PortlandTech/Suggestions
 A collection of 1,000+ companies, groups and people in the technology industry in Portland, OR.
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Contents
- 1 PortlandTech Suggestions, Comments, Problems and Thoughts
- 2 Calendar
- 3 Miscellaneous Calendar Ideas
- 4 Great Job (moved from Category:PortlandTech talk)
- 5 Tagging instructions on PortlandTech/Groups/Organizations
- 6 User group page - categories
- 7 Watching portal category membership for changes
- 8 Portal page description sections
- 9 Identifying potential new portal members
PortlandTech Suggestions, Comments, Problems and Thoughts
Please place ideas, questions, problems and thoughts on how to improve the PortlandTech wiki at AboutUs here.
Calendar
The changes to this look great, and it loads quicker. -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 21:23, 20 December 2007 (PST)
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.
- 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.
- 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.)
- AeA Oregon Regional Council Events (The primary source for these events.)
- Oen.org Events (Primary source)
- Software Association of Oregon Calendar of Events (primary source)
- OTBC.org Calendar (primary source)
- 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)
- Joe, thanks for the suggestions! Here are might immediate thoughts:
- We had a nice discussion with Audrey (organizer for the PDX Tech Calendar project) last night (she came to the WikiWednesday event AboutUs hosted) about her project and ours. There is still a bunch to be thought out and discussed for the PDX Tech Calendar project but we at AboutUs and the PortlandTech Portal are definitely involved in that discussion and excited by the prospects.
- On that note, I just created a groups.google.com/group/pdx-tech-calendar page on AboutUs with info. Naturally, they're part of the PortlandTech sphere.
- The calendars you mentioned are great! We'll make sure they are on the various Portland calendars we're watching/subscribing to as we continue to aggregate various Portland-tech related calendars by hand. (In fact, I just started a External Calendars list on our PortlandTech Upcoming Calendar so we can start collecting a list of the various resources we're using, and inviting others to add their insights as well.)
- Best, TakKendrick | talk
15:39, 10 January 2008 (PST)
Great Job (moved from Category:PortlandTech talk)
- Great job! I hope viewers appreciate -- among other things -- the custom work on pages of individuals and companies included in the Portal, and the work in creating the calendar/event content and displaying it in useful forms. Keep up the good work.
- As people may leave suggestions here, think about combining this page with PortlandTech/Suggestions
-- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 09:59, 26 January 2008 (PST)
- Joe, thanks for the comments. Actually, my preference is to keep the discussion on PortlandTech centralized, I move your comments from Category:PortlandTech talk and have that page pointing here. Let me know if that doesn't make sense. -- TakKendrick | talk 11:26, 26 January 2008 (PST)
- Tak: Perfect -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 11:29, 26 January 2008 (PST)
Tagging instructions on PortlandTech/Groups/Organizations
The tagging instructions ("How to add yourself here") on PortlandTech/Groups/Organizations say to add the tag {{PortlandTechUserGroup}}. -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 18:05, 26 January 2008 (PST)
- Fixed! Thanks for the note. I'm still hoping we can unveil a better way of adding pages to the PortlandTech sphere soon. Meanwhile I'd like to
to elucidate the instructions so they make more sense to people who're new to the wiki. I say because it's been on my list for over a month now, but it's beginning to bubble closer and closer to the top. Feel free to poke, prod or cajole me to get this done. -- TakKendrick | talk 12:46, 28 January 2008 (PST) - Tak: By "adding pages to the PortlandTech sphere" do you mean: (1) listing a domain page in one of the PortlandTech pages, or (2) adding a new page to the portal, e.g., "Medical & Biotech"? -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 15:18, 28 January 2008 (PST)
- Well, the tool we're trying to get worked on would do the former. Adding depth to the portal is a much larger process, beyond just making a "Medical and Biotech" page, there's modification of some 10 templates, not to mention tagging pages appropriately so that they show up on the list and map. At some point, I think a tool can help with this (but I suspect that's far off), more likely though since adding sections to the portal take such effort, I think these things should be discussed on this page, if there's enough interest, we can make it happen. Keep in mind though implementation for each would take a couple of hours for the structural parts, and then going through and tagging the appropriate pages. In mymind, if a section has say, less than 15-25 articles, it's probably not enough to do the work involved; likewise, more than 50 and we should really do it. -- TakKendrick | talk 13:56, 29 January 2008 (PST)
- Honestly, I'd prefer flushing out the sections we already have as an initial task, it's impossible to believe we only have 18 Blogs or 8 Forums. -- TakKendrick | talk 14:03, 29 January 2008 (PST)
- Blogs, forums, and some user groups are often not domains. How do you suggest handling them? Should a subdomain page be created for each one? If not, how do they get added to the portal? -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 14:19, 29 January 2008 (PST)
- I think subdomains should be created for them as needed, yes. That's why the Create Subdomain and the Subdomain Creation Tool was recently built, to make it easier to facilitate subdomains. -- TakKendrick | talk 14:27, 29 January 2008 (PST)
- I think subdomains should be created for them as needed, yes. That's why the Create Subdomain and the Subdomain Creation Tool was recently built, to make it easier to facilitate subdomains. -- TakKendrick | talk
- Here are some ideas for filling out some pages. I don't have time to do them all, so maybe you can chop them into bite-size pieces and find staff/volunteers.
- 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)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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)
- 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.
- 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)
- Honestly, I'd prefer flushing out the sections we already have as an initial task, it's impossible to believe we only have 18 Blogs or 8 Forums. -- TakKendrick | talk
- Well, the tool we're trying to get worked on would do the former. Adding depth to the portal is a much larger process, beyond just making a "Medical and Biotech" page, there's modification of some 10 templates, not to mention tagging pages appropriately so that they show up on the list and map. At some point, I think a tool can help with this (but I suspect that's far off), more likely though since adding sections to the portal take such effort, I think these things should be discussed on this page, if there's enough interest, we can make it happen. Keep in mind though implementation for each would take a couple of hours for the structural parts, and then going through and tagging the appropriate pages. In mymind, if a section has say, less than 15-25 articles, it's probably not enough to do the work involved; likewise, more than 50 and we should really do it. -- TakKendrick | talk
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)
Watching portal category membership for changes
It would be very useful to have a way to watch for changes in membership in the pages within portals. (E.g., a an addition to PortlandTech/Companies/Web 2.0.) I don't think anyone now provides this kind of service. People might even be willing to pay for this.
As these changes occur by adding / subtracting categories to the individual article, Watch and Page Alert don't do the trick. So it would take some development to do what I'm suggesting. I wonder if there's some quick-and-dirty scheme that could be implemented relatively easily. Checking each Portal page for changes just once a day would be fine. So every day, write the output of each page to a file, compare the page (or more likely, part of the page), to a prior version, if there's a change send an alert to a list of subscribers. This scales to other portals. -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 10:07, 30 January 2008 (PST)
Portal page description sections
I suggest a short Description at the start of each page of each portal. This would help people get the right domain pages into the various portal pages, and would help readers to find what they're looking for. I added a sample Description to PortlandTech/Companies/Incubators. (Please delete if you think that Description sections are inappropriate.)
Pages that would benefit most from a Description are:
- 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?).
- PortlandTech/Groups/Communities - I couldn't begin to describe this. How does it differ from Blogs, Forums, Organizations, User Groups?
- PortlandTech/Groups/Organizations - see comment above on Groups.
- PortlandTech/Groups/User Groups - Actually pretty clear. My only question is whether you'd like to see this category include professional groups.
- 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)