ThoughtStorms: ThoughtStorms/RecentChangesClues

I'm gonna start marking up RecentChanges by adding short two character clues as to the change.

-> : a link to a good external article or find elsewhere
-X : an interesting bisociation I've made
==: something which is worth looking at
rf : refactor
( ) : new local indexes, lists of other pages about a particular topic
:-) (-: : conversation with an individual, an answer to a question or a suggestion (hmmm. Is this clue notation aspiring towards TypedThreadedDiscussion?)

Pages without comments are usually just house-keeping, adding links to unsurprising stories etc.

It would be very helpful for me if you marked the house-keeping and despam changes with the 'minor edit' checkbox. -- ZbigniewLukasiak

: I've started to do this. The only issue is with despams. If spammers don't check minor edit, you see an anonymous edit from someone else, but you don't see my minored out despam message. That makes you think there's something of value.

-- PhilJones

HeatherJames asks if we're supposed to use these symbols. The answer is, if you like. This is an experiment, because people were claiming that I wasn't commenting all my updates. That was because I was lazy, and many updates would just be "added a new link" etc. So I decided to try this simple code.

More and more I'm realizing there's something similar here to my TypedThreadedDiscussion stuff. It's about RidiculouslyEasyClassification?. Something sorts your stuff into very broad bins for very little work.

Anyway, how does everyone find it? From a reader's perspective, is it useful? Are you tempted to use it when you add stuff? Feel free to add more symbols if you need them. etc.

-- PhilJones

I think it's a great idea, some more thoughts on it:

From a usability point of view- it's slightly obscure since this information is not available on the RC page. Maybe hacking UseMod to show the legend on the RC page would be good.
It reminds me of mood icons you see in LiveJournal pages.
To make it VERY fancy- it could be another data field. From an end user's POV, they'd have a way to select the symbol, maybe with a radio button or some-such (under summary, etc).

Have you messed around in UseMod much? (I have only installed and used it once meself, never messed around with it.) You know, OddMuse prolly has a module that does this. Just guessing.

(btw, the more i look around here, the more i want my own ThoughtStorm)

-- HeatherJames

Actually, I don't need to hack UseMod. I can just edit the RecentChanges page. I'm starting to think that it could be interesting to capture this meta-data more formally. Hence the TTD connection.

I haven't messed around with UseMod much. I admire it very much as an application but the innards are a bit convoluted. If I were going to try it, I'd probably start with OddMuse which is tidier (and yes, allows you to write extension modules.) More likely, as a programmer, I'd far rather do something in PythonLanguage. I fear my PerlLanguage hacking days are behind me.

Of course you want your own ThoughtStorm, that's why there's SdiDesk ;-)

-- PhilJones

Okey, just two very minor points

in order to use it, i'd need to be able to see the code options on the text input page as well...
if you left-justify the table it'll be easier to scan the list.

~ HeatherJames

Heather, I've taken the key off the RecentChanges page because it was taking up a lot of real-estate and I figured most regulars would understand the symbols by now. If you think this is a bad idea, tell me, and I may reconsider.

-- PhilJones

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ThoughtStorms/RecentChangesClues