The Oxford Guide - Differences between Version 33 and Version 32 of Comments

Version 33 Version 32
== Line 64 ==

* I'm not sure how using their advertised method to generate the URL is any different (from streetmap's point of view) than having manually generated URLS linked to them. IMHO, it ''should'' be okay. The london.pm case appears to be slightly different as they were actively accessing streetmap systems to generate the information. [[James]]

I was wondering if the Clubs category should be renamed Nightclubs, or if it's unlikely that any other sort of club will appear. :) --Art


PhilH: this is an interesting project, i'm afraid i'm not familiar with Wiki sorry in advance for any cockups i may make ;)

  • Welcome. I'd heartily recommend that you read House Style; it'll make your contributions much more valuable. --Dom

James: Would it be possible to alter the long/lat display from the decimal representation to the more usual degrees and minutes representation? Streetmap appears to use this representation.

  • Geography::NationalGrid seems to have a method to do this, so yes. I'll add it to the next release as an option in Preferences. --Kake

James: My spelling is bad I know. Is it possible to add some sort of spell check? Even if it's just a list of mispelled words so I can go back and re-edit the entry?

  • Not my itch; patches welcome :) --Kake

Dom: Perhaps we need specific metadata entries for URLs to other guides/reviews?

  • Could do, yes — I mainly worry about making the edit form overcomplex and huge. But this is something the RDF people are interested in, so I'll probably add it. --Kake

Dom: I can't decide how streets should work, exactly. I think that all streets should be created as Locale links in text, along the lines of ((Locale Foo Street | Foo Street)) (those should be square brackets, but the nowiki tag doesn't seem to work). Then if the locales are important they will be clicked on/otherwise created, and used, if not, no harm done. Perhaps we should even have a macro for this. The idea is that you can easily get a list of all things in a specific street. I'm not entirely convinced by all this, though.

James: I think this would probably improve things, it would make it a lot easier for people to properly link their entries. Otherwise having streets as entries forces the author to actually go and edit the entry for a street to link the entry in properly. Just my 2p.

Kake: Making people explicitly write ((Locale Foo Street|Foo Street)) is a pain though, especially when you can just make Foo Street be a redirect to Locale Foo Street (ie, you only have to do it once).

Dom: Ah, yes, I like this idea even more.


James: How about offering the wanted pages ordered by the number of times they are wanted as well as by alphabetical ordering?

  • Oh, nice idea. That'll require a patch to CGI::Wiki, so I'll have a think about it. --Kake

James: Are inline images disabled or is this a bug?

  • Use img tags — it's done like this so you can put ALT and TITLE text in. --Kake
  • However, I am fairly strongly against linking large photos inline. They disrupt the use of the site. If they *must* be included, then they should at least have width and height tags. --Dom
  • Yeah, can we cut down on the images? I like small, fast-loading pages. Stick in links to images by all means, though. --Kake

James: Can the pages please be validatable HTML of some form or another? I'm trying to write a suitable stylesheet and it would make life a little easier, it's just a few loose </P> tags I believe. Should the <div id="... be <div class="... ?

  • I think the problem is that <hr /> and <<form> ... </form> aren't valid inside paragraph tags, you can spot this on most of the pages as far as I can tell. I could be wrong, but I think that's it. Thanks for the info about the id attribute, that cleared things up for me. -- James

Kake: I'd encourage contributors to make themselves a page so people can see who else is using this, for example Kake, Dom, James, Art. We've found on grubstreet that it makes the guide feel like more of a community thing.


James: Is it nessecary to provide both a map link and the OS co-ordinates? In the current situation if streetmap etc. make a slight change to the formatting of their URL this means that every entry needs to be manually corrected, whereas if we generated the map URL from the coordinates (streetmap provide instructions at http://www.streetmap.co.uk/linkto.htm) only a single change would be needed to the code.

  • The problem is that Streetmap have been known to be arsey in the past about software that automatically generates links to them. However, it was slightly more complicated in this particular case because the software itself was doing lookups to streetmap. The fun starts on the london.pm mailing list. Personally I'd be happy with doing a simple conversion as documented on their own site (I didn't notice that page before) but if Kake isn't happy with it this'll require me or someone else to maintain a patch to OpenGuides and this will need some time spent to familiarise myself with the codebase.

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