Tobi is nearing the end of his Summer of Coding. He says he will soon post a test version of the new antville for us to test and complain about. Read his post for all the info.

On a related note, I have a suggestion/question for antville: I think it would be great to have links to Videoville directly in the titles of Antville posts. See my last post for an example of a clickable "Ace Norton". Links in titles would help open up the content of both Videoville and Antville.

For example, you type in"Björk "Declare Independence" dir. Michel Gondry" and the post automatically becomes..

Björk "Declare Independence" dir. Michel Gondry

I'd love for the links to be automated, but I'm not sure that's possible, and I'm not sure how much incentive antville users have in actively adding the links.

Any suggestions?

         

I'm not sure that's possible

Once you define a strictly formal "protocol", a set of rules to turn names into valid URLs (spaces become underscores, how to encode ampersands, etc...), is it certainly possible.

Exceptions to the rules will be handled on Videoville side (ie redirecting to the correct page).

         

Actually I'm not sure how easy it is for Tobi to implement, but I'm not a power-coder so maybe it is. I can monitor the Videoville side pretty easily.

         

Well, that depends on how antville is actually structured.

I guess it would be not too hard to implement the hyperlink at "rendering" time (meaning: at every user request, when the final HTML document is generated)

Once you find an effective way to locate and extract the director's name from the title — example: all the letters between "(dir. " and ")" — you only have to apply that set of rule to translate it into a valid (or supposedly valid) Videoville page.

Possible problems to handle: support multiple directors (via a default separator, like the comma), minimize false positives (example: the title of the song contains the word "dir."), manage ambiguities in a transparent way (Wiki has disambiguation pages for this), try not to mess with the existing posts, and I guess many many others...

         

Another possibility: use the 'keyword' subtitles (e.g.) to manually create the links..

         

Would be nice to implement a bit of AJAX coding so we can sign in for commenting without having to move between pages. Same goes for uploading images.

         

i second what familiar said. AJAX & JQuery interactivity would be nice.

         

ALSO: Tags (eventually resulting in the ubiquitous tag cloud), and a database that remembers which posts we've read, so new posts are consistent no matter what computer you log in from.

         

dek: Do you know of any websites that implement that type of code? I'd like to find out what I can do to push the idea forward.

         

What code? My suggestions were pure extrapolation.

Ajax? I like the way images are loaded on cpluv.