Esteemed listologists: I have finally gotten off

Submitted by jim on Mon, 12/18/2000 - 08:41
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Esteemed listologists: I have finally gotten off my duff and taken the first concrete steps towards rewriting The Listology (I have scripts for migrating the old data to the new DB structure, and I've done some proof-of-concept
programming). Here's the complete list of what I'm planning (unless I'm forgetting something). Last chance to comment/dissuade me! Click below to read more and comment.

UncRoger12/31/2000

Perhaps in the lists, if the line is blank, you could not put the amazon arrow on that line?

jim01/02/2001

Yeah, I'll be reworking all that a bit.

jim01/02/2001

BTW, for now you can use the <BR> tag instead of doing a return to tweak the formatting. This should allow you to put in true blank lines. Know what I mean?

UncRoger12/26/2000

How about putting the recent discussion posts link on the search page, as well as the main page? 8^)

jim01/02/2001

:-) Someday, someday.

jim12/18/2000

Here's the list:

  • Favorites: You will be able to flag any piece of Listology content as a "favorite", and it will be available from a "favorites" section of your profile. Other users will be able to see your favorites.
  • List Spawning: When you find an interesting list, you will be able to click on something like "create my own version", at which point you will be able to make your own copy with your own modifications. For any list, you will be able to see which list it was derived from, and/or which lists is has spawned.
  • Broader Focus: By popular request, the categories "Television" and "Other" will be added. The "other" category will be used so that folks can use built-in Listology mechanisms to flesh out information about themselves, and use Listology as a more general-purpose content management tool rather than strictly a movie/book/music list repository. If I implement this correctly (time will tell), I think this should serve to make Listology more personalized and rich without detracting from the entertainment list focus.
  • Automatic E-mails: You will be able to "watch" lists of your choice, choosing to receive a daily digest of new comments/updates to your "watched" lists. Also, you will have the option of receiving e-mail when a user responds to a thread in which you are a participant.
  • Better Stars: Right now we have stars for which Listologists have been active in the past week, which comments have been added in the past 2 days, and which of your lists have new comments since they were last saved. I'm going to try to expand the star system. Possibilities include all of the above plus:
    1. "merit" stars for volume of output, and or number of generated comments.
    2. tying star appearance to your last usage date rather than an arbitrary week or couple day cutoff.
    3. the ability to clear stars off your lists without resaving the list (which currently puts your list on the "recently updated" list even if you haven't made changes.
  • Public Interfaces: An XML or WDDX interface to Listology data that would make it easy to incorporate your Listology content into your own pages elsewhere.
  • Better Searching: Allow searching by title, list, comments, or all of the above. Allow cross-category searches (hopefully).
  • Beyond Lists: I hope to allow folks to create polls and reviews in addition to lists.
  • Content Feeds: Any user can create a "feed", which is a categorization of their content. Best explained by an example: I could create a "Recently Seen Movies" feed. Then, when I create a list, review, or poll I can choose to associate the item with the feed. So I could go see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (if it ever comes to a local theater) and associate it with my "Recently Seen Movies" feed. So the review exists as a separate entity, and as part of the feed. Other users can browse my "Recently Seen Movies" feed and see the reviews, lists, and polls contained therein. Better, users can subscribe to feeds such that content from their subscribed feeds shows up on their home page (much like editor notes appear on the home page now). The trick will be implementing this in an intuitive fashion.

Also, here are some features that might make it in. These are either low-priority or difficult to implement. They might make it into a future version though (or this version, if all goes well).

  • Versioning: The ability to store (and view) old versions of Listology content (like lists, etc.)
  • Grace Period: Allow users to alter their own posts in some short period after posting.
  • More List Info in Search: The ability to see how many items and/or comments are in a list when searching or browsing.
  • Randomizer: Return a random Listology content item.
UncRoger12/26/2000

Looks good, though I personally think XML is incredibly stupid (dang micro-weenies trying to reinvent the wheel, again. 8^)

Have you thought about adding a "Notes" feature? That is, say you have a list of recently seen movies. You want to add some comments about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but you don't necessarily want them in the general comments for the list, since it will eventually scroll off the list. You could add a note to that particular list item instead. The note could be either text or a link to other Listology content, such as a review.

One other idea that could be implemented now would be a news submission form for people that want to offer a news item, but aren't editors. Just in case you don't get enough email...

jim01/02/2001

Thanks for the thoughts . . . taking these one-by one:

  1. I don't really like XML as the HTML-replacement it was originally touted as. The hoops you have to jump through to format XML are for the acrobatically inclined. However, as a simple data exhange mechanism, I think it's pretty cool. For example, I would LOVE for sites to publish XML versions of lots of their pages so they could be easily grabbed, parsed, and stuck in anybody's page. Like I'd love it if Amazon would publish an XML interface to their book catalog or search interface so I could piggy-back off it (which I can do affordably) rather than build my own ISBN catalog (which I cannot do affordably). Of course, that de-proprietarizes the data, so folks aren't exactly flocking to support the "let other sites cannibalize my hard-earned data" idea. Of course, maybe they could license it . . . Anyway, I love the idea of somebody being able to grab lists/pages/whatever from Listology and sucking them into their own site with a few lines of code.
  2. The hard thing about a notes field is that currently items are entered en masse, rather than forcing the user to put each item in its own text box. I think this is a nicer data entry interface, and give the user maximum flexibility. But it makes it hard to associate things with individual items. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from putting notes inline with list items in the current system (example).
  3. I think the feeds will take care of this. Pretty much everybody will be an editor when I'm done. I'm not sure if Listology editors will perform the same roles (but you'll all continue to have a special place in my heart (and I'll lose my special status with the rest of you, if it goes that way :-) ).