[ug-discuss] Re: Improvements to the user group talks & presentations page ?

[Martin Man]

Hi All

[ sorry for late reply ]

Tim Foster wrote:
> Hey Folks,
> 
> Sara mentioned yesterday that Martin was looking for a nicer, more
> cuddly user-groups talks and presentation page.[1]
> http://opensolaris.org/os/community/os_user_groups/os-presentations/

Actually I didn't know about this page, it looks nice, but it seems that 
it's missing the latest presentations given by CZOSUG group. As it seems 
the process of including a presentation at this page is to ping 
ug-discuss and tim directly to update the page?

> Without a wodge of server-side support, allowing you to
> search/sort/categorise the content nicely, this could be tricky. (and I
> believe getting support from the server folks at the moment is probably
> going to be like pulling teeth - they're a tad busy)
> 
> 
> So, I was thinking about stuff we could do *without* going to the
> server.

yes, going without the server side changes is always safer :)

> Two ideas: (and I'll probably implement both of them, if nobody has any
> objections)
> 
> a) Upgrade the table to the modern era - use a bit of Javascript to
> allow us to sort the table via columns. Eg.
> http://www.frequency-decoder.com/demo/table-sort/

Well, quoting Manu Chao: too much too much AJAX can drive to 
criminality, :-)

> b) Add a column of keywords : this would be a keyword on the main topic
> of the talk (and hence sortable by the above)

could be nice...

> Another idea would be to drop a Google "Search this site" box on the
> page, but I'm not sure if favouring one search engine company over the
> others is a terribly nice thing to do.

it's not a problem as far as google is the only working solution, but I 
don't think it solves our problem.

> Does anyone else have other thoughts - I'll happily be the code monkey
> here, so if there's been anything bugging you about that list or you
> have ideas on how it could be improved, just let me know. There's no
> timescale here, I'll just update it when I get a chance.

I'd really like to see something *topic oriented*, instead of *date 
oriented*.

I mean, who is interested when the talk was given and where, it probably 
makes sense to just distinguiss the topic, and the presenter, so just 
reorganizing the table into several smaller tables that are topic 
oriented (alphabetically sorted) could do it for the moment...

someting like

ZFS:

| Introduction to ZFS by John Doe        | given XX.YY.ZZ at CZOSUG |
| Taking ZFS to limits by Admin Solar    | etc...                   |
| ZFS Internals by Kernie Hackie         | etc...                   |

Dtrace:

| Introduction to Dtrace by John Doe     | given XX.YY.ZZ at CZOSUG |
| Dtrace Internals by Kernie Hackie      | etc...                   |


> 	cheers,
> 			tim


thanx,
Martin