PortlandTech/Suggestions

PortlandTech

PortlandTech

Suggestions, Comments, Problems and Thoughts


Miscellaneous Calendar Ideas

Some random ideas. (I haven't implemented any because either (a) I don't know how well they fit your vision for PortlandTech, or (b) I don't have time.

  1. Create an AboutUs article for the PDX Tech Calendar project and appropriate PortlandTech entry(ies). If this project really gets implemented, you find a way to import/link/frame its contents to the PortlandTech calendar.
  2. Here are some calendars I check in the course of my work. It would be useful to automatically/manually monitor these and add events to PortlandTech. (I'm sure someone is already doing some of this.)
    1. AeA Oregon Regional Council Events (The primary source for these events.)
    2. Oen.org Events (Primary source)
    3. Software Association of Oregon Calendar of Events (primary source)
    4. OTBC.org Calendar (primary source)
    5. Oen.org Community Events of Interest to OEN Members (A useful secondary source that manually aggregates events from some other calendars)

-- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 08:39, 10 January 2008 (PST)

PortlandTech

Potential Task List for PortlandTech/Groups/Organizations

  1. Review the first part of the list of calendars to aggregate at http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-tech-calendar/web/tech-calendars-to-aggregate and make sure that each 'organization' with a calendar is represented in the Portal. I will undertake to review the list only for user groups that are not PortlandTech/Groups/User_Groups.
    • Finished above review for user groups, creating domain and subdomain pages for them, adding PortlandTech tags. -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 22:00, 29 January 2008 (PST)
  2. Review the PlanetPDX subscription list for Portland technology blogs that are missing from PortlandTech/Media/Blogs. (Remember that not everything on the subscription list is a Portland blog, or a technology blog.
  3. Much more difficult: Look at all the domains and subdomains in the Portal to see if the associated company, group, or individual has a blog. At present, this is a lot of individual labor. Maybe someone can formulate a Google search that would be a first cut at identifiying these. In the long run it would neat and great if the Bot could try to find these, and create a Blog section on the domain page. (Maybe the domain page template should include a blog section, and in can be filled manually now, and in the future automatically.
  4. I don't know where to for forums generally. http://www.oregonlive.com/forums/ has a bunch of forums, but only one is technology. Maybe the same recipe as for blogs.
  5. Out of the box idea. The content on the Portal pages is static. If it were dynamic, people might visit repeatedly. So how about something along the lines of dynamically aggregating headlines (from blogs, press releases, etc.) from the individuals and organizations listed on that page? (Or you could aggregate content a la PlanetPDX.)? -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 15:10, 29 January 2008 (PST)
  • Another place to harvest (but I'll bet you've alrady been there): pdxgroups.pbwiki.com -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 21:23, 29 January 2008 (PST)

User group page - categories

This page currently includes Category:User Group. If reasonably easy, it should also include Category:User Groups.

else, is possible to automatically change every occurence of Category:User Groups to Category:User Group,
else is is possible to automatically add Category:User Groups to every page that already has Category:User Group? -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 16:44, 29 January 2008 (PST)
Hi Joe. I took a look at this specific instance. It turns out our UserGroup category is the one that's used to generate the portal page. I added UserGroups to the portal page and there were only 5 pages there. I removed UserGroups from those and made sure they were all in UserGroup. Longer term, we need to have dev expand the IntersectTool to do both OR and AND. So far it's just AND. We'll keep working on it. -- TedErnst (talk) 16:15, 1 February 2008 (PST)

Portal page description sections

Pages that would benefit most from a Description are:

  1. PortlandTech/Groups - a group could be anything that's not one individual. But the Portal designers doubtless had something narrower in mind. Ideally one of them should add a description. (This may seem like a pain, but it doesn't take that long and you can immediately put it to work in the protals that are under development.) Perhaps say what doesn't belong in this category (e.g., what about for-profit companies?). Groups appears to include all Communities, Organizations and User Groups.
    1. PortlandTech/Groups/Communities - I couldn't begin to describe this. How does it differ from Blogs, Forums, Organizations, User Groups?
    2. PortlandTech/Groups/Organizations - see comment above on Groups.
    3. PortlandTech/Groups/User Groups - Actually pretty clear. My only question is whether you'd like to see this category include professional groups. I added a quick description. Are there any professional groups in there now? Do you think they should be? I would say that if they are included, my description needs to change. Go for it!
  2. PortlandTech/Media/Forums - Is (a) this what you had in mind, or did you mean to (b) include organizations and events that call themselves "Forum", like OEF.org, Foscon2007.com. (I'd prefer (a).)

-- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 11:24, 30 January 2008 (PST)

Identifying potential new portal members

When a new page is created for a domain (or something else) that's within the geographic coverage of a Portal, is the page tagged for possible inclusion in the Portal. A first pass would be, when the bot creates a page, look at the city (or even better use the first 3 digits of the Zip (or Canadian equivalent)) for the Contact, and add an appropriate tag to the page. (You can get a statewide 3-digit zip map for $10 at MaponicsOnlineStore.com.)) Someone could then review the tagged pages to see if, and where, they should be added to the Portal. -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 08:56, 31 January 2008 (PST)

Hey Joe. Great idea. And, given current dev priorities, I think we need to continue to focus on the human part of this. As we run across these pages, we do add them to the portal. Just to make sure, I'll remind the people reviewing changes to keep an eye out for these. -- TedErnst (talk) 15:47, 1 February 2008 (PST)

Organizations with non-pdx addresses

With the advent of Portland Lunch 2.0, I added Category:PortlandTech and Category:Organization to Lunch20.com. Because Lunch20.com is Hq'd in Mountain View, my changes messed up the map on PortlandTech/Groups/Organizations.

  • What are the short- and long-term work-arounds / solutions to this kind of problem. Should someone create a subdomain or pseudo-subdomain page when a Portal wants to include a local chapter of a non-local organization?
  • Please feel free to revert my tagging of Lunch20.com.

-- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 21:05, 10 February 2008 (PST)

There has to be a work-around. For instance, KayeSmith.com has a Seattle ==Address==, but that's not messing up the map on PortlandTech/Companies. What's the secret? -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 14:36, 14 February 2008 (PST)
I wish I knew. Hmm. Must be something. Is there a map on the KayeSmith.com page? Hmm. TedErnst (talk) 15:53, 14 February 2008 (PST)
No map appears, even though one is called for.
-- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 16:04, 14 February 2008 (PST)
Well, that sounds like a bug, not a workaround. :-) I put a space after the address, before the phone number, and the map started showing up on the page. Does that also break the Organizations map? -- TedErnst (talk) 16:25, 14 February 2008 (PST)
For some reason, the maps on PortlandTech/Companies/Software and other page(s) that link to KayeSmith.com are behaving the way you'd want. They are just showing the Portland area, and are centered there, despite the fact that KayeSmith.com#Address is 150 miles away. I think the normal behavior of the Portal maps is to center the map between the most extreme coordinates (and to do so without changing the scale) This is undesirable when there's an address that's distant from the portal city. For instance, the map on PortlandTech/Groups/Organizations shows a slice of rural Oregon. I'd sure like to know how to avoid that. Perhaps someone did something special with the PortlandTech/Companies/Software map. -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 16:41, 14 February 2008 (PST)
    • I believe these issues are addressed (no pun intended) along with a few others in a couple of upcoming development tasks: Override Automatic Scaling of Intersected Maps and Geocode and map domain pages with multiple addresses. I don't entirely know when these will be done but when I talked to Ward about it the other day he seemed to indicate the the map fixes would be a priority over the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned. -- TakKendrick | talk Comment_green.gif 10:37, 15 February 2008 (PST)
      1. That would be great.
      2. But somehow, PortlandTech/Companies/Software is already doing the right thing, despite an outlier (KayeSmith.com#Address). Do you know why?
      3. Seems like a lot of development effort. In deciding whether to expend that effort, please ignore our sponsorship of PortlandTech and do what is otherwise right for AboutUs. -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 11:15, 15 February 2008 (PST)
      • Don't know why KayeSmith.com isn't throwing it off. (It's actually not mapping that point, but it should be because it's showing on the map on the article page.) As far as the dev effort is concerned, we need it for some of the other portals as well, especially the ability to scale and plot a center point. When the extension was initially written back in December, it was with PortlandTech's needs in mind, but I believe we always knew that Dev'd have to do a more thorough revision as we expanded our portal offerings. -- TakKendrick | talk Comment_green.gif 13:00, 15 February 2008 (PST)


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