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

That's what it's there for!

(And I've put another one in just for you, dear.)

TRiG.

That was a very polite request


*giggles*

$skip = floor(($post - 1) / 20) * 20;

If you want to do that by hand: subtract 1 from the post number, then divide by 20, then round the fraction down to the nearest integer, then multiply by 20. This is the value for the skip field.

The show field can be left blank: it will then default to 20. (Similarly, skip will default to 0.)

To link to a specific post, we add #pi[post number] onto the end of the URL.

TRiG.

Clever bugger.

Editors?

That's brilliant. We've bookmarked that URL. It's very helpful indeed and thank you very much for doing that, very much appreciated.

Superb TRiG! Could you possibly also do me a sort-of bespoke how-to-live-my-life one, with three co-ordinates such as where I am, what my mood is, the time etc then with a hit of a button it gives me a perfect failsafe course of action for the rest of the day? I could really do with one of those.

Seriously though, this is fantastic and we really appreciate it. We don't have a tech team per se so Community help like this is invaluable and we really value you sharing your knowledge and time with us. Well played, TRiG.

Derek, that is a very pleasing fantasy. I'll have to do one for myself first, though, and I suspect that might take a while ....

TRiG.

'We don't have a tech team per se so Community help like this is invaluable and we really value you sharing your knowledge and time with us.'

Per se, perhaps not. But you have us.

I like to think of the Aviators as more than AV creators. I also like to think of a plane taking off into a clear blue sky. I'd like us to come up with more of this kind of stuff; useful gadgets that are of use to everyone. We have h2g2aviators.com and enthusiasm, and I think it could be very useful to you guys in terms of site development as well as the clips we host on it.

As an example, people have been asking for years if h2g2 could come up with a way of collaborating on Entries by giving more than one person the power to edit an entry. I'm sure we could come up with a simple limited-access Wiki on h2g2aviators.com (TRiG, we need a name for this ) that Researchers could nip over and use. We could go a stage further, though. If we knew how h2g2 works, we could design our code so that it would work, probably with a little tweaking, on h2g2. We'd need advice from a sympathetic ear in the FM&T team to check stuff with, particularly in the early stages, but once we know what we're doing we could work on taking the site forward ourselves.

Alex posted a journal last week asking what we'd like to see for h2g2's 10th birthday in April. For me, it would be for us to be able to play an active part in the site's development. Volunteers are responsible for everything from welcoming newbies through supplying photographs to editing Edited Entries; the only thing we don't do is help to shape its long-term future. I think we have the skills to do that; we just don't have the tools. And because we have h2g2aviators to play on, all we really need is access to the FM&T tech team.

Imagine if we came up with a h2g2-specific search engine that actually worked, or a way to code Aviators links so that they were hosted on h2g2aviators.com but appeared onsite or as popups, or created a clickable world map of h2g2 geographical entries.

Now imagine that we could work on it in such a way that you could take the code, stick it straight into the site and have it working straight away.

Now *that's* a 'pleasing fantasy'

Hmmm.

The Aviators site is written in (very bad) php running on Apache. h2g2 is written in Perl running on Microsoft IIS. Not quite the same coding environments, and I know no Perl.

But the idea of hosting videos which are viewable through the h2g2 site is certainly appealing. And nor would it be too hard to implement, with a bit of a push from the BBC end. You already provide embedded YouTube videos on Film Network, another DNA subsite, so why not embedded Aviators videos on h2g2?

TRiG.

TRiG, Skanky, we are reading this, we are totally up for it and your postings are well-timed. We can't really say more but we're in talks at the minute about this very sort of idea. Stay cool - remember things take ages in the BBC - but we want you to know that we're genuinely pushing for this sort of thing and right now we're being listened to by some of our superiors.

Wow!

*tidies up the thread, in case of visitors*

Sorry, TRiG, I do get carried away sometimes, as you know by now. I like to give you the odd headache now and then.

I wasn't suggesting we build h2g2aviators to work in exactly the same way. But if we knew how Javascript gets added to h2g2 pages, for example, we could build gadgets over there that could be used easily here. That was more the gist of it. If we know what could be used and what can't, it's easier to come up with useful ideas.

Thanks for your attention, Eds

Sure, ask Jim Lynn to create a tag like so: Here is a video The parser should turn this into: Here is a video

Thread title change noted. It's probably time to head elsewhere with the techy stuff

I'll just respond to that once, though, because it's a nice example of how it could work.

That code there is fine, and it would work, but we could make it a bit more flexible. At the moment, it will only show clips viewable at http://www.h2g2aviators.com/player/popup?title=. That's fine, because we don't want people putting popups containing copyrighted content all over the place. How about if we wanted to show clips from the BBC YouTube account, though?

I guess you'd need a tag more like this:

Here is a video

The content of the TYPE would tell the parser whether to point to h2g2aviators or to http://uk.youtube.com/BBC. It would be tider than having a new VIDEO tag (eg BBCVIDEO) every time we had a new site we could link to, and you'd be building a tag that's a bit more future-proof.

The alternative would be to write the Aviators player so that it could only accept videos from certain sources.

***

Now TRiG has probably got a better idea, and that's the value of having a discussion group. We'd run through the idea and test it, and if Jim or someone else with a friendly ear were there they could point out any bits that wouldn't work on h2g2. Once we had it looking pretty much as we want it, we'd show the Eds and hopefully have it ready to go, with someone there already who knows exactly how to implement it.

Does that make sense?

See you over here, TRiG

F4758237?thread=6022782?thread=#pi1

I've made two minor changes to that page.

1. The three inputs are now blank when you start, instead of having a value of 0.

2. The generated URL has an escaped ampersand, so you can copy and paste it directly, without having to edit it.

TRiG.

Thank you very much indeed TRiG. We use this page now every time we add a new QotD; it's been very useful to us.

.. And my button's still there!!

I dun broke it a while ago while editing something else and never noticed till now.

Fixed again!

(And it's onceagain a standalone file with no dependencies on anything else, so I can happily play with other code without affecting it.)

TRiG.