Posted by Bojhan on August 25, 2008 at 9:38pm
12 followers
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| Project: | Drupal.org webmasters |
| Component: | Planet Drupal |
| Category: | task |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | Unassigned |
| Status: | active |
Issue Summary
It has come to my attention that posts on Drupal Planet are becoming longer, however some posts are not being trimmed. Although this leads to great exposure of the full blog post to the audience of Drupal Planet, it decreases the scan ability of the Drupal Planet which in essence is what a page such as Drupal Planet is about ( http://mydrupalblog.lhmdesign.com/build-aggregation-site-drupal-part-2 for example)
Is it possible to have a max ammount on the post length?
Comments
#1
I've complained about this before and the answer I've always gotten is that people using RSS want the whole post. :(
Michelle
#2
FWIW, I'd much rather have the entire post on the planet as well. Less clicking, more reading.
#3
@Michelle: It should be possible for the RSS to be diffrent in its format then D.O planet I would assume.
@bonobo I am not so much concerned about your personal preference then the scanability of the page. You should consider the different audiences of Drupal Planet, a lot of those are expert users who have less benefit from full length articles that don't concern there working area. It might harder concept to grasp that most people don't read the full d.o.p, but conventions tells us they usually scan the page for stuff they will find interesting, and easily seeing the titles helps immensely with this (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html).
#4
@Bojhan --
This is really a small to non-existent issue -- If you're getting the feed in a feedreader, you're likely just looking at the titles anyway.
RE: "It might harder concept to grasp that most people don't read the full d.o.p"
Actually, it's a pretty easy concept to grasp.
RE: "a lot of those are expert users who have less benefit from full length articles that don't concern there working area."
And some of them aren't. The link you include is to an article from October, 1997 -- the web has changed a bit since then, but the advice in that page is a combination of writing advice that holds true across mediums (ie, be concise, one idea per paragraph, invert the lead, etc) and some basic formatting instructions that hold equally well for full text or titles -- much of the advice in that page is just good technical writing advice that was true before the web ever existed.
In the overall scheme of things, this feels like a minor issue, and one that can easily get addressed via the redesign of d.o, and that will almost certainly be addressed with the new core aggregator work for D7.
Changing status to minor; possibly the status should be marked as postponed, but that's more for someone actively involved in the d.o redesign to say.
#5
Planet aggragates the RSS feeds. If people put the break tag in their posts, the RSS gets a teaser as well as Planet. So it's up to the individual poster to do it. Some do, some don't. Possibly something could be done if they use a different aggregator in the redesign but core's is pretty limited.
Michelle
#6
Bonobo: I just considered it a important issue for the scan ability of Drupal.org, as it is one of the main content pages of the community people should be easily engaged. It all depends on the context and looking at the context of D.O Planet I considered it a big issue and one that should be addressed.
I can refer to http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/ (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/content-strategy.html - Hypertext to the rescue) but its mainly just an very specific issue that can only be proven by observing people in a usability test.
On the 97' note, I could refer to some newer information on this but its mostly literature or usability reports so I chose to go for an article that is accessible by everyone.
But, well I see this going into a pointless discussion again of what to me sounds like common sense (from experience) against the common sense of some one else. I dont understand when the concept is so easy to understand, that somehow it doesn't count for d.o planet? (Teasers have a reason to exist, don't they?)
But anyway, I don't want to light fire to a pointless discussion. Lets hope that the scope of the redesign covers the d.o planet as waiting for D7 to fix this issue to me sounds a bit weird.
#7
@bojhan - provide a patch and it will get applied. Otherwise this is idle speculation that is better directed towards the redesign than the webmasters queue.
#8
@Greggels : I can't code.
#9
I think that this should be solvable, and I'm tagging it as a Google Code-In project to see if someone can handle it. If not, I'll assign it to a tech @ Zivtech, as we worked a lot on this page for the redesign, but we have less than zero time to work on it over the next 2 months, so...
Anyway, my suggestion for this is to expose a form to users on that page that says "view trimmed posts" (or perhaps a dropdown that gives the choices of "full posts", "trimmed posts", and "titles only". Then, I suggest we use JavaScript to change the viewer options, and keep the RSS feed as is (since you can control your viewing preferences from your feed reader if you like).
I'd say we should default to the trimmed version, since I agree that would be the best view for a first-time user.
#10
We're not throwing new open source contributors into a community mine field. Removing GCI tags.
If you can come to consensus about what to implement, we can revisit. But please follow instructions for proposing GCI tasks.
#11
This would be one of the things solved with not using core aggregator module. We're stuck with full posts since that's what we want to re-aggregate to RSS. I'm filing an issue to look at overall techincal solutions to improving the Planet, which may be better to spend time on in the long run rather than an one-off solution.
#12
Curious: is there a policy against jQuery plugins? If not, we could possibly use something like the jQuery truncate plugin to solve the task w/out having to wait until we can get a non-aggregator solution implemented (which I suspect may not happen for a long time).
#13
Not that I know of. It would be something that would have to be run by the infrastructure team on what can and cannot be deployed. Webmaster's do not handle that kind of thing.
#14
Thanks, I created #958464: Possible to use jQuery plugin (truncate) on d.o.? to see if it's possible.
#15
Great, if we can get an easy solution in the meantime, that would be awesome, and its not my intent to deter efforts on it.
#16
Looks as though #958464: Possible to use jQuery plugin (truncate) on d.o.? was given the go ahead!
#17
Yup- I have a 'todo' task in my GTD list to add a Google Code-In task to review and recommend one of the truncate plugins, but haven't found the time yet. Maybe tomorrow, although please feel free to do so (or test them), if you have some time.
#18
#1035184-73: Form a community consensus on Planet Drupal guidelines contains a 3 line snippet for drupalorg.module that fixes this issue.
#19
+1 and subscribing.
#20
I did a quick poll to ask how people they prefer the posts (full/trimmed) and how they read the planet (reader/on site).
Results say that roughly 2/3 prefer teasers, and 2/3 use some kind of RSS reader.
The groups are pretty evenly distributed between all combinations, except the combination "I want full posts and I read on drupal.org/planet" which was small. There has so far been almost 70 comments/votes.
A handfull of people suggested two separate feeds to make everyone happy. Greggles posted a link to this issue + provided the excellent idea of having a JavaScript that may truncate the posts when displaying them on d.o/planet.
I know the selection is probably biased, but it is still better than mere guesses.
The post, and the comments, can be found here: http://nodeone.se/blogg/drupal-planet-stream-teasers-or-full-posts