by popularity) and we’ve auto capitalized them to make them look nicer. This means the capitalization will sometimes be incorrect (e.g. acronyms, McCain, capitalizing articles like “and”) but for the most part is a big visual improvement.

Topic Pages

Without the side column we had to move the topic tagging form to the main content area. We moved the tag information under the topic title. You’ll see the public tags, your own tags, and a green link to tag the topic. Clicking the link will display a form where you can add tags to the topic.

With the change from the side tabs to the horizontal tabs we were also able to put a reply all link at the bottom of the page as an inverted tabstrip and we also added a new feature to the topic page in the form of the “top replies” list. Under the first post in the topic you can click to view the top replies, which can be a handy way of perusing a large topic and getting to the best posts quickly.

There were a number of other improvements that I don’t remember right now, but there are probably also some bugs (especially display bugs in various browsers). Please let us know if you run into any and we’ll try to fix them.

And lastly, yes we know some people won’t like these changes. That’s how it always is, since the beggining of the site there has always a significant percentage of the members unhappy (read for yourself, in every step of the site’s history there are some saying the site sucks, an opinion they are entitled to) and we can’t please everyone. We’ll keep working at this, and keep trying to make you happy but sometimes we just won’t be able to do so despite our efforts and we ask that you have patience with us, we have a lot of improvements planned and things may look better to you was we release them.

Duplicate post/overpost filter, new roadmap

October 6, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

As you might have noticed, our development pace has slowed as we had to return to other jobs to pay the bills. But we’re still actively working on site improvements and here are some we made today as well as our current development roadmap.

Duplicate Post Filter: We released code to prevent duplicate posts.

Topic Flood Limit: We released code to prevent a user from making more than 3 posts (current settings, may change) to the same topic in a row to reduce the ability any one individual has to distrupt threads. The limit only lasts for 24 6 hours, and only as long as nobody else posts. So now one member can’t flood a topic with posts as easily. It won’t prevent such disruptions but it can reduce the volume significantly.

Current Roadmap

We are working on a navigation overhaul combined with a design update to address the rough spots in the site design and the user interface. The improvements we need to make here are fundamental and we need to address them before moving on to other features (like private messaging) so this is our current priority.

We also need to address the email updates, new users who ask questions aren’t sent emails when they get replies and we’ll be looking to address this next.

Private messaging is one of our next top priorities, but as this is a secondary feature to the site (and in a pinch email tends to work similarly) the navigation and email updates take precedence.

No timelines exist but we estimate that the navigation and email updates constitute several weeks of work and we don’t have much more visibility than that at the moment. Any updates or changes will be posted to this blog.

Questions vs Discussions

September 16, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

Right now there are two topic types for “Questions” and “Discussions” and the difference between them isn’t fully articulated by the software. Questions are intended for topics where you have a question that you want an answer to. Once having the “right” answer these topics will be less visible. Discussions are open-ended and won’t close or have a specific answer selected.

At this time the differences are not very clear, but we are going to build auto-closing for the questions and the question topic type is not going to support open ended discussion well.

So if you just want one right answer to a question that has an objective answer use the questions topic type. If you want to discuss things and get multiple opinions and viewpoints use the discussion topic type, even if your discussion is started by a question.

A tutorial for formatting articles and websites to share

September 13, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

In the future able2know will have a special topic type dedicated to sharing articles and webpages but in the mean time there’s still a lot of article posting going on and I thought I’d share my tips on making the submissions more useful to others.

  1. Link to the article. Give the users a chance to see the article at its source and give credit to the publisher where it is due. I find the best results are to give the link as a large and prominent headline to the article excerpt you are sharing.
  2. Write a good headline. Good headline copy is too large a subject to cover here but the basics are that you can go for informative or catchy. A title like “Best article ever!” might draw attention but says little about the topic. A title like “computer keyboard” is topical but not very interesting. I find that the best titles are the ones that combine both as they draw interest by being catchy as well as from people searching for specific subjects. Often the website or article has a title by the author and I usually take these and improve on them slightly when I don’t have a much better (in my opinion, of course) headline to use. Sometimes articles come with a main headline and a secondary headline and when they do I’ll sometimes use one for the topic title and the other for the link to the article.
  3. Excerpt the text. Copying and pasting the article in its entirety is not useful to many people (besides being illegal in many cases). An excerpt of the highlights or what you found most relevant does people a favor of giving them something shorter that they can use to see if they’d like to read the whole thing. And since you are already linking to the source (see above) prominently they can read the whole thing in a better format than most of the copy and paste tends to transfer.
  4. Include multimedia. An image is worth a thousand words and a relevant article image can make the submission more interesting to others and draw more people in to check it out. It helps flesh out a bare-looking entry and doing things like embedding a video instead of just linking to it and embedding images can help make your submission more substantial and catchy.

When all is said and done, able2know users tend to react more positively to postings that have at least a little thought and structure to them. Simply dropping a link isn’t enough to get most people to click on it and simply copying the whole text is too verbose to catch their attention. So most people like a nice prominent link and a good excerpt and perhaps even your thoughs and comments on the matter (or even when you tie togehter some related articles to provide them a cluster that they might not have found on their own).

So if you want your post to be useful to the most users and to get more replies follow those style guidelines and you’ll make your posts more interesting to more people.

Here is an example of a post using those principles and the bbcode I used for them in case you’d like to use the same style I do:

Topic title: The toughest animal on earth (Tardigrada) survives trip in space

Post Body:

[url=http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/invertebrate-as.html][size=150]Invertebrate Astronauts Make Space History[/size][/url]

[quote]It’s one small step for Tardigrada, and one giant leap for the animal kingdom: The toughest creature on Earth has survived a trip into space.

Except for a few hardy strains of bacteria, any other creature would have been destroyed — but tardigrades handled the voyage as though it were a dry spell on their local moss patch.

“They have claws and eyes. They are real animals. And this is the first time such an animal was tested in space,” said Petra Rettberg, an Institute of Aerospace Medicine microbiologist.

[img]http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/images/2008/09/08/tardigrade3.jpg[/img][/quote]

You’ll note that I used the catchier headline “toughest animal on earth” for the topic title while adding a bit of context (the animal’s name) and then used a secondary title for the main link to the article. I then excerpt a bit of the article, link an image and quote it.

To do the headline link to the article I paste in the headline and make any changes to it that I need to, and then I highlight it and change the text size to “large”. I highlight it again (including the size tags) and click “url” to put it in url tags and then add the link inside the opening url tag. The result of that is this part of the bbcode:

[url=http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/invertebrate-as.html][size=150]Invertebrate Astronauts Make Space History[/size][/url]

Robots crashed the server

September 13, 2008 | By Robert Gentel

Today there was some downtime as a rogue robot made too many connections to the database and caused it to stop responding. In the future we’ll build some more caching to be able to handle more concurrent connections but we’ll also build in robot banning code that will block robots that don’t respect the robots.txt protocol.

Right now the blog is on the same server, so it was down as well but in the future we’ll move the blog to a separate server so it can serve as a good place for updates when the main site is down.