h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Oh, I'm sorry. That's why I thanked you. I did get there this time.
It is also possible that I misspelled test, user, or page.

I am a little slow about somethings: cars, Computers, plumbing, and the interface talents needed to deal with such things.

I eventually get to the same place others are, just usually in a round-a-bout way.

awsome pilots! Mark

Here's one for Jim - when you preview a posting you can't see the message you're replying to - but you can see the smileys from the message floating beneath the name of the previous poster. It's as though the text is there, but is the same colour as the background. You can highlight the shape of it if you click and drag where the text should be.

Or maybe it's something else entirely - I don't know what I'm talking about.

But the whole, erm, oneness of the whole, erm, unified DNA thingie is

The text *is* the same colour as the background. There are a lot of problems like this throughout the site because they chose a dark blue colour, but only for some of the text, so occasionally some text colour items are missed. Thanks for pointing it out, though.

Opera (at least for Mac) will do this; IE (for Mac again) won't. I don't know about others. Such a browser will notice that the text and bacground colors match and figure that the page author doesn't want the text visible. Thus, when the text is selected, the text and backroung still mach but in the selection color (usually the inverse of the original). Of course, it could simply be the inverse of each (text and background) which, beginning the same, will reverse to the same. The selection trick acts differently in different browsers (such as IE for Mac) and thus the text will become visible. You can always copy it to a text editor, though, and read it there.

-Spike A.

Sorry if this has been asked before, but can we view the sites in Goo (or even, heaven forbid, a*******r)? I really don't like the SOP skin...

Sorry. (Jim, correct me if I'm wrong.) The skins belong to each site, so h2g2 has the skins Classic (Goo) and ala. 360 has only the skin called 360 (hence '/dna/360/360'), and the sop sites technically each have their own skin, though they are exact duplicates (I think...). The skin never shows up in the URL, though, which is odd. Enlightenment, Jim?

-Spike A.

BTW, Jim, in case you haven't seen, I've thought of something again (sorry). Here: F56584?thread=174564

-Spike A.

My point was that I can view my h2g2 page in 360 or SOP skins (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/place-devon/place-devon/U168284 ), but I can't see SOP pages in h2g2 skins...

Thanks, PF, you just anwsered my question with that link. As I suspected (and should have attempted ) the duplicate skins for each sop skin have the same name as each sop site.

Here's the big difference between U-pages and the others. U-pages, user spaces, are made to appear on any site, thus they can be viewed in any skin (from the appropriate site). To tailor you space intro for different sites, you can use the tag. Other pages (A-pages, entries/articles, or F-pages, fora) are site-specific, and even if loaded through a site which they aren't on, they will load in the correct site, though the URL will be misleading. For instance, here is my Entry on Thursday: A700930. I could ask 360 to load it, but see for yourself:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/360/360/A700930

Now here's a 360 page: A702046. Because it's in an h2g2 forum, the link goes to an h2g2 page. Try it.

The same is true for F-pages and other DNA IDs

-Spike A.

Thanks Spike, you've cleared that up nicely!

(Incidentally, good point about a 'DNA Hub'...)

The sense of place skin names don't appear because they only have one skin. 360 should really only be dna/360/ but I was being too pedantic when I put the skin together.

It's all about branding. You and I realise that it's all just information, and the skin doesn't matter, but it would be a little disconcerting for a site owner to create a whole bunch of content, then see it all appearing as if it belonged to a completely different site. Hence, all sites force all dedicated content to appear in its own skin (or set of skins).

Besides, it's a lot easier this way. Otherwise, every time you wanted to link to a page on a different site, you'd have to specify the site name in the URL or elsewhere in the LINK tag in order that the page appears in the correct skin. People wouldn't bother, so pages would have any old branding and navigation, which might be entirely inappropriate for the content.

I think as a "network" of sites, if its going to be called something like that, "The DNA Network", which I suppose it is anyway, I feel they should all have the same features, except where they're not relevant - IE Things on the Devon site which are only useful to The Devon site, wouldn't go down too well on h2g2, just like something like "Ask h2g2" would be useless on Devon's site,

well, except for the lazy amongst us who can't be bothered to go to the right features at the right sites

aka (",)

*goes to check out the place sites*

Oh, and I hope it will spread later - There *has* to be one done about Liverpool, surely!

(Sorry, last message re: Jims request for opinioins on the Journal entry thing..

Sorry about that.. should read *all* the backlog first.. !)

This is really cool - in a bizzare way it will come closer to being a hitchikers guide than hootoo will. All in all I think it is fabulous, and a tribute to Douglas Adams, Jim and the Eds for enabling the Been to see the light.

and s for all concerned.

A couple of tech questions, and a couple of thoughts.



I included two footnotes in my U-Space which appears in the SOP sites. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/place-devon/U148580 All well and good. They are in text which is ed out of my h2g2 U-Space.

However they float, lost and lonely, at the bottom of my U-page here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/U148580. (Sorry about the Alabaster, guys). Do I need to the footnotes separately, and if so, how do I do that?



Actually, this is more of an editorial question.

Is there an equivalent of Peer Review in the SOP pages, so that you can bring your pearls of wisdom (hah!) to the attention of the eds there, the community, and the users of the site?



And finally, I feel very slightly uneasy about threads such as 'The most embarrassing thing' appearing in propper grownup sites. I know I could have to IDs, but that defeats the object of the exercise, doesn't it.

Is it - will it be - possible to select 'show all conversations' or 'show this site only conversations' in future releases.

I feel less cosy and private by appearing in the SOP and 360 sites than I did here.

Like being caught by one's mother-in-law drinking tequila shorts with sailors.



Ben

(Blimey, I dont think I have posted anything with as many typos and failed smileys for months. Sorry about that).

Hi Ben

As far as I know there is no way of separating your footnotes Im afraid - any footnotes you have will be at the bottom of the page in all skins, and of you have (example) two footnotes in two skins, then the numbering will go 1,2, in one skin, and 3,4, in the other.

As for getting the slight bug fixed, Jim has known about it since the 360 early days (all those weeks ago ), and hopefully it will get to the top of the things to do list at somepoint....

vp

There's also a similar problem with references.

"Just as soon as you start paying a licence fee to the BBC."

Drat! I was just about to express the same hope for Dublin!
I don't suppose you could do a deal with RTE?

Ben, there's currently no editorial process in place on the SOP sites. This will happen gradually, as they get more of a sense of how it should work. If you remember far enough back, h2g2 launched with a very different editorial process (one that was deeply flawed and inherently unscalable) so it's good for these things to grow naturally.

And yes, I know about the sitefilter/footnote bug. It's just a *real* pain to fix. Same with the references in the sidebar.