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9 ways this blog has been improved
27 August 2010
By Tennie Videler
Blanka started a discussion (16 comments!) in March on how this blog/ forum could be improved. Well, it has taken our web developers some time, and due to budget and reality limitations not my entire wish list was fulfilled. But I am happy to announce the following changes (and I hope you’ll agree they are improvements):
- It is now ordered by latest activity, whether latest post or latest comment! How are you finding this?
- The search functionality should now perform a whole lot better and allow you to search by author’s name as well as searching for any key words or phrases in the title, main post or comments
- The comments are now the same width as the posts, hurray
- You can now insert hyperlinks in your comments!
- You can now use italics in your comments
- The start of comments are no longer displayed on the side, do we miss them? I don’t know if I could get it reversed.
- The breadcrumbs are now fixed (they used to sometimes go silly)
- The RSS feeds are improved: they now show the whole blog post, not just the titles, and are restricted to the 20 most recent posts. This should help with the SEO (see Hannah’s mega useful post)
- You can now add your profile to the core contributors’ page using the comment box at the bottom
I am finding that there are also some changes when you input a post via your 'dashboard'. I have to admit I am not sure what the abstract feature is for or whether you need to put in a date.... here goes without putting in a date. Ah, no, it needs a date. I'll try to find out why!
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Simon Smith27 August 2010 at 07:56 PM
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Brilliant, Tennie, and you forgot the most important:
10. You can now edit your comments!
I think the dissapearance of the latest comments from the right-hand side panel is compensated for in a way by the re-ordering you've implemented. And you still get them when looking at individual posts.
Hannah Dee31 August 2010 at 07:05 PM
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The "add-post" page is improved, but I'm not entirely sure what all that date stuff is about. Why do we need a date rather than a "publish now" button?
I also rather miss the latest comments thing. I can see how ordering by most recent comment gets around that, but I think that could mean new posts drop off the front page fairly quickly if there are a couple of old posts getting lots of comments still.
And for some reason it seems to create two articles for me when I create a new post. By going back and un-publishing one of them I have managed not to mess up the front page too much, but it's a bit of a pain. Unless that's just me!
Matthew Salois31 August 2010 at 08:53 PM
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I think, like Hannh, that I miss the latest comments bit on the side column. In fact, having the latest five rather than three comments would be nice...just to see who is commenting on what and what the first few words are is a nice feature.
I actually kind of like this abstract feature which allows for a brief summary of the blog post.
I have noticed that for some reason now (the updates?) I cannot use Internet Explorer at all for posting comments or blogs on this website. I was advised to use Firefox and everything is works fine now. However, this issue may become problematic to the new visitor who is using IE, trys to leave a comment or blog and can't, and then just gives up.
Andy Humphrey02 September 2010 at 01:08 PM
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I've had problems with Internet Explorer in the past too. It's been working OK for the last few months, apart from the fact it's almost unbearably slow.
In answer to Tennie's points:
Actually I really dislike "ordering by latest activity", for exactly the reason suggested. We now suffer the same issue that every bulletin-board has, i.e. the light-hearted and "chat" posts are permanently on the introductory screen as, by their very nature, these attract lots of comments. The posts with something meaningful to say, and which require more thoughtful responses, are very quickly buried, and end up being overlooked. Unless you're one of the small band of Vitae blog regulars, you have to know that someone has posted on a particular specific topic, and search for it, or you'll miss it. Either that, or you have to have hours of spare time to trawl through pages' worth of postings before finding something of interest (and how many researchers have hours of spare time these days?). I'm not sure this is helpful to newcomers to Vitae, and I'm not sure it's helpful to the purpose of the blog either.
Blanka SengerováEdited: 02 September 2010 at 01:52 PM
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I will defend the ordering by activity as I was the one who originally suggested. To me it seems like a much quicker way of seeing at one glance which topics are active and where discussion has been going on. But everyone has their own preferences and you're never going to please everyone.
My main gripe remains that the whole forum (and I presume the whole Vitae site?) is woefully slow, which doesn't encourage browsing of the older posts or articles. (This, in my view, is more of an issue than the way in which the posts are ordered). On the connections I am on, I would expect the pages, which are mainly text only, to load almost instantly, and at the moment I have to wait about 15-20 seconds (at a guess). Can something be done about this?
Sarah Davies02 September 2010 at 04:26 PM
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I'm going to add my voice to those who miss the 'latest comments' sidebar - I *really* miss this. It was great for getting a flavour of what people were talking about...
But otherwise I like the new look, I think!
Rachel Talbot03 September 2010 at 10:00 AM
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I have to confess to being very confused when I first went onto the new look site – I use a RSS feed in IE and it was telling me there were 3 new posts but an old one was top of the list... However I did quickly work out that they were in order of activity. I think I would prefer new posts to be at the top of the list so it is easy to identify them but at the same time I like knowing which posts have received comments.
I haven’t had any trouble with IE and posting comments but the RSS feed in IE wasn’t working properly. The new features seem to have fixed that however so thanks!
Hannah Dee03 September 2010 at 10:36 AM
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Another side effect of the redesign for regular visitors is that you now have to remember how many comments a post had last time you looked at the site, and what order the posts were in (as in "ah, this thread has 7, did it have 6 last time or has it been updated?"). I think this is perhaps the biggest drawback for me.
Bring back "recent comments"!
Andy Humphrey10 September 2010 at 01:16 PM
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"it seems like a much quicker way of seeing at one glance which topics are active"
It is - but I think there would be more value in this blog if the posts that attracted attention were the informative ones, rather than the popular ones. The amount of activity on a post isn't necessarily a measure of the quality of the post or its usefulness for future researchers to refer to.
Blanka Sengerová10 September 2010 at 03:56 PM
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>> I think there would be more value in this blog if the posts that attracted attention were the informative ones, rather than the popular ones.
Yes, but what is informative is a very subjective measure, and will be different for everyone on the blog. So as a first approximation, the popular posts that people are commenting on, has to work.
In the old set-up, if you commented on some post that was written weeks or even months ago, no one would know about it (unless they caught it whilst it was in the 3 most recent comments). With the new set-up, commenting on an old post by, for instance, a new forum participant can bring a fresh insight into an old discussion.
Hannah Dee13 September 2010 at 04:58 PM
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Another problem with the new set up - the "Report Comment" option no longer works.
Andy Humphrey23 September 2010 at 03:19 PM
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"With the new set-up, commenting on an old post by, for instance, a new forum participant can bring a fresh insight into an old discussion."
True, but this requires the new participant to be able to FIND the articles in question. And that's going to require a much more specific set of search terms and a MUCH better internal search engine. One that doesn't even bring up my blog post "Networking Help!" when I type in the search term "networking help" clearly has a problem...
Elizabeth Dodson30 September 2010 at 11:52 PM
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Just wanted to add my vote to the call to bring back the "most recent comments" column.
Also need to check what is bumping some older posts before they have had new comments added...
Tennie Videler03 October 2010 at 03:44 PM
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what is bumping up random old posts at the moment is spam. Mainly selling prom dresses (??). At first I felt quite flattered for the blog to be considered worthy of getting spammed but now it just annoys me and we remove it.
Tennie Videler16 December 2010 at 11:48 AM
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have people seen that you can now click on authors' names to get all the articles by that person? I am afraid I don't know when this appeared, but thought i'd point it out.
The problem with the search facility is site wide and is working currently but very temperamental (moody even) so regularly gives up the ghost.
Tennie Videler25 January 2011 at 09:17 PM
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We've finally worked out how to feed the news that a new blog is posted onto Twitter! At the moment it appears as tweets by me @tennievideler (at last I'm saying something on twitter again) and @vitae_news. The hashtag is #vitaers