Subject:
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Re: Part Tracker news
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev
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Date:
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Sat, 3 Apr 1999 03:20:58 GMT
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Viewed:
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1247 times
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<discussion about new home for Parts Tracker snipped>
> 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/
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.
> 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.
True, speed is really not a concern. I guess I just don't like how
cumbersome flat-files can be. Of course, on the other hand, databases can
be even more cumbersome, so on reflection a database is probably
overkill. I had brought it up because I thought maybe it might allow
tighter integration with other LUGNET resources.
> 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?
After an author moves the status to the "Completed" state, the assumption
is that it will be voted on and possibly introduced into an official parts
update. I am not personally very familiar with this process, so hopefully
Terry can chime in. Once a part has been released, it is the author's
responsibility to return to the Parts Tracker and update the part's status
to "Released". This automatically deletes the part from the Tracker (and
places it in a backup file).
> 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?
Again, hopefully Terry can chime in here. It is possible that I could
automatically generate a list of parts that have been marked as
"Completed" and create a "first draft" voting page automatically as well.
This could then be hand-tweaked and posted. If this were the case, I
could also have the voting list generator mark the parts as "Being Voted
On" to better keep people informed of a particular part's status. Heck,
the results of the vote could even be used to automatically mark a part as
"Released" or "Needs Work".
Speaking of part status, I was thinking of only displaying a part's
current status on the main list to cut down on the length of the page.
Clicking the current status would bring you to a page with more detailed
information about the part.
> 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.
Sure, this wouldn't be all that hard to implement. Of course, it depends
on folks entering the URL, which has always been the major stumbling
block. What about multiple reference articles for a part? Should someone
be able to post links to all articles concerning a part? (This is where a
flat-file format gets more cumbersome :) Perhaps when you click on a
part's description, that takes you to a page of references, and you can
choose among them. Can I grab the subjects of the articles and use those
as more descriptive links?
How about for every part in the Parts Tracker, you can go to a detailed
"get info" page. This page would contain, among other information, a
complete status history for the part, links to any relevant LUGNET
articles, a picture, and possibly a more detailed description (such as
sets the part comes in). That way the main list of parts can be trimmed
down to just contain basic, current information, but all the details are
available for those who need them.
Here's a question for everyone: Are there too many parts listed on one
page? Should they be divided up among multiple pages somehow? By
number? By "category"? Speaking of which, should "category" be another
bit of information associated with each part on the Parts Tracker (e.g.
wing, door, etc.)? Boy, a database would be nice! :) Then I could easily
generate part listings on the fly based on criteria specified by the
user. Of course, that is completely overkill if people don't think there
is too much information to handle at once as it stands.
> 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.
I'm sure others will have constructive comments about this, but sounds
like a good idea in general to me.
> > 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 " <=> "
> inside of <INPUT TYPE=TEXT ... VALUE="xyz"> values...?
The problem results from my using the part's number and description to
uniquely identify it when someone is choosing among parts to update. The
radio buttons are given a VALUE made up of the number and description,
meaning that any quotes in the description (or number for that matter) end
the VALUE string prematurely. My interim patch for this is simply to
strip out any quotes when the part description is entered. I am currently
re-designing the whole back-end engine, and this should no longer be an
issue at that point. Silly oversight on my part, though.
-Zach
Zach "The Lego Maniac" Benz
http://www.bigfoot.com/~zbenz/lego.html
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Part Tracker news
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| (...) That is what I thought should happen. I view the tracker as being an aide to piece authors, to prevent duplication of work. I rarely ever go check the Tracker page myself. I consider it the authors responsibility to check the page before (...) (26 years ago, 3-Apr-99, to lugnet.cad.dev)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Part Tracker news
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| [Added lugnet.cad.dev to Newsgroups list, with followups set to lugnet.cad.dev] (...) 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 (...) (26 years ago, 3-Apr-99, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.dev)
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