Here We Go Again

[COBOLdinosaur]

It's not the final solution, to be sure, but I think it's a step forward.

I agree.  It looks a lot better than what we have, and it has more functionality.  Some of the pieces that you are using will integrate nicely into what I am working on.  

The final ERT 2 will have page build from components like Lego.  The whole thing will hang togethr through the database.

It just requires 3 primary entities people, pages, rules.

Peope and page relate through rules and everythign that happens during processing is the result of the direct or side effects of rule execution.

user A wants page 123, so the suer profile returns rules 17, 38 141... and the pages return rule 87 65 and 900.  All rules have a priority property that is used to order execution of the rules.

Users czn change the rules they own, editors and admins can chagne priveilged rules and developers can change the implicit rules thet are included in all reuests.  

Security rules can only be chaned by the security admin.

The architecture allows caching of frequently executed rules.

The rules themselves are dead simple.  The name of the object the get executed  a parametr list definition that specifies the object constructor and any cmbination of parametr values, pointers to parameter values, or rules that return a parameter valueth the object invocationwith the appropriate parameters cause execution of the necessary methods.

If that sounds object oriented; it can be.  However the first one I did (many years ago was in COBOL) and while we commonly implement with Java to day; we still also do COBOL rule processors and you can build rule sets using XML and run from property files, though that is not efficient if there are  large number of rules.

The thing that makes it work is everything becomes a rule.  A CSS delaration is a rule.  The attributes for HTML tags are rules. the validation method for a form is a rule. The form definition itself is a rule and in most case teh validation rule will be a parameter of the form rule.  


Any way let's move ahead with the 1.5 upgrade and see if we can generate a little activity.  I am getting tired of coming to thre forum and being the only on e here a lot of the time.

16,000 users have already passed through ERT in July, we need to get a few of them to stop here.  I know how to get them to content, but so far I have not figured out how to promote the forum.

We need a place to have dicussion threads tied to content ad th enew 1.5 look and feel might be the place to start intergrating the various pieces we need to put together.

[nicholassolutions]

I'm glad to see people like it...by the way, I noticed I said "Integrated version of mambowiki"...I meant "Mediawiki" although the mod is called "mambowiki"....

Roy, your comments make good sense. It will take a while, but if we go about it like that, it can be done in logical stages. If we have a semi-decent work environment in the interim, we will not be as rushed, and hopefully some of the new toys will get people better prepared for ERT 2

Esopo, regarding the SEFs....that is something of a problem. I had originally had it set up for SEFs, but after one of my mods, there were problems. I think the URL rewriting rules specified in the htaccess had not envisioned quite the setup I'm using there. To be honest, I cannot remember which mod it was -- this took a LOT of hacking and experimenting before it worked acceptably...reviewing the SSH logs might give a clue, because we can see where the htaccess got turned off....if I was on really good behavior, I may have even commented it from the command line, but I don't think so...I'm all for trying to sort it out, but it may be tough....

[COBOLdinosaur]

It will take a while, but if we go about it like that, it can be done in logical stages.

I'm not in a hurry to conquer the Internet.  Things are on track with the exception of the mistake I made with the selection of the forum software.  I have always been comfortable with this kind of format, but if I had taken an extra 2 months to bring the site up originally, I probably would have gone with something more modern than PHPBB.  

It is a two year thing to get this done.  We are not even through the first year yet.  Back in October I said we would go live in January (which we did) and then build a final version based on what we learned along the way.  

In terms of success of delivery of educational content we are ahead of the curve.  We should be up to 20,000 pages a month and we are at 30,000.  I am aiming to stablize and plateau around 50,000 a month.  That is high enough to give us the diversity we need to lock into a niche that we can grow out from.

We have links on pages that I can't even read in Polish, Chinese, Turkish, and a dozen other languages.  We have been added to university libraries that require logins to access that I know are there from referals but I can't go see the pages with the links.  We now have links in thousands of bookmarks on sites like del.icio.us, furl and blinklist.  We have been integrated into an unknown number of blogs, and become part of the database on content intensive sites like Digg.

We even spiked into the top 10,000 sites on Alexa.  That is the result of the Digg community adopting the Alexa extension for Firefox.  The standard Alexa toolbar is IE only.  That is bad for us because 60%+ of our visitors are using FF.  Digg had the same problem.  Two months ago there was a concentrated effort to get Digg members who are FF users to add the Alexa extension for FF.  The result was Digg moved up a couple of hundred spots to 120 passing Slashdot in 180.

The success of those kind of sites has pushed AOL to revamp the Netscape portal as a community news site similar to slashdot and Digg.  Yahoo has a beta version of the Yahoo community infomation sharing portal; and sites like Dzone are coming online as some formerly forum centered site try to cash in on the success format.  The wide adoption and copycatting of the Digg and slashdot format is both good and bad.  Good because it gives us more outlets, to draw attention to ourselves; bad because only a few will be successful with it and the competition to get to the front page of the survivors will get very intense and crowded.  

Anyway as long as we keep moving ahead we will eventually get somewhere.  We just have to avoid wandering around in circles the way we have done a couple of times.  All we have to do is keep up our quality level of the content.  The world is becoming aware of us, and so far they seem to like what they find; considering that we are seeing a steady increase in the percentage of returning visitors browsing through content.  Those are the folks we need to tap into to find out what else they want so we can give it to them on the discussion side.  

BTW if you want to have a chuckle take a look at the mess the EE entry on wikipedia is.  I am insisting that if the entry stays it has to be accurate and balanced.  So far I have gotten most of the promotional stuff (including the price list) remove now I am proposing that a history of the site has to include the crap that went on; and that it cannot be called a "free" site if it charges a subscription fee.  I proposed to Eric that we collaborate on writing the history, but he has not responded to it;  doubt he will because he knows I can document a lot of the crap.

In the discussion page I even posted a link to the Greasemonkey script that filters EE out of the search results. Just a little fun to help remind me that we don't want to get our heads screwed around and forget that we need to keep thinking in terms of building a Community, not just a site.

[Esopo]

I have to read this full thread and reply to the comments; but, regarding the SE Friendly URLs,

I can imagine what a PITA that must be. It's hard enough to get the right rules working in a medium-size site, I suppose getting all these different packages to work well together is going to be a private taste of hell.

I did something that works well in my CMS, if you can recall from a few months ago when I was stuck with the rewriting, I ended up directing every request to a PHP page that dealt with parsing the URL and pointing to whatever was appropriate. This method proved easier and nicer than setting up rules in the server config.

I do vote for fixing the URLs sooner than later, so that when people link to our content in forums and blogs (etc), those links remain forever as coherent permanent links.

If you'd like me to, I could take a stab at it, although I can't promise success.

[nicholassolutions]

If you'd like me to, I could take a stab at it, although I can't promise success.

I've actually turned on SEF URLs in the CMS, and it seems to be working OK -- maybe the problem mysteriously went away, or I just havent found that one thing that caused me to shut it off before. If it pops up again and you're in the mood to battle with it, it's all yours ;-)

[Esopo]

I spotted a couple of problems:

To come to this thread, this was the link on the front page ("last post"):
http://www.expertsrt.net/main/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,2/topic,872.msg8393#new

But it returns a 404. Same thing with the "Last post" arrow in the Soapbox area.

Also, the email ping gave me this link:
http://www.expertsrt.net/main/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=2&topic=872.new;topicseen#new


Posted on: July 16, 2006, 01:30:10 PMBTW,
Do you mind if I toy around with the CSS files? I'd like to smoothen some stuff up.

[nicholassolutions]

OK, I noticed those too, and that was the problem from before. I have a little more patience now than I did then, and I think I can fix it.

As for the CSS, yes, please do, and in the future you don't need to ask ;-)

[Esopo]

As for the CSS, yes, please do, and in the future you don't need to ask ;-)

:D
I thought I'd ask first in case anybody was on the task already.

[nicholassolutions]

OK, I installed a component designed for SEO. It helps some, but ins't all it's cracked up to be. For the forum at least, I've gotten it to behave, combined with a little bit of hacking in the htaccess. The forum URL is now http://www.expertsrt.net/main/forum/ and all the links, as far as I can tell, work. The redirect after a reply also seems OK. The wiki and journal also have nice base URLs now, although the wiki's internal links are not quite as SEF as I'd hope...for now I'm out of patience again, so I'm going to stop before I break something ;-)