[Theforum] subcats vs. metadata/beginners vs. everyone

mccreath mccreath at ak.net
Sun Dec 16 13:34:48 CST 2001


These are not fully-formed thoughts, so please feel free to tell me I'm off
track.

SUBCATS vs. METADATA
It seems like we could create virtual subcategories using views. (You can
create views on Oracle databases, right?) Say we run a query that gets all
the articles in all categories with ASP in the body (as an extremely simple
example) and build a view with that. Then just create a link on the 'Code'
page that says 'ASP', which loads a page with just the 'Code'/'ASP'
articles. That page would have a link that says something like 'See all ASP
articles from all categories', which does exactly what it says, but
separates the results by category (as opposed to the current search which
only sorts by date).

Basically we build a better search engine, then use it to create the
subcategories *for* us, rather than hard-coding anything.

BEGINNERS vs. EVERYONE
I'm on the fence about the difficulty rating. It seems like beginners like
to find 'Getting Started' articles, but nobody else cares about the level of
difficulty. So I guess I could see offering some way for the author to
designate is as a "beginner's" article.

David





More information about the theforum mailing list