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We've got stickers, and questions for you

To celebrate the launch of the new OrangePolitics (and the fact that I finally made a logo), I had some new stickers printed! They are sturdy vinyl and will look great on your car, bike, or skateboard. Come say hi to me at tonight's Chapel Hill Town Council meeting (or any place else you see me) and I'll be glad to give you one - until the first 50 I printed run out.

And while I'm here, now that you've used the site for a few weeks, do you have any feedback or suggestions? I know a few things have been pretty clunky (like saying you "forgot" your password to access your account) and there are some things that still don't work yet (like OP Junkie e-mails).

Have you noticed the fun, new stuff, like the member list? You can click on anyone's voting precinct and see who else is registered there. How about the moderated anonymous commenting - are you ignoring those in gray or treating them like other comments?

I still hope to move the site ot a more collective editing situation, but am still working on just getting ut off the ground and recruiting more people to come (or come back) and participate.

Comments

new site upgrades

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on January 23, 2008 - 8:15pm

nitpicks: sorta "busy" in my opinion.

too much information.

i would be happy with half.

Useability

Submitted by Terri Buckner on January 24, 2008 - 7:34am

I've heard several others make this same observation (too busy). But I wonder if that may not be a generational thing--everyone I've heard make that observation is "older". :~)

The UNC School of Information and Library Science maintains a useability lab. It might be interesting to subject OP to their review.

Interesting

Submitted by Ruby Sinreich on January 24, 2008 - 10:15am

I'm definitely interested in anything I can do (on no budget) to improve the usability of the site. When you say it's too busy, is that in relation to the old site or just in general? Are there features on the front page that you're not interested in?

A lot of the new tools like rich-text editing and threaded comments are the kind of thing you asked for in the past, Terri. I hope you're pleased with those improvements.

I've been thinking of having a geek-out session with some coder friends and volunteers where we can get together and maybe come up with some new solutions or fix existing problems.

The comments I have heard

Submitted by Terri Buckner on January 24, 2008 - 6:40pm

The comments I have heard were in relation to the old site. Some of the busy-ness could be eliminated (in my opinion) without taking away any functionality. For example, do all the tags really need to show on the front page blurb or could they be placed at the bottom of the post so that they only show up on the full page?

The other change I would make is to convert the red type to black due to the red-green color blindedness in men (red becomes black and then they wouldn't see the links). If you want to keep the links red, maybe you could format them to be bold to make them stand out a bit more. Not sure if that is technically feasible though.

I love the Preview feature!

I also like the threaded commenting but it's a little confusing how it shows up on the front page. I was watching yesterday when the landfill discussion was going strong and the summary links kept changing. Do replies to the initial post take precedence over replies to internal threads? Or maybe I'm just crazy. I don't see this as a big deal--more just something to get used to.

I don't understand the watchlist any more than I understand the friends thing on OrangeCitizens. But over time, I expect we will all figure it out. It's still a new application and everyone was used to the old way so I wouldn't remove any features until folks have had a little more time to get adjusted.

RSS?

Submitted by Patrick M on January 24, 2008 - 12:19pm

I still can't get a single RSS feed to work. Anyone else having this problem with the new OP?

RSS feed

Submitted by Terri Buckner on January 24, 2008 - 6:12pm

This feed is working over on the OrangeCitizens forum: http://orangepolitics.org/feed

Try copying the RSS feed

Submitted by user on January 24, 2008 - 9:35pm

Try copying the rss feed, which is http://orangepolitics.org/feed, and pasting it in your favorite feed reader. This should work. (It does for Google reader) I think the prob is most browsers don't recognize that url as a feed. (ex. Safari, firefox asks me if I want to download it) This is a suboptimal workaround. Should be easier.

feed XML parse error

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on January 28, 2008 - 10:29am

I believe that the problem is that the feed content has two carriage returns (0x0d) prependeds to the start.

[aeh@localhost tmp]$ GET http://orangepolitics.org/feed|head -1
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
[aeh@localhost tmp]$ GET http://orangepolitics.org/feed|head -1|od -x
0000000 0d0d 3f3c 6d78 206c 6576 7372 6f69 3d6e
0000020 3122 302e 2022 6e65 6f63 6964 676e 223d
0000040 7475 2d66 2238 3e3f 000a
0000051
[aeh@localhost tmp]$

XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity
Location: http://orangepolitics.org/taxonomy/term/308/feed
Line Number 3, Column 1:

Calendar RSS?

Submitted by Jason Baker on January 27, 2008 - 12:47pm

Speaking of RSS feeds, one thing I'd absolutely LOVE to have (though, I'd also love it if the town, county, OCDP, N&O, Citizen, Indy and other places I turn to for events would do it too) would be a feed for calendar information. I've figured out how to get feeds for each TYPE of event, but my calendar reader starts to look rather crowded after a while, and right now they're not working for me anyway. Any chance there's a Drupal plugin that would allow you to a calendar in iCal, for example?

second

Submitted by user on January 27, 2008 - 6:19pm

I second the ical feed request! :)

anonymous comments

Submitted by Jim on January 24, 2008 - 3:33pm

I find the anonymous commenting confusing, especially when there are multiple anonymous commenters in a single thread -- it's hard to keep track of who has said what. I think that the use of pseudonyms works better as it makes it easier to refer to certain comments or to know which anonymous comments others are talking about.

As things stand, it's pretty much impossible to ignore the anonymous comments altogether, especially since so many of them seem to have been unintentionally anonymous.

I agree.

Submitted by Jason Baker on January 24, 2008 - 7:10pm

I agree. While I don't want to discredit the input of anonymous posters, it would be much easier to follow the conversation if they were to use some sort of pseudonym. It's distracting, especially when in most cases the "anonymous" person is actually quite willing to identify themselves, and simply isn't logged in.

looks good ruby

Submitted by joan on January 25, 2008 - 5:17am

Ruby, I like much of the new site. Some of it is just a matter of getting used to.

One suggestion:

I wish, on the front page, I could click on the name of the whole thread rather than comments under that thread. I often like to start at the top. I can do that by scrolling back up the page, but a link that got me to the top of a post right from the start would be great.

Also, maybe I'm just lame this way, but I don't want to preview, but just post. I wish I could skip the preview step and go just to post.

It's on my list

Submitted by Ruby Sinreich on January 28, 2008 - 9:41am

The things that does the "Hot topics" on the front page was custom-built by an amateur programmer - ie: me. I also wish the titles linked to the top the of the post, and I plan to work on getting that to work when I sit down for big geek out in a few weeks.

I will also look into the iCal feed, it shouldnl't be too hard.

Yeah, I hat haveing to

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on January 25, 2008 - 8:21am

Yeah, I hat haveing to prevew my post,

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