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Subject: 
Re: Part Tracker news
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.dev
Followup-To: 
lugnet.cad.dev
Date: 
Sat, 3 Apr 1999 02:18:14 GMT
Viewed: 
1099 times
  
[Added lugnet.cad.dev to Newsgroups list, with followups set to
lugnet.cad.dev]


In lugnet.cad, zbenz_NO_SPAM@hmc.edu (Zachary Benz) writes:

If you are looking for a stable home for Parts Tracker (in the interim
or permanently), it could easily put in a subcategory of

  http://www.lugnet.com/cad/ldraw/parts/

as a new category

  http://www.lugnet.com/cad/ldraw/parts/tracker/

--Todd

Hi Todd,

I was hoping you'd chime in. :)  LUGnet does seem like a good place to put
it.  I've been thinking about its future some more, and I really want to
spend some time personally upgrading it and maintaing it in the future, so
I guess I'd ultimately like to retain control of it, time-permitting.
Whether or not I can do this, though, remains to be seen.  Would it be
possible for me to access and update its code if it were to be hosted from
LUGnet?  This would probably be the ideal solution for me.

I can offer a temporary or permanent safe-haven if you need to move anything
quickly, and I can take and apply any periodic updates you'd have; I can't
offer access directly via a shell.  If you want to keep the code as mobile/
portable as possible, you'll probably want to keep the text-based flat-file-
DB structure that you currently have, because it will work unchanged on
virtually any machine you might want to put it on -- obviating the need for
external RDB or OODB resources.  Also, unless you have tens of thousands of
records in your DB and the DB is seeing continuous round-the-clock access by
multiple users, flat-file DB's are more than fast enough on modern machines,
even in CGI context.

Some related questions:

How can LUGNET help to bridge the gap between the parts tracker and voting?
(Or how can it generally help make life easier with respect to these?)
I see 4 status tags at the partlist.shtml page:

   - Planning to Work On
   - In Progress
   - Completed
   - Abandoned

After a part receives "Completed" status, does it next move to "Being Voted
Upon" status and finally to "Part of the Official LDraw Update" status?

How does Terry generate the list each month of new parts to vote on?  Does
he look at parts labeled "Completed" and mentally weed out those which have
already been included in previous updates?  Or do parts disappear from the
parts tracker once they've graduated on to "official" status?

I noticed that only 26 of the 159 parts listed at

   http://www3.hmc.edu/~zbenz/parttracker/partlist.shtml

currently have links to more information about the parts -- in some cases
.dat files, in other cases .gif files or website-DB links.  Most of the
links work, but 1 was a dead-end page on geocities, another went to an empty
HTTP directory, and 2 went to a non-responding web server.

Zach, if there were a new group lugnet.cad.dat.parts, would you find it
useful to link from your partlist.shtml page to parts posted in the group?
You could link to the text of the news article, e.g.

   http://www.lugnet.com/news/display.cgi?lugnet.cad.dat:190

which would contain any commentary or subsequent corrections posted as
follow-ups, or you could link to the MIME/DAT content, e.g.

   http://www.lugnet.com/news/ldraw.cgi?lugnet.cad.dat:190

or both.  You could ask for the URL of a news article (or just its ordinal
number and fill in the rest automatically) at any step past "Planning to
Work On."  For example, Bram could enter simply '190' and you could supply
the rest of the URLs on-the-fly as you display the page.

Providing cross-communications links such as these would be another way for
you to further assist people via your resource.

Another potentially useful application of lugnet.cad.dat.parts might be
providing links to the same sorts of URLs directly from the voting pages.
I seem to remember quite a few discussions during the last voting period.
In some cases these discussions referenced parts by URL, but in most cases
just by name.  If discussions were encouraged as follow-up articles to
actual .DAT content representing parts, and these .DAT content were easily
findable via convenient links from the parts tracker and voting pages, that
could certainly add value to the overall parts-creation process.


To everyone:
On a completely unrelated note, as I was perusing old e-mail regarding the
Parts Tracker, I noted that a few people were having trouble updating
their parts.  I discovered that the problem results from my code not
properly dealing with part descriptions that have quotes in them.  I will
have to look in to this.  In the mean time, I have simply removed all
quotes from part descriptions.

Hmm, sounds like you're either using quotation marks around strings in your
flat-file DB, or you're not handling HTML-entity conversion of " <=> &quot;
inside of <INPUT TYPE=TEXT ... VALUE="xyz"> values...?

--Todd



Message has 3 Replies:
  Re: Part Tracker news
 
On Sat, 3 Apr 1999 02:18:14 GMT, lehman@javanet.com (Todd Lehman) wrote: [Big snip] The Parts Tracker is completely separate from the actual flow of parts from author, to Terry, to voting, to release. It would be very helpful, at least to one (...) (25 years ago, 3-Apr-99, to lugnet.cad.dev)
  Re: Part Tracker news
 
<discussion about new home for Parts Tracker snipped> (...) Makes sense. Let's say it will be a temporary move for now, although that could quickly turn into permanent if I decide I can't afford to re-establish a personal web site. (...) True, speed (...) (25 years ago, 3-Apr-99, to lugnet.cad.dev)
  Re: Part Tracker news
 
I have made a mock-up of what the revised version of the LDraw Parts Tracker might look like. Please visit: (URL) love to hear people's thoughts on the design and layout! Question: I have placed "actions" buttons in the right hand column: a "get (...) (25 years ago, 3-Apr-99, to lugnet.cad.dev)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Part Tracker news
 
<discussion of future of Parts Tracker snipped> (...) Hi Todd, I was hoping you'd chime in. :) LUGnet does seem like a good place to put it. I've been thinking about its future some more, and I really want to spend some time personally upgrading it (...) (25 years ago, 31-Mar-99, to lugnet.cad)

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