Building The Next Layer

Bibliographies and Download Area

Lindsay — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:36:08 +0100

Hello

Wondered what peoples views were on the bibliography system and how they would perhaps like it to develop?

I wondered if bibliographies should be linked directly to individual research journals (to keep the journal coherent) and also to a centralised point so that users would not have to go into research journals just to look for references. Should the bibliography section be searchable by topic or research interests? Someone mentioned a search function already, I presumed this was for the entire site, but perhaps a reference search could be possible which was separate from a general search? Also how would the bibliographies be displayed in individual journal pages?

Another section could perhaps be a download area for papers and notes? There are already a few downloadable papers on this site, would it make sense to have a specific area for this, linked to bibliography? This again would save manually searching through individual journals. I have not writen many papers but I do have some notes that I would like to share...these are basically editied books (!) which people might find handy.

Categories and Taxonomy

Lindsay — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:55:28 +0200

Hello

I've added a a couple of categories to the content terms in Categories and also added a few descriptions and synonyms. Wondered if anyone would like to add to this or edit any of the terms and descriptions that I've put in?

HI all

christof — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 22:21:35 +0200

thank you armin for establishing this plattform and inviting me to participate here at "the next layer". First of all some words about myself ...

I'm coming from Salzburg and have writen my diploma thesis about free networks as pratice of social selforganization. Therefore I've done some interviews with net activists from the Djurslands.net in Denmark, the OLSR-Experiment (Freifunk) in Berlin, Julian Priest and last but not least Armin. I'm also member of the net culture platform subnet (http://www.subnet.at), located in Salzburg.

For getting started, I will post my thesis (in german only, sorry), an executive summary (will follow also in english) and some texts I have written during my work at subnet within the next days here at thenextlayer.org.

I'm very much looking forward reading from you!

cheers,
Christof

blogger API and del.icio.us rss feed block

acracia — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:16:27 +0200

Hello world:
The already configured module called "blogger api" has a kind of hard to get feature really useful:

The little image at the right of the rss blocks now allows you to quickly enter a review on your "research journal".

This way you can quickly pick the items from your (or other's!) rss feeds and create a review of them.

On the same side of the web, I've created a block with the category delicious of the rss feeds. I've added armin's and my own delicious rss feeds there. I haven't added more because they weren't public on the user profiles but is pretty easy to do so. If you add other feeds under the same category, then the new links will appear under the "mixed delicious" category that you can see at the right border. If you are logged in, that block will also have the little , so it will be easy to pick up your delicious items to create an entry on your research journal...

developmental

admin — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:36:46 +0200

To be done (updated)

News, Bugs and Bugettes

minor bugettes

* the modules footnotes and biblio have been installed; the according tags are 'fn' and 'bib' but so far ~~I have not got the tags working yet.~~ The footnotes are working now, now you can use the fn tag to create numbered footnotes at the bottom of an article. You need to switch the 'Input format' to 'full html' to do so. The 'bib' tag probabloy also works, the biblio module as such has always been working, so you can enter bibliographic references into the text with the bib tag, which also go into a shared database. This rocks!

* The book module has been tried for the first time, it works, check it out
(left menu bar 'books' or create content books).

* the module blog api has been enabled. this makes it possible to use certain blogging tools to create research journal entries. I have not tried it, maybe acracia can tell us how it works.

* The links administration database works but this menu point weblinks is strange. It lists many catgeroies from taxonomy but does not shjow links which have been entered in those postings which belong to the categories. It shows only one link which I have entered under 'create content' --> weblinks. It would be nice to have under weblinks all the links on the site which anybody enters under the according categories.

Other news

Contributors have now rights for node management and input management; basically this means when adding a new research journal entry or other content type you have 2 new fields, one for 'input format' and one for 'publishing options'. the latter lets you decide if you want your contribution to be seen on the front page or not, published or not; 'input format' is very important; standard is 'limited html', but if you switch to 'full html' you can use basically all html tags; what is quite useful is for instance the img tag, you can now reference images how you like, they don't need to be physically on this site; the option 'php' is for experts only.

The diff module has now been installed. This will make visible the difference between versions of a document and should become very valuable when different people edit the same text.

A User Profile that makes sense

As I tried to formulate, conceptually, what i thought this site should become is to have on one hand a range of content streams -- in the manner of a multimedia online magazine -- and on the other hand an enhanced user profile which allows 'social software' type things to happen but in a really nice way which fits the needs of a research community.

I have created a few custom fields so far such as

Location
Messaging
Personal Information
Tagging
my newsletters"

but those are just a quickshot into the direction I would like things to see develop. Therefore I would like to collectively ask the question:

What would be useful to have in an enhanced and expanded / expandable user profile?

For instance I thought it might be useful to have on the profile page the delicius links, not just as one link but expanded. Also, quite an obvious ting to have would be a field for a cv and/or a short bio.

Another more important thing might be a field in the way of how we now have "what do you think about FLOSS" to put something about people's research interests so that people with matching interests could find together (I might do that in a quick and dirty way).

Has anybody more ideas in that direction?

The profile is a major issue to be tackled now. How to
really furnish that user profileso that it becomes a home, a hub, a launchpad, a point of reference where you manifest yourself, your work, your interests on your own terms as well as shared terms?

Categories, Taxonomy, Creating a Language

It has been mentioned by different people that it would be nice to 'create our own dictionary' (Lindsay) or to have a "shared taxonomy" (acracia). For me those 2 things are roughly the same. How can you invent a new language in drupal? through the taxonomx/category module. Yet this needs ot be done with sense and reason. As I understand it there are hierarchical categries where it is required to choose from drop down menues which is good for creating 'hard' content cateegories which makes it easy to display content according to categories. I have also added a field 'Topic' which allows free tagging. I have no idea what happens with those categories, in which way they could be made useful or how the two types could be made work together --> the rigid almost semantic web style hierarchic categories and fluid tagging without relationships of any logical kind.

Older Entries, some still valid

- as installed drupal offers only one author for a blog or any other entry. I tried to fix this by adding a new author field to some of the content types. but it still needs themeing using node.tpl.php to make this the main and only author field; the community on the support mailinglist was very helpful and gentle;

- headings and table of content: automatic generation of table of content from documents like in twiki

footnotes: TNL should have classical footnotes (more like comments, a second text stream, not like endnotes or bibliographic references); there should be an easy way to add foot notes when entering text; footnotes should also be searchable; in 'books' footnotes could be on third column on the right (right sidebar)

references: bibliographic references should be entered using one specific format, for instance Harvard referencing; each reference entered using the right format should then go into a shared references database; this reference data base should / could become an interesting share knowledge body of its own, linked to categories and also maybe names of researchers who entered them (you could then ask the researcher for more info on this or that book) the references should be part of a text AND part of a shared emergeing references database.

- index: if texts have indexes you should be able to browse contributions according to what appears in the index, like there would be a meta index of all indexes within which for example there is the name Adam Smith; you can then see all the texts that have something about Adam Smith

- image captions: there should be a way of entering text to appear as the caption of an image; within this text there could be different data fields relating to the image, so that thjis is actually like a more reader froiendly version of the image data base.

Navigation

a number of issues relating to the overall navigation and structural design of the site

- related texts: there should be a way of telling the system if there are other texts in the system you know of which relate to this text -- this should be in the right navigation bar (assuming that we keep the current design) it should be an easy way of doing this like just telling node numbers; (I have tried to solve this through adding the field 'node_reference', this goes into the right direction but is not perfect yet)

- more flexibility with content types which use sidebars differently
- generally more context depending design

Design

The site cries for more design work being done. In particular a new header section would be nice. Anyone bung mea logo please?

- most design of the overall site can be done with CSS and I start getting it how that works
- The top area offers itself foremost to be designed; rather than just a logo it needs to be the whole top area which gets a styleover (and of course it should still match with the rest)
- it needs a logo too, but maybe something visual which can be on the right hand side and same width as right sidebar width 48 height 55 pixels

User-Designed Software

lisa — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 14:04:17 +0200

I've been interested in the idea of user-designed software for some time, and what I've seen recently of drupal sharpens the question a bit, and maybe brings it into reality.

Actually, I consider myself to be a user who, though necessity and personal interest, can write just enough code to satisfy my personal requirements for tools.

I finally learned to write code just before my 40th year. I enjoy the process of designing and writing programs a lot. I enjoy breaking down the tasks and the concentration involved in coding. But most of all its just great to decide I want or need something and then to write it myself.

I wrote a web application a few years ago, for my MSc project, that was to help people organise workshops and events. Why? Because I had many years of experience of the task, I could break it down into little pieces, I felt I knew all of its necessities and that building them into an application would be a way to distribute my experience to others.

So: what i am interested in is this possibility of being able to create an application without writing code. Users are experts in their own areas, and it seems to me that the advanced use of a system like drupal does allow people to bring their experiences to building an online system.

Armin, for instance, has many years of writing and publishing; he understands the issues and the processes, and the gaps and shortcomings of the various platforms he has already worked on. If I understand right, The Next Layer is his first chance to really shape a platform to be what he wants.

So: never mind user-contributed content, what about user-designed platforms?

For sure the learning curve with advanced modules like "cck" and "views" is big, and you have to sort of love the detailed mindset and absorbing technical information but nevertheless I think its exciting stuff. Or will it just lead to even more big messes out there ;)

Any comments?

Magazine or Community

admin — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 14:28:29 +0200

I would like to propose to think about the following: wouldn't it be interesting to develop this project along the lines of building a research community?

In this regard, two things come together, the need of creating high quality content with a level of editorial involvement, and the maybe sometimes contrasting need of being 'open' as a group of people who use this site all self-motivated and to their own ends.

Can both goals be joined together in an interesting way? First very tentative ideas regard the use of the user profile for collaborative filtering. For instance, we could decide to share our bibliographic references, or maybe import our delicius bookmarks and link them to the user profile.

What do you think?