openguides-oxford March 2012

openguides-oxford@lists.openguides.org

4 participants
4 discussions

Usability/user-friendliness improvements
by Kake L Pugh 18 Jun '12

18 Jun '12

As promised in my other mail, here are some suggestions for improving the user-friendliness of the Oxford Guide. They're not in any particular order. I do have some other ideas stemming from a very useful conversation with Janet, but they are a bit more complicated and I haven't finished thinking them through (perhaps we could discuss them in March). - Make "The Oxford Guide" in the banner be a link to the home page. This is how people expect websites to work these days and it keeps tripping me up. - Remove the recent changes display from the front page. It's always full of spam. (Alternatively, but harder, patch OpenGuides so unmoderated changes don't show up in this list.) - Switch from this style of locale/category page: http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?id=Locale_Central&version=1 to this: http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?id=Locale_Central&version=2 This would involve (a) editing existing pages, and (b) creating a custom_autocreate_content.tt template something like this: http://svn.randomness.org.uk/trunk/london.randomness.org.uk/custom-template… - Once the above has been done, switch the front page links to point to the category/locale pages proper, e.g. http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Locale_Central instead of http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?action=index;index_type=locale;index_val… - Switch to the most recent version of the Google Maps API. Version 3 of the API is much smoother and also optimised for mobile browsing. This could be done either with an external script - see for example http://london.randomness.org.uk/scripts/locate.cgi?loc=SE1;map=1 - or by patching OpenGuides. Here is the code we use on RGL: http://svn.randomness.org.uk/trunk/london.randomness.org.uk/scripts/locate.… http://svn.randomness.org.uk/trunk/london.randomness.org.uk/scripts/lib/RGL… - Edit the stylesheet so node images float to the right; compare http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?id=Category_Chinese_Food&version=3 with http://cambridge.openguides.org/wiki/?id=Category_Chinese_Food&version=4 - Add more categories to the sidebar (see the Cambridge Guide link for an example). (BTW, please don't just respond with "JFDI". It really is a very disheartening thing to hear. For most of these things, if I had the time and brain space to do them then I would already have done them. However, I would be extremely happy to advise and assist anyone who is keen to take charge of rolling the scripts I've written for RGL into OpenGuides core.) Kake _______________________________________________ openguides-oxford mailing list openguides-oxford(a)lists.urchin.earth.li http://urchin.earth.li/mailman/listinfo/openguides-oxford

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Scope of the Oxford Guide
by Kake L Pugh 13 Apr '12

13 Apr '12

Before I forget, here is some of the stuff we discussed during my week in Oxford, regarding various aspects of the scope of the guide. 1) Geographical scope. http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Scope_Of_The_Guide says: "Obviously the guide should be about things to do within Oxford City. However, locations outside the City may be okay as long as they don't stray too far and don't belong better on another wiki. For example, we have articles on places in Kidlington, but Witney, Didcot or Aylesbury are probably too far away." Janet has however suggested that Kidlington is also too far away, as is Abingdon, but Botley is certainly part of Oxford, so saying "nothing outside the ring road" doesn't really work. Owen has suggested the traditional "6 miles from Carfax" definition. Dom thinks it's a bit tricky because Abingdon is unlikely to ever have its own Open Guide, so where should a person write about/document Abingdon, if they happen to want to do so? (Please correct me if I have wrongly paraphrased anyone there.) 2) Completism vs. selectivity. Owen thinks (and I agree with him) that completism is the way to go, rather than trying to be selective on the grounds of e.g. notability. This means that the Guide should have an entry for every business within its geographical scope. These entries don't have to contain "reviews" (see next point) or a vast amount of text, but should give a brief yet comprehensive overview of what the business is/does. Example: http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?William_Morris 3) Subjectivity vs. objectivity. Related to the above, we've started splitting off subjective "review" content from the main pub/restaurant/etc pages into subpages of people's userpages. Example: http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Arbat http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Kake/Reviews/Arbat The idea is that we would encourage most people to write their reviews on Daily Info, or on their own blogs, and we will then link to the relevant Daily Info page or blog post. Regular contributors can be an exception to this, if they really don't want to host their reviews elsewhere[0], but in this case the reviews will always be under their userpage rather than on the main restaurant page. [0] I fall into this category, so am somewhat biased on this question. 4) Things that have closed. The plan that Janet and I hashed out between us is thus. When a business closes, we remove all its categories and locales, add it to the "Closed" category, and make it very clear on the page that the business is no longer in, er, business. When something else opens up on the same spot, it gets a new page of its own, which is linked from the old one, and which links to said old one in turn. The "summary" field for both pages is updated to mention the old/new occupant of the premises (the summary shows up in search results, so if someone searches for e.g. "Hajduczek" and Arbat comes up, there is text saying "Russian restaurant on Cowley Road, previously a Polish restaurant called Hajduczek." to explain it). Examples: http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/search.cgi?action=search&search=hajduczek http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/search.cgi?action=search&search=trichy 5) AOB. Have I forgotten anything important? Kake

6 36

College data from OxPoints
by Kake 10 Apr '12

10 Apr '12

I've just run a script to import some OxPoints data into the Oxford Guide (thanks go to Janet for providing the data in handy CSV form). This covers all the colleges in OxPoints, which I believe is all the colleges which form part of the university. In some cases, the data import simply added a few bits of missing data, e.g. geodata, summary, Wikipedia link, etc. In others, we didn't yet have a page for that college, so it created a stub one. I copied the existing practice of adding the following categories to each: Colleges, Education, The University. I also added locales in the cases where the name of the road the college is on was already defined as a locale in the guide. I didn't add locales such as "Central" because I'm not sure what counts as central. Here is an example of an update: http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?id=Lady%20Margaret%20Hall;version=1;diff… and here is an example of a new stub page: http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Exeter_College Let me know if anything weird seems to have happened as a result of this. Kake

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Overexcited spam trap
by Kake L Pugh 01 Mar '12

01 Mar '12

The Oxford Guide spam trap just refused to let me edit http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Co-Op_Walton_Street even though all I was doing was adding the "Walton Street" locale (which I had just successfully done for Walton Street Cycles). Could this be loosened up a bit, please? (As previously mentioned, it also refused to let me change the category links on the front page earlier this week.) Kake

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openguides-oxford March 2012