06-22-2018, 08:33 AM
Agreed we need to do something about the timelines.
As a first step, we had discussed plugging all the timeline stuff into a spreadsheet to allow the Editors (and perhaps others down the line) get an overall view of how everything plugs together and possibly start fixing it. One of the nice things with a spreadsheet is that nearly everyone can use them and that we can use the filtering functionality to rapidly drill down to specific dates and items.
In a bored moment, I actually started this a few weeks ago in Google Sheets. I could readily make it a shareable link and make it available to the Editors so we could all work on loading it together, if folks want. I'm also open to making it available to general membership, although I'm also somewhat leery about that for the same reasons we don't set up the site as a true wiki that anyone can edit at will.
After thinking about it and my initial set up of the spreadsheet based timeline, I actually think something like it might be the best option for OA - assuming we could make it work as a webpage somehow (EDIT - a bit of googling turns up that if we create a spreadsheet in Excel, we can store it in OneDrive and export to HTML to embed on our website AND users can sort and filter - perhaps I should recreate this in Excel? Easy enough to do - I haven't loaded much actual content yet - and apparently Google Sheets will let you embed a spreadsheet, but won't let users manipulate it.). We are not just dealing with the linear history of a single place, or topic, or even a single world, but an interstellar civilization with multiple histories going on in multiple locations. Some additional dimensions seem called for.
We would need to set up a OneDrive account, but that is easily done and shared with the Editing team, I would think. I believe that there is a free online version of MS Office that folks who don't have it might use - although that might have more limited functionality to one degree or another. But we are also doing fairly basic stuff, mostly.
Hmm. Thinking about this further - if the embedding functionality works well (and we should play with it a bit before going whole hog), perhaps we should employ it for all of our tables on the site? I'd actually prefer to use Google for this if sorting and filtering can be done on it (although as of Mar of this year it apparently still can't), but it is what it is. I'm assuming it would be over complicating things to use Google for all static tables and Excel for interactive tables - although nearly everything we do with the exception of the timeline seems likely to remain static at this point. Which probably guarantees that 5 people are now going to post other ideas for stuff we could do with interactive tables
Note finally that all of this is assuming that:
a) Trond (our Webmaster) can't point us at something just as functional (or more) that is outside of both Excel and Google.
b) Trond doesn't point out some reason that we either can't - or really shouldn't - try to do this sort of thing.
Anyway - Thoughts?
Todd
As a first step, we had discussed plugging all the timeline stuff into a spreadsheet to allow the Editors (and perhaps others down the line) get an overall view of how everything plugs together and possibly start fixing it. One of the nice things with a spreadsheet is that nearly everyone can use them and that we can use the filtering functionality to rapidly drill down to specific dates and items.
In a bored moment, I actually started this a few weeks ago in Google Sheets. I could readily make it a shareable link and make it available to the Editors so we could all work on loading it together, if folks want. I'm also open to making it available to general membership, although I'm also somewhat leery about that for the same reasons we don't set up the site as a true wiki that anyone can edit at will.
After thinking about it and my initial set up of the spreadsheet based timeline, I actually think something like it might be the best option for OA - assuming we could make it work as a webpage somehow (EDIT - a bit of googling turns up that if we create a spreadsheet in Excel, we can store it in OneDrive and export to HTML to embed on our website AND users can sort and filter - perhaps I should recreate this in Excel? Easy enough to do - I haven't loaded much actual content yet - and apparently Google Sheets will let you embed a spreadsheet, but won't let users manipulate it.). We are not just dealing with the linear history of a single place, or topic, or even a single world, but an interstellar civilization with multiple histories going on in multiple locations. Some additional dimensions seem called for.
We would need to set up a OneDrive account, but that is easily done and shared with the Editing team, I would think. I believe that there is a free online version of MS Office that folks who don't have it might use - although that might have more limited functionality to one degree or another. But we are also doing fairly basic stuff, mostly.
Hmm. Thinking about this further - if the embedding functionality works well (and we should play with it a bit before going whole hog), perhaps we should employ it for all of our tables on the site? I'd actually prefer to use Google for this if sorting and filtering can be done on it (although as of Mar of this year it apparently still can't), but it is what it is. I'm assuming it would be over complicating things to use Google for all static tables and Excel for interactive tables - although nearly everything we do with the exception of the timeline seems likely to remain static at this point. Which probably guarantees that 5 people are now going to post other ideas for stuff we could do with interactive tables
Note finally that all of this is assuming that:
a) Trond (our Webmaster) can't point us at something just as functional (or more) that is outside of both Excel and Google.
b) Trond doesn't point out some reason that we either can't - or really shouldn't - try to do this sort of thing.
Anyway - Thoughts?
Todd