[thelist] Tip Harvest / Descriptions

Dean Mah dmah at shaw.ca
Mon Jan 28 13:04:00 CST 2002


Michael Pemberton writes:

> I was trying to work out what my "account balance" was by doing a
> search for my name in the tips and found that each tip appears
> twice.

We had a problem with the harvester as a result of the recent mailing
list upgrade.  It caused all tips to be re-harvested.  It should be
fixed now.

> Also, any chance of allowing for the use of "subject" or
> "description" as a setting in the <tip>?  I noticed a few tags where
> people have used such terms and they appear as "* Unclassified*

The harvester pulls the 'type' attribute which can be used to apply a
description to a tip.

See the tip below for details.  (This was supposed to go into a
community news article but I forgot.  Sorry, Mich.)


<tip type="Tip Harvesting">

The tip harvester currently stores a couple attributes in the database.

1. type - this is known as the attributed type of the tip.  There is
   also a canonical tip type that is assigned manually by me.  The
   canonical tip type is displayed in the summary and is used for the
   pulldown part of the tip search.  Consider it a course-grained tip
   category.  If a canonical type has not be assigned, the attributed
   tip type is displayed.  If the attributed type was not provided,
   'Unclassified' is printed.

2. author - this is known as the attributed author.  If this is set,
   it shows up as tip author.  If not, the 'From:' header of the
   e-mail is grabbed and used.  The 'From:' e-mail is matched against
   the www.evolt.org 'USERS' table in an attempt to link the tip
   author to their weo user page.

Helpful hints:

1. Providing meaningful 'type' attributes is helpfully for when I'm
   manually classifying the tips.

2. Posting to the list with the same e-mail address that you used when
   signing up for an weo account will match your tip count to your weo
   user page and allow the pulldown author search box on the harvester
   page to find your tips.

3. Use quotes for your attribute values if they contain spaces.

</tip>


Dean



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