(Dis)Organization?
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So, I was doing a Google search for some JSTL information, I happened across Manning Publication's [url=http://www.manning-sandbox.com/category.jspa?categoryID=3]Author Forum[/url] where readers can interact with authors of their books. Every book is represented in a sub-forum, which seems to be a neat way to do it.
However, they decided, for some reason to sub-divide the individual book forums not by technology nor by programming language nor even by author (with cross-linking for multi-author books.)
No, instead they decided to sub-divide the forums up by year of publication (with seemingly no ordering within that sub-division, although it is likely that the in-division ordering is ordered by month and day-of-month of publication as well. Without research -- which I don't plan on doing -- it is difficult to tell. Left as an exercise for the reader.)
As a bonus, every single book's forum's description (at least for the recent titles) appears to follow the pattern:
"Welcome to the Author Online Forum for ${book-title} by ${author-list}. During the MEAP, we welcome reader comments and errata. The authors will be monitoring this forum and will respond as time permits."
Except, of course, when it doesn't.
Neat.
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@El_Heffe said:
@zelmak said:
Except, of course, when it doesn't.
What is "it" and what isn't it doing?I ass-u-me this refers to:
@zelmak said:
every single book's forum's description (at least for the recent titles) appears to follow the pattern
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@zelmak said:
No, instead they decided to sub-divide the forums up by year of publication (with seemingly no ordering within that sub-division, although it is likely that the in-division ordering is ordered by month and day-of-month of publication as well. Without research -- which I don't plan on doing -- it is difficult to tell. Left as an exercise for the reader.)
That is how publishers categorize things. It's a domain-specific ordering.
@zelmak said:
As a bonus, every single book's forum's description (at least for the recent titles) appears to follow the pattern:
"Welcome to the Author Online Forum for ${book-title} by ${author-list}. During the MEAP, we welcome reader comments and errata. The authors will be monitoring this forum and will respond as time permits."
Except, of course, when it doesn't.
Neat.
Care to provide an example of when it doesn't, and why that is insane?
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@pkmnfrk said:
@zelmak said:
No, instead they decided to sub-divide the forums up by year of publication (with seemingly no ordering within that sub-division, although it is likely that the in-division ordering is ordered by month and day-of-month of publication as well. Without research -- which I don't plan on doing -- it is difficult to tell. Left as an exercise for the reader.)
That is how publishers categorize things. It's a domain-specific ordering.
So a forum to bring AUTHORS and READERS together depends on a PUBLISHER'S preferred method of categorization rather than something more appropriate to the users of said forum? That's precisely my point. Thanks for making it for me. :)
@zelmak said:
As a bonus, every single book's forum's description (at least for the recent titles) appears to follow the pattern:
"Welcome to the Author Online Forum for ${book-title} by ${author-list}. During the MEAP, we welcome reader comments and errata. The authors will be monitoring this forum and will respond as time permits."
Except, of course, when it doesn't.
Neat.
Care to provide an example of when it doesn't, and why that is insane?
Instead of repeating what could be perused at the original link, I'll describe why I think its a bit ... off. You can look at the forum yourself, if you care to.
o They go to the effort to try to customize the description of the given forum, in a sense personalize it. But, this personalization is replicated through a considerable number of the forum descriptions and makes every one of them look lame. They could have excerpted a blurb from the given publication. They could have had the author's personalize it. But they didn't.
o There are quite a few descriptions which are wholly blank. As it appears this forum was automatically imported from a previous incarnation, having a blank description seems even odder. It should have been automatically generated by the same mechanism as the ones in the previous bullet point.
o There are some descriptions where it looks like someone went to the effort. But they wrote end up writing three or four paragraphs to "briefly" describe the underlying forum.
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@Ben L. said:
@zelmak said:
o
o If you're going to write HTML,o
o
- At least use HTML and not the letter o.
o Glass
I didn't. I used the letter 'o'.
