Talk:Catprog's Favorites

Minor changes

When you're doing small edits, please click on the "This is a minor edit" check box below the summary field. Thanks. --Buck 12:15, 13 June 2008 (EDT)

You can also edit your user preferences to automatically flag all of your edits as minor, unless you uncheck that box on the edit. And you can edit your preferences to create a java-recent changes list that compresses all recent changes into an (expandable) list. --Jetfire 14:09, 13 June 2008 (EDT)

And, since this is after all a fairly small wiki still whose recent changes aren't hard to keep on top of currently, all this isn't really that important to worry about if it seems like a big hassle. Content first. :) Bryan 14:48, 13 June 2008 (EDT)

Formatting

This list has bulked up quite nicely. Would you like any assistance with fancying up the formatting? I extended the offer to Devin so I should make the same offer here, though if you prefer a nice simple bullet point list that's perfectly fine. Bryan 13:54, 13 June 2008 (EDT)

a bit of help would be nice Catprog 22:47, 13 June 2008 (EDT)

Certainly. What sort of layout would you like to see? We could do a simple table, or use templates to get fancy. If you want to reuse the icons I'm using over on Bryan's picks, that's fine too - or if you need new ones not present over there, we could find some free stuff or I could whip something up. What information would you like to present in your list? Some sort of quality rating, a genre or type of TF indicator, a blurb?

Oh, I just noticed User:Catprog/Template:Test. Since it isn't in the template namespace, to use it in testing you'll need to include the full name: {{User:Catprog/Template:Test}}. Just so you know. Bryan 16:14, 14 June 2008 (EDT)

What about something like on my user page at the moment? Catprog 22:22, 14 June 2008 (EDT)

Because of the way addresses are generated in the parser what Bryan mentions holds for any use. {{User:Catprog/Template:Test}} is the only way to call it. ShadowWolf 03:23, 15 June 2008 (EDT)

There, just did a little tinkering. I modified the table slightly to make its layout clearer; the text in the separate columns had no distinguishing separation between them before. Once we've got the contents defined we can look into the visual styling in more detail. The sortability's a very nice feature, I'd use it myself if it didn't mess up the colspanning headers over on Bryan's picks. :) The number of columns could become unwieldy if you're not careful, though. Also, I note that there's no author field. A deliberate choice, or an oversight?

I've also whipped up a very basic template for adding rows in a standardized manner. I inserted one as an example. I used raw HTML in the template because MediaWiki's preprocessor can get complicated sometimes when dealing with templates and tables, this way there's less opportunity for odd results. Bryan 04:06, 15 June 2008 (EDT)

An oversight on the author field. Catprog 10:42, 15 June 2008 (EDT)

Have you looked at the template's coding, and/or the possibilities for styling the table? I don't want to assume too much about your level of comfort and familiarity with HTML and wiki markup, but on the other hand I know it's annoying to be talked down to (even unintentionally) so I'm not sure what level of guidance you'd like. I could add HTML comments explaining various features, if you like, to help you with modifying the code to change how it looks or to add the author field where you'd like it. And finally, if you've got any requests or suggestions for additional icons, let me know. Category:Icons may have a few that you might find useful that aren't currently in use on Bryan's picks, and new ones can be created or uploaded from free sources fairly easily. Bryan 02:17, 16 June 2008 (EDT)

Plenty of experience with html (not much on the design side) and little wiki markup. On the icon side I would like one for each type of transformation. Also is it possible to set it up so that I only have to add each story 1 and then a list of the new additions in the last month is shown? Also it doesn't see to want to sort properly on some of the columns (ignoring the difference between template and non-template rows). one example is the favourites column title 6. Catprog 00:33, 17 June 2008 (EDT)

It appears that the sorting code doesn't deal with non-textual information such as those columns with the icons. I've "tricked" the code into sorting the length column by adding some text with display:none styling, so that it won't be shown to the end user but is still accounted for by the sort function. The other columns could be fixed up in a similar manner.

I see you went with parser functions to set some of the columns with more limited numbers of options, if you're into that sort of thing there's also a #switch statement you might want to look into (never worked much with it myself).

Why not simply add stories to your table in chronological order? If you insert new entries at the top, when people first come to the page the newest entries will be shown first but if they want to sort by some other criterion they can click a sort button.

Finally, that icon request is rather open-ended. :) What types of TFs did you have in mind? I've occasionally poked around looking for a good set of icons to use in the TF type headers for Bryan's picks, but haven't had much luck and don't want to spend the time to create them from scratch simply for a little eye candy. Even the genre icons were a pain to come up with, and I deliberately chose very expansive and fuzzy categories to divide things into. Unless you know of a good set of images under a suitable license I'd recommend using plain old text for the TF type column. Bryan 01:46, 17 June 2008 (EDT)

can I use this one http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:External.svg for the external column?

Certainly, anything on Wikimedia Commons is pretty much by definition available under a free licence. Though Shifti doesn't support SVG so I've uploaded a PNG version: Image:External.png. Bryan 15:49, 18 June 2008 (EDT)

The prototype's looking good. Only suggestion that comes to mind offhand now is to add a space between TF types to allow them to break onto separate lines when the screen's too narrow to contain everything on a single line. You might also want to use → (→)for the arrows, or perhaps upload an arrow image, to make it look more "professional". And of course you may want to fiddle with the table's styling, I threw the padding and vertical rules in there just to make it easier to see where everything was in an earlier version. Bryan 23:36, 18 June 2008 (EDT)

Dude, Im loving the look of the page.

--75.154.95.48 04:19, 3 July 2008 (EDT)