CUNY Academic Commons

interesting thoughts. I think you're right to push this down. Let's reconsider when the 1.4 milestone approaches.

Boone, saw you updated this and was wondering if you had done more thinking on it. I don't have any answers for solution number 2. You bring up some good, difficult questions around dealing with multiple authors and UI. If and when you're going to tackle it, let me know and I can focus more attention on it.

Because the situation described, knowing the person but not the blog, can be solved by visiting their profile and clicking sites (you're solution 1) it does beg the question whether people realize this and if there are other UI changes that can be made to help them find that solution. A couple thoughts on that and if anyone else thinks they're worth pursuing we could create separate tickets on them.

• We are inconsistent with the naming. In the main nav we have "Blogs" and then in the profile it is "Sites." This could be confusing and could be made more consistent.

• The profile has a "Blog" entry which allows people to fill out any blog they want. That's a good thing but for someone who doesn't know the interface they may think that is the full listing of the person's blogs and not look further. That problem probably won't get any better with the move to the new profiles.

I've started work on this. Author information is now displayed in the blogs directory: http://cdev.gc.cuny.edu/blogs/ Notes:

- Some blogs have many, many authors. I'm only displaying 5 per blog, with the "and x more" notice when there are more that aren't shown
- When choosing the five users, I select randomly on each pageload
- Authors are displayed in a random order on each pageload
- I've applied some minimal styling to make it look decent. It adds quite a bit of visual bulk to the directory, but I don't know that there's a way around that, given the amount of data we're adding

Please have a look and let me know if you have thoughts. I'll be working next on implementing search.

Interesting work, Boone. To my mind, it's not necessary to see author names in the listing by default, especially since, as you say, it clutters up the page a fair amount. Perhaps having authors listed there could be a preference that one could check or uncheck?

I do think that search is important, and that it would be good to be able to search for a user and then see what blogs that person is on.

Looking forward to hearing other thoughts on this, and thanks for your work.

Oy, and now I'm seeing that showing the member names there was my idea to begin with. I am sorry. What do others think?

Thanks, Boone. Is there a limit of 11 max results of the search?

Also, I wonder whether we need to tell people that they can search by user? Maybe some starting text in the search box (that disappears when clicked) that says "search by author or blog name"? What do you think?

Is there a limit of 11 max results of the search?

No. There is no limit - just 20-per-page pagination. If you're finding incorrect results, please provide details.

Just noticed that when I searched for "Boone" and "Gold," 11 results were returned, which seemed odd. When I search for "Smith," the same thing happens.

When I search for "boone", I get 13 items. When I search for "gold", I get 17 items.

Please try with another browser, in case there are cookie issues. As always, please also hard refresh your browser.

Note that I am doing this as a logged-out user -- maybe that makes a difference?

Ah, yes, this explains why we're getting different numbers.

The 11 is just a coincidence. Try searching for something more generic, like the letter 'a'.

Okay! Weird that "boone," "gold," and "smith" all brought back 11 sites! Wonder if they're the same sites (too tired to check).

At any rate, this looks good. Sorry for the false alarm.

Is "search sites..." new?

I think this is ready to go as is for this release.

I have some ideas on changes/additions, but making the changes or debating them shouldn't hinder this making the release. If we like some of them but they won't make the release then I'd suggest adding new tickets and closing this one.

We need to list the authors even if it does add some bulk, otherwise there is not way to see the authors.

Change 1
The placeholder text reads
"Search sites..."
perhaps it should change to
"Search sites and authors..."

Change 2
If someone is really interested in seeing all of the blogs a person is author on then the best thing to do is to view that person's sites page. While power users know that it is not clear to most users.

One way to get around that is to make the author link go to their sites page instead of their main profile page

Addition 1
This solution is an indirect way to search for blogs by a user. A more direct way would be to add a filter (like how you can filter by college in Members) that would be similar to send invite where you could start typing a name to find someone and then it would filter the search to just blogs that person authored.

I don't think that is needed in this case. If we do go down that route we should probably also filter on other info we have like letting people find blogs attached to a particular group, blogs who have made a post in the last x days or even blogs by people who are your friends.

That sounds like a new ticket to me

Both of the suggested changes sound advisable to me.Looking forward to the separate ticket to discuss the potential addition, which is a nice idea.