Listology 2.0 Sneak Preview
Hey all. For the last several months I have been hard at work on the new Listology site, and I finally have something to show for it. After a couple rounds of beta testing with a small number of users, I am ready to open the site for public preview. All you have to do is Click This Link! All existing logins should work, and the content is from an import that is about a week old now, so it is not 100% up to date. Functionally it should be very similar to the existing site. The biggest change is that the old concept of genres is gone and entirely replaced with free tagging, and every post can have multiple tags. Your existing content should have its existing genres imported as tags. One piece of functionality that is gone is the ability to perform a search within only one user's content. I just couldn't find a good way to implement it in the new system. Beyond that the site should be fully functional and everyone should be able to do all the things they would normally do.
NOTE: Any new content you enter into the test site will be wiped out when the final transfer takes place. Feel free to make test posts and edit existing ones, but just remember none of it is permanent.
The new target date for launch is around May 10, so what I am looking for from you all is feedback! Specifically:
- Did you find anything broken? In particular did any of your content import improperly, or is any of it missing?
- Is there anything that should be there but is missing?
- Is anything massively unintuitive? Is there anything you rabidly hate?
- Stuff you like would be nice too :)
Feel free to send feedback by commenting on this post, or emailing listology@heyrocker.com. I can't guarantee I will respond to all emails or comments depending on the volume, but know I am reading them all and taking everything into consideration. You guys are the whole reason the site is here and I just want to make it the best it can be.
Also note that for the moment comment notifications are turned off. This is to prevent unsuspecting users from getting notified about comments on the test site. This is not a bug :)
Thanks and have fun!
I do wish that gray square around the pages didn't have to be there. The homepage needs some excitement to it. As bad as the yellow was on the old page, at least it did it's share of keeping me awake during the late hours. Now I'm afraid I may be falling asleep at the computer. I know you may be limited by a format, but at least "white" would bring the homepage out from the screen. Just a thought.
I'm really digging the new site. It's got a very nice, streamlined look. Excellent!
The logo in the upper right is perfect!
Comments indent is perfect.
Theme is great.
Top menu great.
FAQ is great.
Advanced search very good! Too bad you can't search a user's content. Would it be possible to sort search results by user, date, popularity, etc.? That would be kickass.
Haven't found any bugs yet.
Is there user RSS?
Wow, I was going to add user RSS and forgot. Adding to the list. Should it be new content, updated content, or both?
I'm still looking into search options.
The logo in the upper right came from the designer trying to build something around the idea of an L surrounded by two bullets, like
*L*
Like a "Listology emoticon", then realizing it was kind of a little face. The rest came from there :)
Push back the launch date. No hurry; you're doing an awesome job.
RSS should be both new and updated content, imo.
There is now user rss. If you go to a user's profile and click the content tab, you'll notice the rss feed icon in the url bar. This is that user's content sorted by updated date. This includes new content and updates, so if a person has
List 1
List 2
List 3
And then adds List 4 it becomes
List 4
List 1
List 2
List 3
and if they then update List 2 it becomes
List 2
List 4
List 1
List 3
I am honestly not sure how most RSS readers will deal with this but we'll see! Hopefully well.
Yeah, that's how it should work.
All hail CMSes for rapid development!
Thanks heyrocker, the new site looks awesome.
When you say comment notifications are turned off is this in relation to recent posts? That is the only feature which doesn't appear to be in the new site which I'd want. There are often a large number of updates on recent activity and recent posts allows an easy way to keep informed of everything that's going on. For example, that is why I'm commenting on this list right now!
You can now find recent posts (or comments as they're now referred to) in the Browse menu. There's an RSS feed of recent comments as well. While setting this up I noticed a bug in the import which caused a bunch of comments to import incorrectly. Amusingly this only happens when someone ends their comment with ":/". Anyways I'll fix it but for now that listing is slightly wacked out.
Recent posts will be simple to add and I'll do so. I somehow missed that view when putting the new site together. Comment notifications is the functionality by which you are emailed responses to comments.
Enabling your OCD, one post at a time. Perfect. That alone is awesome enough for me to stop browsing and post this. :D
One thing though so far...I make a lot of small edits (partly for fear my computer will shut down in the middle of something, partly because I like to see how things look as Im going along). There used to be an option to not kick your update to the top if you were just correcting something minor (to avoid being annoying). How does that work now?
I agree with both of the above posts. In particular, allowing corrections not putting a list at the top of the updated list.
I also love the "Enabling your OCD..."
I am very, very disappointed that searching my own content will no longer be available. That is a feature I use every time I update movies or books. I do understand its a complicated thing. Is there no way to add an "and" feature in the search?
I love the look of the site. More comfy. But I would prefer the highlighting still be gold or yellow. Gray is so bland.
I edited one of my lists and decided I didn't want to save the change. A "Cancel" option is needed in the editing phase for those of us who change our minds 3/4 of the way through.
This is all for now.
It's not just that I need an "and" feature in the search (there is one) it's that the search is just an index of the text of posts. As such there is no way to specify "posts written by user x". I can search for heyrocker and it will find all posts that mention heyrocker. I will continue to look for a solution to this (several people have mentioned missing it) but it probably won't be there for launch.
As far as Cancel, you can always just navigate to another page. A Cancel button might make sense though, I'll look into that.
Well each post does have the little note including the username - for example, my 2002: Movies I've Seen list says "Submitted by AJDaGreat on Thu, 08/15/2002 - 10:11." Is there any way you could convince the search feature that that line is a part of the text?
I have installed a new search indexing service on the server which allows for several interesting search enhancements. One of these is that after searching, you can filter the results down to a specific author. While it takes two steps, this at least functionally replaces the "search my own content" functionality that was lost. There are also several more options like filter by tag, by content type, sorting options, etc. The new index won't be complete for about 12 hours, but it is adding about 200 posts every 5 minutes, and common terms like "movie" and "list" are returning a good number of results already. You can access this new search at
http://67.23.0.101/search/apachesolr_search
Here's a sample result
http://67.23.0.101/search/apachesolr_search/movie
Comments welcome!
I tried searching a book that I knew was in several lists in my content. It took 3 whole clicks to get to exactly what I wanted. I'm thrilled! This is exactly what I needed. So it takes a few extra clicks, I just think of those extra calories I'm burning and celebrate.
I agree, I use the "just fixing typos" feature all the time.
I'm a fan of the new layout and look, I'd be happy using that. It streamlines many of the site's best aspects, and adds a lot of features I've wanted for a fair while.
A couple of suggestions though:
1)The grace period for editing posts really needs to stay. I find typos shortly after posting almost every time.
2)The ability to reply to earlier comments (producing nested conversations) was extremely useful. I can't even imagine going without it, it's so fundamental to the way discussions on the site go. I think this is one of the most important features of listology - almost all of my lists have had multiple conversations going on at once, and they usually stay civil and coherent, since everyone knows exactly what statement is responding to what, and in what order. It's all very organized and has the effect of producing a sort of "mind-map" of conversation topics, which is fantastic. I'm actually of the opinion that much of the reason conversations on this site are abnormally interesting and well thought-out is this self-organizing effect: rather than the shouting mob you end up with on most forums, you get a series of thoughtful, related conversations and debates between small groups. The removal of this feature is the one thing I rabidly hate - I actually wouldn't use the site nearly as much without it. I would be very thankful (and I think a lot of us would) if you found a way to put this into the new site, if it's possible - it's perhaps my favorite feature of listology 1.0.
3) Closely related (and this may be restricted for bandwidth reasons) is the ability to see all of the comments at once. This isn't as fundamental, but it was nice having a comment page that was so easy to search.
As far as #2, this was just a bug in permissions settings and has been fixed.
As far as #3, right now comments are paginated after 150, which affects a very small percentage of posts. I will think about upping this limit or removing pagination, it really does increase load time and nail my server though.
#1, well, I'll look into it. It won't be easy but a lot of people seem to be missing it. It might not make it in for launch but I'll keep it on my list.
Thanks! That second one was the most important.
It's also good to hear that number 1 will (hopefully) eventually make it :D
Number 3 isn't that big of a deal, actually, especially since it only happens at 150 posts.