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Author Topic: Website Suggestion  (Read 3599 times)

BradSmith

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Website Suggestion
« on: December 07, 2009, 03:00:56 pm »

I offer a suggestion that would help us find things on the site.  

I often think back to reviews/techniques/tutorials/locations/essays on various topics or pieces of equipment.  Yet I find it very hard to find them when all seem to be categorized alphabetically.  It would be helpful if they could also be listed chronologically by publishing or update date.  For example, when I go to the "Equipment Reviews" page, it would be nice to see another link to that same, long list, but in chrono order.

Just a thought.
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PeterAit

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Website Suggestion
« Reply #1 on: December 07, 2009, 03:12:05 pm »

Quote from: skeedracer
I offer a suggestion that would help us find things on the site.  

I often think back to reviews/techniques/tutorials/locations/essays on various topics or pieces of equipment.  Yet I find it very hard to find them when all seem to be categorized alphabetically.  It would be helpful if they could also be listed chronologically by publishing or update date.  For example, when I go to the "Equipment Reviews" page, it would be nice to see another link to that same, long list, but in chrono order.

Just a thought.

Not a bad suggestion. It would also be very helpful to list reviews by categories. I wanted to look at reviews of sensor-cleaning systems, but not knowing the names of any of them I had to give up. I still don't know if LL has reviewed any.
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Griffin Friedman

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Website Suggestion
« Reply #2 on: December 07, 2009, 04:21:30 pm »

Quote from: PeterAit
Not a bad suggestion. It would also be very helpful to list reviews by categories. I wanted to look at reviews of sensor-cleaning systems, but not knowing the names of any of them I had to give up. I still don't know if LL has reviewed any.

Here are two reviews I recently stumbled upon (there may be more):

Visible Dust Review
Arctic Butterfly

I strongly agree with skeedracer's comments. I've never completely understood the way in which reviews are ordered. At the simplest level it's alphabetic, but then within each letter I can't seem to find any logic. I think a lot of these problems could be solved with a little database integration. This would allow articles to be sorted by title, author, date, company, category, etc. This would be relatively easy to code and I doubt it would make updating the site any more difficult. I think it would also eliminate some of the dead links that I find occasionally. I know I'd personally be willing to volunteer my time towards coding a new system, and I'm sure others would as well.

Finally, while we're making suggestions, I think it would be really useful for each article to include the author and date that it was originally published at the top. Some articles have the date at the bottom, but most of them seem to be missing it. That's fine if you're already knowledgeable about a product line (I know a 50d is newer than a 10d so I can skip to the most recent reviews and ignore the older ones) but if you're trying to learn about something new that you're not as familiar with it can be frustrating.

This site is probably my favorite on the internet. The articles, when combined with the video journals, video tutorials, and this forum, make LuLA one of the most informative, useful, and enjoyable websites out there. I think with a few minor changes it could be even more useful.

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wolfnowl

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Website Suggestion
« Reply #3 on: December 08, 2009, 12:37:37 am »

It's a great idea, but since there are thouands of pages of information here and Michael makes it all available to everyone for free, perhaps skeedracer or someone else will volunteer to do all the work?    IOW, who wants to bell the cat?  There is a search button on the main page, which I've found quite useful.

Mike.
« Last Edit: December 08, 2009, 12:39:26 am by wolfnowl »
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jeremyrh

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Website Suggestion
« Reply #4 on: December 08, 2009, 04:42:49 am »

Quote from: wolfnowl
It's a great idea, but since there are thouands of pages of information here and Michael makes it all available to everyone for free, perhaps skeedracer or someone else will volunteer to do all the work?    IOW, who wants to bell the cat?  There is a search button on the main page, which I've found quite useful.

Mike.
I doubt if Michael would make that stuff available to a 3rd party, even if that 3rd party had time on his hands to help. Surely there is no harm in making suggestions? It is just an idea, for such time as Michael may have resources for upgrading the site. We all know and understand the constraints.
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Vautour

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Website Suggestion
« Reply #5 on: December 08, 2009, 06:32:00 am »

I think it's chronologically ordered within each alphabetical category. Other than that I agree, would be nice. Or at least posting the date of publication alongside its title (hmm, shouldn't be too much of a problem if the correspondig pages are composed dynamically). But then again I'm glad the content from all those years ago is still there even if it's somewhat awkward to find occasionally.

I also second that on articles author and date of publishing should be written at the beginning at least in the forthcoming articles.

But on the whole since there's so much content I guess it would involve a major site overhaul presenting the articles in other ways or giving new search posibilities to the users.
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Craig Arnold

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« Reply #6 on: December 13, 2009, 01:24:02 pm »

One thing I would find very useful is an option to search the site but EXCLUDE the forums.

I have often wanted to find an old article I remember reading, but the search ended up returning 20 pages of references to forum posts.
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Gary Brown

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« Reply #7 on: December 13, 2009, 02:15:05 pm »

Quote from: peripatetic
One thing I would find very useful is an option to search the site but EXCLUDE the forums.
Google can do that, if you don't mind doing it manually. For example, on Google search for
[blockquote]g11 site:luminous-landscape.com[/blockquote]
and you'll get everything on the site, but search for
[blockquote]g11 site:luminous-landscape.com -site:luminous-landscape.com/forum/[/blockquote]
and you'll eliminate (most of) the forum pages.
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Wayne Fox

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Website Suggestion
« Reply #8 on: December 13, 2009, 09:24:17 pm »

Quote from: Gary Brown
Google can do that, if you don't mind doing it manually. For example, on Google search for
[blockquote]g11 site:luminous-landscape.com[/blockquote]
and you'll get everything on the site, but search for
[blockquote]g11 site:luminous-landscape.com -site:luminous-landscape.com/forum/[/blockquote]
and you'll eliminate (most of) the forum pages.

thanks for that tip.  I often am trying to find a previous article myself on this and other sites, and this will certainly help.
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