One Week With SlashCode

So we’ve been “Beta Testing� the newest slashcode
for a week now, here’s what I’ve learned…. I’d love some feedback on the new
site, your thoughts and ideas are always appreciated.

I think I may have moved a little too fast. The new site has more bugs
(listed below) than I thought it did while we were in “alpha mode,� and
it’s making my life quite difficult. I still don’t see any
show-stoppers, so we need not switch back, but it’s annoying to chase
things around like this. My biggest fear is we’ll lose some authors.

The SlashCode is awesome. It’s powerful, flexible, extensible and
unbelievably hard to understand at this point. Everything I want to do
is a million times harder now, it’s a very slow learning process for
me. Everything will take an extra long time. This is taking up even
more of my time and stretching me in ways that are testing my ability
to get anything done.

So we’ve been “Beta Testing� the newest slashcode
for a week now, here’s what I’ve learned…. I’d love some feedback on the new
site, your thoughts and ideas are always appreciated.

I think I may have moved a little too fast. The new site has more bugs
(listed below) than I thought it did while we were in “alpha mode,� and
it’s making my life quite difficult. I still don’t see any
show-stoppers, so we need not switch back, but it’s annoying to chase
things around like this. My biggest fear is we’ll lose some authors.

The SlashCode is awesome. It’s powerful, flexible, extensible and
unbelievably hard to understand at this point. Everything I want to do
is a million times harder now, it’s a very slow learning process for
me. Everything will take an extra long time. This is taking up even
more of my time and stretching me in ways that are testing my ability
to get anything done.

The journals are great. They’re not being used much, yet, but I love
the idea of everyone being able to have their own blog right here at
LISNews, it extends the open, collaborative nature of LISNews that I
love.

Moderation is going to take awhile to kick in. One of the biggest
reasons I switched code was for moderation. Since slashcode is designed
to run a site as big as Slashdot, the code needs to be scaled down a
bit to match our lower number of users. Though more people are signing
up for user accounts than I had thought would, we’re still not as big
as Slashdot. Much of the neat stuff doesn’t seem to scale down well,
since it was
designed for a monster site rather than for a itty bitty one like
LISNews.

Those of us with Author/administrator powers have a million things to
do, watch and pay with.

Spell check will make me look smarter! I love having the integrated
spell check, should save me a lot of embarrassment!

The code does not play well with others. It interferes with some other
stuff running on LISHost.

The friends/foes is another fun little thing that will be interesting
to watch grow.

Overall I’d say I’m happy with the way things are running. I feel like
I have a million new things to learn and fix, so I ask for your
patience while I get the site running smoothly. This additional work is
really tugging me in a million directions. I need to play author,
writer, moderator, programmer, customer service and sys admin all at
once. As you can imagine, I’m keeping busy!

Bugs bugs bugs, yeah, we got’m,
and I bet there’s more than a few I’m not aware of. There’s a million
little fixes and tweaks I want to make. If you know of ANY, please let me
know.

The RSS needs help still.
The quotes are gone, I like those.
The older stories need help still
The old quotes are just gone right now, not sure if I can import them or not yet.
The old polls, forgot about those till someone asked.
I need to write some decent documentation for both authors and members
As JB pointed out, the Mailing List link isn’t quite right.
Are the logs being written properly?
Make sure all authors are imported correctly.
The old stories make sure they are imported.
Old comments, HOW TO?
Fix all the RSS feeds
Write user guides
Integrate mailing lists
What about subscriptions?
Make the “hits” come back to the story display
I don’t like “Read/Comment…” but not sure what would work better.

Email this story has a bug in it all of sudden.

A Little Q&A.

Change the story titles from white to blue, white is too hard to read.

What Karl said, the edit link is misleading. See if I can hide that when previewing stories (authors only). [Submitted to the Slashcode folks as a bug]

Make a better page that lists UID’s.

Make admin toolbar stand out more, it’s easy to miss.

“anonymous coward writes” on submissions, needs to be changed to patron.

Ender filter.

Fix all those 404’s via ln -s.

Don’t force a topic or preview on submissions.

Get that “about” page rewritten

Make a “help” link

Figure out sections as subdomains

ENT Feeds for Jen

Categories for all the vars?

Modify the moderation reasons a bit

Change that colour scheme in the admin area, it’s giving me a headache.

Make HOF.pl better, or move back to the old .php one.

Kill relocate.pl

Old stories with single and double quotes in their titles have the \ showing

dial down metamod

add links to Urchin, search, and mailadmin to admin tool bar

Tell me how many user accounts we have when I log in

Put search and other stuff on admin header.