[Meta] Story Hour Index (development)

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Another question is how to do the index itself - I mean, part of me envisions links with the name of the story hour and its author that is clicked to pop-up the full entry or something like that - instead of a whole list of entries. . .

I like that idea, though I'm not exactly sure how this could be done. Are we wanting to use the message boards as is, or an outside site? I'm not sure asking poor Michael to do more coding is a good idea, as he's swamped as it is.

I could see it done with the boards, simply having the first post as the actual index and listed in some kind of order(not sure how though, will get to that in a second), and linking to all of the replies that contain the actual information.

However, the problem with this is that you're really just picking the SH based on name(or author) alone, which is essentially what we have now. I don't think the idea of a pop up or link would work, as it kind of defeats the purpose and makes the whole thing kind of useless.

Of course, this really brings up the quest of HOW to organize things? Alphabetical by author and just list each of their SHs together? Or by genre? Or something that is escaping me as its 11:30 and I'm getting tired?

 

[el-remmen]

Yeah, I am thinking perhaps a thread is the best way to do it. . . Just trying to figure it out so that I don't end up doing all the work of maintaining it

I figure it could be set up simply with a few posts at the top listing them with links to the posts below that actually hold the entry information in the format we have been talking about.

So, for example, we'd have a post listing story hours A thru G, and another of H thru N, etc. . .

The advantage of this would be we would not have to post the entries in any kind of alphabetical order - we can post them as we get them and just have the contents at the top of the thread be in order with anchor links below. . .

Of course, we may want to try to put them in order anyway for the sake of browsing.

 

[el-remmen]

As for order:

Alphabetically by story hour name, if the story hour is just named after the author (as in "Sagiro's Story Hour") then by the author name - It makes sense to list it by the actual name of the story hour as listed in the main thread.

However, we could have mutiple listing in the index in the first post so Sagiro's could be listed, for example as both "Sagiro's Story Hour" and "Abernathy's Company". . .

 

[spyscribe]

You know, since I suspect that this plan has stalled out due to technical difficulties, one thing that would be very simple to do, but still useful to browsing readers, is to encourage authors to put something along the lines of the index entry in the first post of their thread.

That way a reader who sees an intriguing title can find out story hour facts-at-a-glance, and the forum acts like its own index, no coding necessary. Participation is completely voluntary, and all authors are in charge of maintaining their own information.

No muss no fuss.

Thoughts?