What about “Communal logmarks”? To logmark a line that isn’t already logmarked, click it’s time field. From now till someone or something unhighlights it, that line will be highlighted for you. And for everyone else. It’s a communal logmark. Anyone (or anything) can click again to unhighlight.
Original gist below, with couple minor edits.
I am very happy you’ve done what you’ve done. I say the prognosis just sharply improved for #perl6 summaries, my carpal tunnel pain, and your irclogger software!
Phase 2 and 3 (https://gist.github.com/3662771) aren’t going to magically materialize. And I don’t want to burden you. And I don’t currently feel it would be wise for me to try to code them. So I’m going to ignore Phase 2 and 3 for most of this gist. But I felt I needed to say something about them, so here goes.
Forgetting me for a moment, I think doing Phase 2 and 3, so it becomes relatively trivial to do something like http://blogs.perl.org/users/perl_6_reports/2012/09/perl6-summaries-for-2012-09-02.html, would again sharply improve the quality of the summaries and add a lot of value to your irclogger software.
Coming back to me, I’m thinking that, at least until my pain subsides, I won’t manually do these annotations of the annotations, ie I won’t clump summary lines together, give them a category and heading, and add commentary and links, as I did in earlier summary posts. Even when the pain has subsided, I think I’ll still be hankering for the Phase 2 and 3 stuff to save me further pain, and the extra time and bugs of using cut and paste.
I would really like to clean up the Phase 1 stuff. This is not about me being the one currently focusing on #perl6 summmaries but rather about pride in your nice irclogger software and also making it easier for #perl6ers to help summarize.
Currently anyone can change which lines are in the summary but it’s relatively cumbersome. Scroll to top. Click Enable summary mode. Scroll back to the line to change. Click checkbox. Scroll to top. Click Save summary changes. Click “summary”. Scroll to line to confirm it’s in the summary.
Currently everyone can see the current summary — but only when they (know to and, unprompted, think to) click the “summary” link.
Currently folk don’t get to see highlighting and context at the same time. (The closest is “Enable summary mode” when viewing the Full log; “highlighted” lines have their checkbox checked.)
So?
First, here’s something I think you’ll agree would be both nice and simple no matter what. Could you highlight (use a different cell color for) summary loglines? Something like (exactly as?) the coloring one gets when one clicks the time field? So someone could see these lines, and visually skip thru the full log, without needing to click a summary link.
Second, what if clicking the time field just toggles the summary status for that line? Sure some folk might accidentally toggle the highlight of a line because they clicked the time field, but so what? Maybe this won’t work because of spiders that ignore robot.txt but it sure would be a simple UI that is a tiny step from what currently exists.
“Enable summary mode” would presumably then be just for someone focused on doing the Summary as a batch change process.
A final overall comment: I think the feature you’ve implemented would be much better described as “Highlights” than as “Summary” and suggest you change the links etc. accordingly.
- In the “summary” display some nick cells that I would expect to be dark are light.
- I clicked “Enable summary” mode. Then a link within that. Then the back button. Appeared to be back in regular mode! Had I lost my changes? Clicked “Enable Summary mode”. All changes kept. Phew!
- Link menus:
- On my PC “Enable summary mode” (and “Turn on filtering by nick”) doesn’t appear until after the rest of the page has loaded. In combination with some other UI quirks, this confused me when I was first trying to understand how this “summary” stuff worked. (Where did that Enable link go? Click to go find it. Repeat. Ah, there it is. Could have sworn it wasn’t there earlier…) Maybe all the “summarizing” stuff should appear where “Enable summary mode” currently appears? If one squints, the “summary” link and its effect are somewhat analogous to “Turn on filtering by nick”.
- There’s no space between the “plain, newest first” and “|” that follows it.
- “plain, newest first”, and “summary”, are not tc but all other menu entries are (Previous day, Channels, etc.)
- There’s no “Full” link. Links like “Today” are close. But what if I’m viewing the “summary” of, say, 2012-09-04, and want to switch to the full log?
- If viewing the “summary” AND “summary mode” is enabled, the “show only summary lines” and “show all lines” links don’t change the display (summary and all are the same).
- Fwiw I think the top text could do with refreshing. “Parrot” definitely seems out of place. “source cross referenced” didn’t respond. I think Specs is less worthy of a link than p6doc.
Example? After a quick skimming of a summary page I didn't notice any.
I'm afraid that's a "wontfix". The back button and Javascript simply don't work well together, fixing that would require far too much work.
That's a feature of progressive enhancement, ie somebody without any javascript won't see any such links. I'm not sure if there's an easy way to load it faster without losing progressive enhancement.
fixed
fixed
done
Some of the changes you propose make the summary mode much more intrusive than it is now, and I'm not convinced that it's useful enough to warrant that. I want to wait for feedback from other users (including non-#perl6) before I decide whether to take action on them.
I'm aware that the UI needs some polishing, and I'll work on it a bit.
Thanks for the feedback!