Public Lab Research note


Refine and improve an existing topic or project page on PublicLab.org

by warren | March 29, 2019 20:14 29 Mar 20:14 | #18904 | #18904

Lots of pages on PublicLab.org need some work, or are starting to get overgrown -- either because they need updating with more recent posts and community work, or sometimes because there has been too much added to the page, and it's hard to read.

This has long been a collaborative task, and we could definitely use your help in maintaining this community knowledge base!

Inline power tags

Many pages are set up with inline power tags, or shortcodes, where we add a special code formatted like:

[notes:turbidity]

...which inserts a table or a grid of content that's fetched from the site - in this case, all notes tagged with turbidity

But over time, these can get really long:

image description

Splitting up sections

One quick way to improve this is to break them into two groups. For a kit, for example the Coqui, we took all the activity:coqui posts, and broke them into activity:coqui-assembly, activity:coqui-mods, and activity:coqui-usage, for the guides for assembly, modifying the kit, and using it in the classroom or in the field. We re-tagged each post with the new tags, in this case leaving the old tags in place (though we aren't using them)

Then, we split the table into three, so the page has distinct sections. We used the [notes:grid:coqui-usage] syntax to show the "usage" posts with thumbnail images, which is more inviting as well:

image description

The same could be done with questions -- for example, if there are too many questions on a page for easy browsing, they can be re-tagged as, for example, question:coqui-troubleshooting versus question:coqui-mods (for questions about modifying, hacking, or improving the kit).

What pages need updating?

Lots of pages need it, and not all use these inline power tags, but we've been marking pages that could use some help with the tag needs-revision -- and that means we can list them here on this page. Skim through and see what you can do to help tidy these pages up! And leave a comment below to coordinate - that way we can tell who's been working on what areas of the site. THANKS A TON for helping improve Public Lab's collaborative knowledge base!!!


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1 Comments

I did this! As part of a research area review, I updated https://publiclab.org/wiki/microplastics. Next up, the questions and research notes grids on that wiki could probably be broken up into smaller chunks, as well.

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