Thu, May 12, 2005
Linkification
Informal focus group testing has revealed that few (if any) readers make use of the "Related" boxes that appear on most onebee pages. However, I continue to believe that they're an important part of the onebee experience. I mean, without "Related," it's just a bunch of random scribbling of limited relevance. With the "Related" box, it's random, irrelevant scribbling within a context!
The links between related items form the backbone of how things are strung together, and this is one of the more complex functions of the onebee back-end – which, you'll recall, I'm currently overhauling. Everything comes together in the item link section: polls, links, columns, their scrappier step-cousins the log entries, and – coming soon – photos and galleries. The item link section has to know everything about everything and it was woefully unintelligent in the previous (read: current) onebee back-end. Thanks to the newly renovated search functionality, it's going to be a lot better in the new version. (A LOT!)
Most importantly, it's now possible to search through everything at once. (This is a double benefit because the same code can be used to speed up the search on the public side of onebee.) This meta-search is huge because even to this day, there's no way to search through the log entries on the back-end. ("That's a right the cops in Amsterdam don't have.") This glaring omission was improved recently by adding the ability to create a "backwards" item link – meaning I could start with an entry I wanted to link to and then search for the item I wanted to link from and create a backwards link. Of course, if I wanted to link an entry to another entry, I had to go into the database and create this link by hand. (Ridiculous!)
Between the improved search and more intelligent layouts for the screens along the way, I've taken a mechanism that previously required up to 12 clicks on 6 pages, a pop-up window, and a page reload down, and streamlined it down to a lean 2- to 3-page process requiring 3 to 6 clicks.
Was:
Navigate to the item to which you want to add a related item (either by search or by clicking through the archives).
Click the "Attach Related Item" link.
In the resulting pop-up window, select what type of item you're attaching, from a menu of Columns, Entries, Links, etc.
Type in a query to search for the item you want out of all items of that type.
Select your item from the search results.
Select what kind of link you want (forwards, backwards, or both).
Link is added, main page reloads to show the item in the Related section.
Is:
Click the "add a link" link, either from the item you want to start with, or from any listing or search result containing that item.
Select from a list of recently created items or
Search through all items (optionally restricting to just a certain type).
Select your item, specify the kind of link you want (forwards, backwards, or both).
Link is added, you're returned to the edit page for your item, which displays item links as well.
This improvement results in large part from the advanced search system, because that makes it easier to get to anything from anything. I've also been able to make sweeping changes in organization because – having used the onebee back-end for a couple of years – I know what gets the most traffic and I can bring that to the foreground, like the way a handful of the most recent columns and entries show up right on the administrative "home" page, and the way the recent items show up in the item link menu (90% of the time, I'm linking to something I just created).
While there's a fair amount of laborious coding involved, this process has also been fun, because I'm learning a lot as I go along. The focus of this redesign has split evenly between the code (streamlining for power and efficiency) and the design (improving the layout of the administrative pages to make them vastly more usable). It's surprising how much "smarter" a layout can be when you put a little extra thought into it. Starting from the ground up, I'm able to prioritize the features that will be the most useful, rather than developing code to fit in between the existing modules like I have for the past couple of years of piecemeal development and patches. In the past, I'd only be able to devote an hour or two at a time, so I had to find the quickest tolerable fix and live with it. Now, I'm working hard to incorporate all the best ideas – never rejecting a feature idea just because it would require more complex code or necessitate changes deeper in the system. It's taking longer than I anticipated, but there's a great deal of gathering momentum, and because the new foundation is rock-solid, everything I build on top of it will go much more quickly.
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