- Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
- Uh, I think so Brain, but we'll never get a gorilla to wear trowsers!

I have been doing some podering of myself. Wouldn't it be cleaner if only the 1st paragraph of SOPW showed up? Sometimes fellow monks will post questions with code that are not of my particular interest, and I have to scroll through the post to get to the next one. No problem there, I'm not THAT lazy, but I only tend to look at the SOPW main page searching for a topic of my interest. If I like it, I'll enter and read what others had to say, and perhaps post something of my own.

If we all share this common behavior, I beleive that it would be more efficient to have only a descriptive first paragraph and more about the topic in its node page, á la /.'s read more. By using a similar method, we could have a clearer, more concise, easier loading SOPW (and other nodes even, if it becomes convinient)!

So now you have read this, and still have no idea of why I posted a P&TB quote? Since its the 1st paragraph, its a perfectly good example of what not to do. And I think Brain is sexy... :)

#!/home/bbq/bin/perl
# Trust no1!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: Slashdot Style
by Ozymandias (Hermit) on Jun 03, 2000 at 22:33 UTC
    Even better would be an additional field on the form; Title, Concise, and Complete. That lets you use your own distinctive P&TB style in the first paragraph of your question - but the concise field, which is what shows on the front page, has a short, clear statement of your question.

    For example:

    Title: JAHQ (Just Another Hash Question) by BBQ

    Concise: I need to alphabetize a hash of a hash of a hash. How?

    Complete: -Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?
    -I think so brain, but is the world ready for a gay cartoon mouse marriage?

    ...

    Or is that too complicated? Puts a little more work on the shoulders of the user, perhaps, but it makes life a lot easier for the readers of the front page.

    It also solves the "code formatting" problem. That concise section should never have actual code in it; so since it and th title are the only things displayed there, the front page never gets wider than 1024 x 768 from lines of code. Which would make everybody happy. <G>

    - Ozymandias

[reply]
RE: Slashdot Style
by takshaka (Friar) on Jun 03, 2000 at 23:32 UTC
    Yeah, I agree. I was going to post something about this a while back, but the server died or a router puked and I never got around to it.

    My thought was to add a User Setting for the max number of characters shown for each node listed on the section indices/home pages. I prefer keeping this sort of control in the hands of the reader; a lot of SOPW posts don't even have descriptive titles, and I'd hate to think what those same posts would have for a "concise" (á la Ozymandias' idea) question.

    But then I suppose there could be a problem with closing HTML tags....

    Well, at any rate, put me down for "Yes, I would like a way to shorten index listings."

[reply]
      Now that you mentioned having a fixed length stipulated by the user's settings... It occured to me that something would have to be done with all of the previous posts (aprox. 16,000?) that are already on the database, in case the descriptive title suggestion were implemented. The lousy thing (in a good way) about our liberty to suggest stuff in PerlMonks is that we know this site is live. I can imagine the nightmares vroom must have every time we come up with an idea like this.

      Changing code? No problem.
      Changing the database schema.. Whoa!

      Even if some work needs to be done in order to allow length, rather than a descriptive field, I'd rather go with length myself.

      Good call!

      #!/home/bbq/bin/perl
      # Trust no1!
[reply]
RE: Slashdot Style
by Adam (Vicar) on Jun 04, 2000 at 02:40 UTC
    I have to disagree.
    I like having as much data on one page as possible. It allows me to read more stuff faster. An instant gratification of sorts. :)
[reply]
      As long as it is available on the user settings page, I think the idea is that you can choose to have the listings terminate with "Read more..." after EITHER x number of chars OR not at all. I do agree with you that having to click thru is inefficient and annoying. My personal user settings would remain at "full story". But I think this could make the site more usable for other people, so I'll throw in my vote for BBQ's idea.

      e-mail neshura

[reply]

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