Free Republic Software Update for November 25th, 2003 (Update #4)

[John Robinson]

Terse report for now:

• NEW By popular demand Browse All Forums (Search is on the todo list.)
• FIXED The pager now alerts on new comments to you in any forum (it used to only alert for the News/Activism forum.)
• CHANGED General Interest now General Interest (Chat).
• I added color to the sidebar, tell me (politely!) what you think.
• Lots of misc. things under the hood.

There are a bunch of add'l changes/additions I'd like to make, and this is probably not the last update today. I'll update this thread if so.

Update #1

• You can choose your own color for each topic subscribed in your sidebar. See the subscriptions gadget (All but blue is probably dog ugly. Feel free to suggest new color schemes in standard web hexadecimal (one color for the background of the title the other for the background of the links)

Update #2

• A few trivial changes, mostly cosmetic.
• You can now search by time or relevance from the latest posts. And it remembers what your last search was and defaults to that. So NOW order by time can be your default search setting.
• Oh yeah, almost forgot, SPELL CHECK! (replies for now, articles will come later.)

Update #3

• New Posts to You from You has been vanquished. New posts will only alert when other people ping you.
• Playing with the position of the Spell check button. Sorry.
• Your personal menu has a new small treat inside.
• Fixed a couple bugs dealing with the spell check code.
• I'm not done yet.

Update #4:

• Okay, I have stopped dorking with the link colors. Back to the defaults they go. Thanks for baring my experiment, I figure it's the least you owe for All Forum posts. ;-)

[null and void]

Fixed your typo:

I hope someone gets him [Kennedy] up soon or PETA will show up en masse and try and roll him into the Potomac Chapaquidick.

[Tijeras_Slim]

I know you Hobbits work in shifts. :)

[John Robinson]

Everytime we want to check to see if an article has been posted, we have to do TWO searches in order to get the articles listed by date.

Just paste in the full title of the thread and hit search. The relevancy check will bring similar titles to the top.

[John123]

I added color to the sidebar, tell me (politely!) what you think.

I think the colored sidebar is a little distracting.

[John Robinson]

I have my eye on that but don't know what is wrong at the moment.

[GailA]

I like the new color on the side bar. The two blues together are easier to read than the blue on white.

[Sabertooth]

• NEW By popular demand Browse All Forums (Search is on the todo list.)

Great, I'll definitely use this. Will there eventually be a way to select specific forums for the "Browse All" option? For example, if Daily Threads gets its own forum, as they are so popular, I'd go for a "browse all but Daily" option, if that was available.

Will keywords eventually work across all forums? Can keywords be retained when threads are moved from News to Chat, or to the Backroom? I realize it's sometimes necessary to move threads, but sometimes they contained info and keywords that are still useful as a resource.

• FIXED The pager now alerts on new comments to you in any forum (it used to only alert for the News/Activism forum.)

Cool, thanks, I've wanted this.

Something I've noticed recently is that when I'm browsing, "new posts to you" gets highlighted for my own posts to others. I don't think it was always like that, so lately I've had to do extra clicking, only to find out the new post was my own. Can this be changed back to the way it was?

• CHANGED General Interest now General Interest (Chat).

Another good improvement. There's still a source of "GI" confusion when posting News articles. When I get to this field:

Topics Comma-separated list of topics; or press "Choose" to select from list REQUIRED

It takes me to a page with this heading...

Choose any number of topics

General Interest

If you scroll down, "News/Activism" is a subheading of this "General Interest." Since this isn't same "General Interest" as General Interest(Chat) -- I don't think, anyway -- this might be confusing to folks who haven't posted many articles.

• I added color to the sidebar, tell me (politely!) what you think.

No opinion. Might be helpful if the sidebars had different background colors, to enable quicker scrolling. Just a thought.

Oh, the other day, someone posted a link to something like a "My Sidebars" page. I forgot to bookmark that, can you repost? Also, is it possible to have more than just the three main sidebars on that page?

• Lots of misc. things under the hood.

Looks good so far.

One feature I've thought would be helpful is a shortcut to "My Bookmarks," that could appear next to "My Comments" and "My Mail," when I'm browsing. Unless I'm missing something, I think the only way to one's bookmarks, as of now, is through one's profile page.

Keep up the good work. Thanks, John.

[null and void]

What would be way kewl would be a pull down menu on the tag lines so a poster's frequently used tag lines could be switched back and forth without retyping...

[Unknown Freeper]

John, thanks for listening to your fans and for all the work you do. Nice changes.

[socal_parrot]

You mean it's not General Interest (Hobbits 24/7)?

In Chat, no one can hear you scream.

[glock rocks]

Good stuff, John.
I'll use the "All forums" alot.

is there any plans to use css for the thread pages? The white background is hard on my eyes, and the beta test a while back was wonderful change. Thanks.

[Inspectorette]

Who is this guy, General Interest? Is he any good?

As a matter of fact, he is a West Point graduate, a Rhodes scholar, and, by the way, did you know he served in Vietnam.

He was born a poor black boy whose father was a millworker and staunch union member as well.

[11th Earl of Mar]

Just paste in the full title of the thread and hit search. The relevancy check will bring similar titles to the top. But as you know, the same AP story can have a different title on ABC News, CNN or Newsday.

Keyword searches can be much more accurate.

And why not set change the default? A lot of people on FR have mentioned it. Would it cause a technological problem?

[general_re]

As a suggestion, I wonder if it would be possible to have some kind of "find related topics" function associated with keyword searches. That is a function that would bring up a list of keywords most commonly used in conjunction with the one the user is searching for.

What if you were to automatically generate keywords? You could take the article text, run it through an automatic summary generator, filter out really common words from the resulting summary (I, you, he, him, they, your, we, a, an, the, and, or, that, his, my, her, et cetera, et cetera), and then index whatever's left as a set of keywords for the article. Add any user-defined keywords that don't already appear in the automatically generated list, and you ought to wind up with a fairly extensive index of articles. Allow Boolean searches of the keyword-index, and you should get something that's very much like a full-text search, and nearly as powerful, except that you don't actually have to parse the full article during a search to do it - you just have to parse it once, during the summary generation. It wouldn't be a 100% solution (summarizers can require a fair amount of tweaking, and they're not absolutely perfect in any case), but it strikes me as a valid possibility...

[Diddle E. Squat]

Excellent changes! Thank you.

[Solamente]

The Browse All Forums feature is excellent! Thanks!

[Quix]

LOOKS GREAT, AS USUAL, JOHN.

MUCH appreciate all your labors of love. And all this so soon after our recent discussion is very timely.

BTW:
Is your mouse/trackball REALLY comfortable? Or would you like me to try and track down another of the type I use from Taiwan?

[Mo1]

I added color to the sidebar, tell me (politely!) what you think.

It's Purdy

[Mo1]

Thanks for the ping Libby

[steveegg]

You can choose your own color for each topic subscribed in your sidebar. See the subscriptions gadget (All but blue is probably dog ugly. Feel free to suggest new color schemes in standard web hexadecimal (one color for the background of the title the other for the background of the links)

I wouldn't quite say dog-ugly. I like the gray combo, but the red one needs some work. Might I suggest #990000 for the title background and #FF0000 for the links background?