Quick views?

[bakercp]

Hey all, this is somewhere between a philosophical question and a technical one. I need some thoughts on it.

Basically, the driving principle of olab.io has become that it is a "smart filter" for the forum. Thus, we want to use olab.io to present a very small subset of the "good stuff" for quick perusal. But then when people want to know more, then can click through and land in the middle of a conversation. This has the advantage of situating people in a conversation -- which means possible engagement -- but the posts are not really visually styled for quick viewing (there are a lot of distractions on the forum) and a passerby may have no reason to join the conversation.

So, I'm wondering if we should offer another layer between the site and the forum in the form of a "quick" view. Technically, this is just pulling up the json from a given post and formatting it in a modal (or other) box with -- perhaps -- a "Get involved" link that takes them to the forum post where they can talk about it, get more info etc.

Anyway ... @manzalena @brannondorsey @notandrewkaye do you have thoughts on this?

[andrew-dash]

I definitely think we need a "quick view" that would allow someone to click on the project title or cover image to see an excerpt of the project, project link, maybe one additional image, and the get involved link.

I really like the get involved link being the link to the post on talk.olab.io - this makes much more sense.

[bakercp]

One concern may be speed if we have to ajax query the forum for each quick view -- but I guess if it becomes a serious problem, we could prerender or something. Or, we could have the server side PHP make queries for us -- it would be super fast since it's all on the same machine. I suppose we need a "quick view" design and we need to think about what would need to be pulled from the discourse db.

[manzalena]

so you mean something like this?
by category I mean whatever those colorful label things are. maybe not ALL categories but each window can show stuff filtered by some combo of recency/likes?

then a button in the header that says JOIN or something that links to the instruction post?

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 15, 2014, at 11:44 AM, Christopher Baker [email protected] wrote:

Hey all, this is somewhere between a philosophical question and a technical one. I need some thoughts on it.

Basically, the driving principle of olab.io has become that it is a "smart filter" for the forum. Thus, we want to use olab.io to present a very small subset of the "good stuff" for quick perusal. But then when people want to know more, then can click through and land in the middle of a conversation. This has the advantage of situating people in a conversation -- which means possible engagement -- but the posts are not really visually styled for quick viewing (there are a lot of distractions on the forum) and a passerby may have no reason to join the conversation.

So, I'm wondering if we should offer another layer between the site and the forum in the form of a "quick" view. Technically, this is just pulling up the json from a given post and formatting it in a modal (or other) box with -- perhaps -- a "Get involved" link that takes them to the forum post where they can talk about it, get more info etc.

Anyway ... @manzalena @brannondorsey @notandrewkaye do you have thoughts on this?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[bakercp]

@manzalena what "this" are you referring to? I'm thinking something like when you press spacebar on a mac in the finder -- something modal that doesn't take you to a whole new page. Something that is "quick" to bring up and quick to ignore, etc.

[andrew-dash]

Bootstrap modals work pretty great.

[manzalena]

did you not receive my súper articulate drawing as attachment?

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magdalenawistuba.com

On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Christopher Baker
[email protected] wrote:

@manzalena what "this" are you referring to? I'm thinking something like when you press spacebar on a mac in the finder -- something modal that doesn't take you to a whole new page. Something that is "quick" to bring up and quick to ignore, etc.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#28 (comment)

[bakercp]

@manzalena I don't think that git email replies post attachments ... ?

@notandrewkaye yes, that would be the easiest route for sure. Feel free to experiment! Remember that any post on the talk.olab.io site can be seen as json by just adding .json to the end of it ...

I've also got the talk.olab.io server setup to allow cross-domain requests from olab.io. If you need me to temporarily allow any domain (including local domains), I can do that pretty easily.

[andrew-dash]

Awesome, sounds good Chris!

[brannondorsey]

I think this is a good idea. Maybe it could even be pushed further and we could have designated project pages on the oLab site again (with the data is still pulled dynamically from the forum). Like @bakercp was sort of saying, I think that it is a bit strange to visit the forum when browsing the projects section. I get that it is great because it points them to the forum, but most of the time when people are browsing projects they aren't interested in doing so in a forum-like setting. I fear that whatever quick-view feature we implement might be a bit too abstract. Plus, for most people who visit the site, they will prefer the quick-view, so why make it feel secondary to a somewhat puzzling link to the forum?