Links in and out of indexes

Really, short, but:

Essentials:

There's no problem. Only thing is that the icons might disappear, but they reappear in fractions of a second. So no big deal.

But:

ie is really slow and annoying with apture. So I couldn't saturate blogs with as many links as I'd like, even though I don't think I'll run into any problems on further testing. If you guys want to be proof positive nothing breaks with a thorough stress test, permission to use firefox, and I'll give it a more comprehensive run sometime this weekend. Yeah, i.e. is just really that painful. Fucking microsoft....

Below is a car crash of observations/suggestions. Enjoy...


Details:

Opera:

The welcome to apture thing should only appear once after you've been there before after clicking cancel on browser incompatibility warning. If this is an opera specific bug, you shouldn't allow apture period when you're in opera.

ie:

we need to figure out if by default, people want the linker panel to stay open. because ie is slow, it's becoming annoying.

some links blink, but appear in the right place, so no biggie.

should allow one to close the linker panel while the text on it for the first apture link shows. In otherwords, I should be able to close the linker panel and move on with adding more links to text, or just some way that if I only want one media item per link, I'm not being slowed down by the persistent linker panel.

linker panel switches place with the media window, and refreshes the entire browser window in ie.

Sometimes on selecting a link it searches and finds things, other times it keeps searching...

Don't know how to add successive end of paragraph links smoothly...

And do I have to preview the resource I'm trying to link to before linking? If I know what's already there, it slows me down to have to click view preview and then link item. Users should have a choice.

Read more section on an external link opens a new window. Is that how it works? If so, it should probably be re-worded to something more specific.

Can't double link (i.e. if there's already a link to a page, placing an apture link over it obliterates the one underneath it. Maybe apture could display the old link in a new window?)

Add link at end of paragraph feature shouldn't change the paragraph shape. It makes me miss links sometimes.

ps: Because archive links are sorted by month and not quantity, we'll have to wait a little over a week to see what happens with linking consistency in that aspect, unless you know a way of hacking it)

hrs: 8:30 - 9:20 (oh, and on Tuesday, it was 11:30 to 3:20 (creating blog articles) )

Installed wordpress

Fairly painless, but like I said to Tristan, not a bad idea to mention that you can only install apture for a wordpress blog you're managing yourself, not the hosted solution wordpress.com offers. That's why I was coming to grief.

So, with no further ado, I'll mention today's servings of bugs...(frowny face)

1) The add link at the end of paragraph deal is shaky in ie. Either it just doesn't give it to me, or it takes ages and I get the bug below...



2) Even when bloggers turned off, I still got an option to add links at the end of a paragraph. To the title of the blog no less! I'm not sure if this is a standard feature, but I think links in the title of the blog might be a little weird.



Oh, and the highlighted sections don't turn off sometimes.

3) Just in general, ie cries when apture is turned on. I get the script error warning at the bottom of the status bar.



Here's are the lines of code in question (in this, it's the fifth line, I believe, oh and used parentheses, because blogger doesn't convert code in the compose view so it actually displays. Hmphff):

(span class="'fn'")Kweku(/span)

(span class="'post-timestamp'")
at
(a class="'timestamp-link'" href="http://www.blogger.com/'http://laichasse.blogspot.com/2008/02/continuation-of-yesterdays-posts.html'" rel="'bookmark'" title="'permanent")(abbr class="'published'" title="'2008-02-12T17:03:00-08:00'")5:03 PM(/abbr)(/a)
(/span)



And some weird cancel icons stay on the page after you closed it.

In general, I was getting the most of the above bugs when apture editing this very blog in ie, so it might have something to do with the quantity of text that apture is dealing with on this page.

4) Final observations:

I think including the script code in the wiki installation instructions could be cool. Either that or linking from the blog to the place where the code is hidden.

Oh, and pretty please can we have a search option in the add links panel? That would be soo cool, though strictly speaking not really necessary. But I wanted to go and search for links that didn't come up in the media options, and would have been cooler if I didnt' have to open a side tab and google the right terms...

And btw, I think in my first meaningful post in the wordpress blog, I'll have to admit that even though I only got two links in, I was having real fun doing so, and wanted to do more before ie tanked. Despite the kinks that come up once in a bit, I think you guys have a stellar interface going here.

hrs: 10:50-12:40 + 7:45-8:15

My (Final) Version of the Apture Wiki

So, I know the wiki is the same thing used on the apture help, so I edited it as such.

General Views:

I think the shorter, the sweeter. Also, if you guys could throw in some pictures into the dashboard help, that would be a lot easier to glance and get an idea of how to get started. I'll draw up some pictures later on what exactly I mean.

I think some hyperlinks from with the blog text would probably be a good think in case users forget terminology, like Apture linker panel, or bookmarklet (still have no idea what that means)...

****

Getting Started

Welcome to Apture, the simple and easy way to enhance web pages with rich multimedia content from around the world!

Click *here* for an introduction to apture (probably have both a video option and a thumbnail snapshot/commentary option)

To learn how to add rich multimedia content to your pages with Apture, see Editing Pages with Apture.


Contents

1 Editing Pages with Apture
1.1 Adding links to words or phrases on the page
1.2 Adding related media items to an existing Apture link
1.3 Adding links at the ends of paragraphs

//

Editing Pages with Apture

To begin editing Apture-enabled pages, you first need to open the Apture Dashboard and turn on the editing mode.

Opening the Dashboard

This panel is probably already open in the top-right corner of your screen, but if you turned off the automatic display option, you can get it back by doing....

• Hint: You can define a shortcut may be defined to open the Apture Dashboard in your user settings. By default, press the 'e' key on your keyboard. Be sure you click the body of the webpage before you press the 'e' key.

Turning on Editing

After the Apture Dashboard is open, you must log in to your Apture account before being able to editing the page.

Once the Apture Dashboard says "Editing On", you're ready to start adding multimedia to the page!

Adding links to words or phrases on the page

• Select any text in the page body. The Apture Linker panel will open.
• Choose the media you want to link to the selected text from the options provided.
• Click "Link this Item", and the text is transformed into a link!

Adding links to words or phrases on the page

To add links to existing words or phrases on the page:

1. Ensure that the Apture Dashboard is open and editing is on.
2. Select any text in the page body. The Apture Linker panel will open, with a selection of
available media types.
3. Choose the media you want to link to the selected text.
4. Click "Link this Item", and the text is transformed into a link!


Adding related media items to an existing Apture link

Apture links can contain links to more than just one type of media (perhaps a link to an example?). To add another link to an existing Apture link:

1. Ensure that the Apture Dashboard is open and editing is on.
2. Open any existing Apture link on the page. An apture media window will appear.
3. Click on the (+) button near the bottom of the window. The Apture Linker panel will open.
4. Choose the media you want to link to the open Apture window.
5. Click "Link this Item", and the new link appears in the related links bar inside the open Apture window!

[edit] Adding links at the ends of paragraphs

You may add "end of paragraph" links to the page should there be something you wish to link that is not directly referenced in the page text. To add an end of paragraph link:

1. Ensure that the Apture Dashboard is open and editing is on.
2. Hover the mouse over any paragraph on the page. A (+) icon should appear at the end of the panel. Click it.
3. The Apture Linker panel will open. Now choose media you want to link.
5. Click "Link this Item", and Apture will ask you to title the end-of-paragraph link.
Tip: Because the new link is not attached to a phrase in the text, Apture recommends using a title such as "See Steve's Keynote" rather than "Steve's Keynote"

Hrs: 7:45 - 9:15

Assorted UI Suggestions, part 4

Sorry for yesterday's break in transmission - but we're back today.

Here are a bunch of random UI suggestions I have. I hope you don't mind if I'm being too nitpicky, but I figure the more the merrier, and you guys can always ignore the not-so-helpful ones when you come across them....

Deletion

I'm not sure Tristan got exactly what I meant by allowing users a delete site option, so I drew a picture of it below:



I figure once one clicks on the delete, uninstallation instructions come up, samples of which I will write up for your later perusal.

Extended Installation Guide

I think adding more directions, some pictures, and breaking everything down into a step-by-step fool-proof process would help. So in the image below you'll come across some of my suggestions.

And then finally,

A couple suggestions about the editing page

The enlarged image below should be self-explanatory, but feel free to leave comments and I'll be happy to go into more depth.


Cheers,
Hassan

Browser Browsing

So, I forgot to read your e-mail properly, and test it exclusively on i.e., but I did come across a few firefox problems.

firefox:

Oh, if there was a way to allow users to share bookmarks across browsers, that wouldn't be bad...

Oh, I clicked close on the dashboard: See screenshot for the crash. Did it twice, same crash...



Finally, in firefox, when I scroll, the dashboard appears over the square of media playing as a white square. i.e. doesn't have this problem.

Internet Explorer:

It runs a little jumpy.

Biggest problem I'm having: my downloading program interacts with apture in a really big way. Every other time I click, I get a little download link icon pulldown, and it tries to download something weird. It's impossible to use apture under this mode, so I'll get rid of the program (no biggie, don't use i.e. in any other case)

Oh, the text in i.e. isn't anti-aliased as well as it is in firefox: see image.



hrs: 8:45 - 11:20

Continuation of yesterday's posts.

I guess I described the crash in the phonecall, so I'll exclude the descriptions of that which were the meat of what I hadn't finished writing up yesterday. So carrying on, I'll wrap up with the rest of the comments I had...

So, just in general, we need more expressive directions. In a later post, hopefully today, I'll write out my own version of the apture 'getting started' window.

One thing is that it may not occur to users that they're only supposed to use apture after having finished writing up their blog. Otherwise, they might start hitting 'e' while they're in edit mode, get nothing, and get confused.

Continuing, some blogging platforms may not have such a distinction between the page you use to edit, and the page that you and others look at when you're done. So I wonder: does apture accept any url from the domain you listed? e.g. is www.example.com/welcome.html covered if the url of your site was listed as www.example.com? If it's excluded, then you'd have to add site upon site if your blog is a list of different pages. If it's included, then a blogging environment that uses php post info to seperate the editing mode from the viewing mode would end up screwing you over.

I mentioned in an email that I saw no ways of deleting sites from the 'my sites' tab. I think that one should probably be in place, and if one is, it should be in an obvious place.

I may have mentioned it in the site above, but I think if you're blogging in a different language, the search for the wiki articles should search wiki in the language you're blogging in first.

Day One

Hey,

Quite a busy time I've had on day 1 trials. Rather than try and give you a play-by-play breakdown of what I've been up to, I'll highlight a bunch of points that I have to make.

Installing apture on a blog:

1) Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no way of installing apture if you don't have access to template html. If so, then that should be made explicit...

2) "Copy the following line to your site's HTML template, right before the closing (/body) (tag altered because blog whined) tag"

There should probably be a thumbnail picture, to sure where that is. When I installed in on the polyglottal at first, I but it after the (/body), you know, a la my usual scripting style. Whether that caused the crashing (described way below), I have no idea, but some more guidance would have helped.

Also, explaing what an HTML template is, and that it is sometimes difficult to reach depending on your blogger software, would be helpful... And I've just tried everything2, and installing apture on it is pretty much impossible. Makes sense, since it's not really a blogging platform, but could still be rather cool if that was explained.

Also, if you have your one privately owned collection of webpages you call your blog, you might like to explain that to users, though for all I know, the same instructions would work, even though the terminology (HTML template) wouldn't exactly carry across if they aren't using templates a la dreamweaver/frontpage.

3) Some UI/layout quibbles (ignore me if I'm being annoying):

Imho, you should move the block of text underneath the icon of the step in progress (see pic for details)

For each text in the installation, I think there should be more text explaining what's going on. e.g. what will happen after you do it? Add some screenshots?

The 'blog' link at the bottom might be replaced with 'apture's blog'... Just and idea.

4) After having installed it:

So I managed to install apture on a blogger blog. First I saw a javasript warning:

"

The current webpage (http://polyglottalstop.blogspot.com/) is not contained within the site for which credentials were requested.

Do you want to edit this site's list of URL prefixes so that this page is included? (Site administrators only)"

In the installation step, you should probably let users be aware that they might get a warning, and remember to tell users that they can click ok.

As soon as I did, the page I was on got re-routed to the apture 'my sites' page with no warning. This was especially confusing, since I couldn't find a configure template page in squarespace, I installed the blogger one first, so apture got confused. Maybe open a new window or frame for them?

Auto-link: "Apture can update existing links to certain media locations so that they appear in an Apture window"

I was bit unsure about what that meant exactly in terms of how my page will now look, until I saw apture in action. Perhaps some introductory thumbnails about what apture's like might clarify.

5) Using apture:

"To begin editing Apture-enabled pages, you first need to open the Apture Dashboard. This panel is probably already open in the top-right corner of your screen, but after you check "Don't show this next time" in the Welcome to Apture window, the panel will no longer open automatically"

How do you get it back again? I found out later, but some instruction on how to get it back again is always reasuring.

Language support for arabic:

I can't select blocks of text in arabic, once the editor is on. When it is, text gets selected, and when you let go of the mouse button, unselected. So I couldn't really link text. All I could do is click the add link at the bottom of the paragraph.

When you drag the mouse across trying to select Arabic text, some of it changes. Long since forgotten how to read Arabic, so I unfortunately couldn't tell you what is changing...

Also, it might be a good idea to search the Arabic wiki, exclusively if you select arabic text.

Most importantly, it crashed. When I selected a link in wiki for the end of the paragraph, the window went white. Everything went to shit from there, essentially.

I'm bushed, I've spent the last 3 or so hours on this, so I'll wrap up now and continue this post later, as there's a lot more to say. But here's a bit to chew on...

First post!

So, I've now installed three out of the six blogs for the trials (Is mentioning the name of the company OK?) I'm clueless about how I'll be able to embed the code into blogs that don't allow you to edit the html, so we'll see.

My roommate still hasn't fixed our internet problems, so I'm in an internet cafe right now with depleting battery reserves, so I end here until I have more to write about.