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

Ah - too much of the fabled omnipresence and not enough of the actual presence.

Should we invite the italics over some time? They probably need a few safe ideas with which to get the whole thing started - as examples of what you can do if nothing else (which the help pages really aren't).

I'm trying to watch TV at the same time as posting. Some fun gadgets today - with very predictable Clarkson results! The Sluggy cartoon had a spoof of one thing long before it was even publicised much here. I can't remember whether they had insider info for some reason.

I almost forgot this again (as I have done for weeks now).

With the front page archive we haven't been including the banner one-liner above the new EG entries which is usually (vaguely) specific to them. If someone used test to follow the trail we've left them they would see it but who really does that.

However, I wondered if it was worth going back and including the banner somehow? It shouldn't be used as is because of the non-standard GuideML SUBJECT tag - which someone recently found was used in another entry and caused inconsistent/buggy behaviour. We might make it part of the date HEADER or a SUBHEADER under that. It wasn't the same back in Feb 2001 anyway.

Ah, well, I have to earn that 'L+++++' somehow.

I think that we should show them it, once we're a little further on. I suppose that we'll have to keep comments here about it as vague as that. (*waves to the lurkers*)


It's a lot of work to go through all the old pages looking for banners! Should we split the work? Say, you do July 2003, May 2003 etc and I do June 2003, April 2003 etc?

I think it would look best if we incorporated them as, say, '11 July 2003: H2G2 - DOLING IT OUT'.

RhoMuNuQ

Yes, I was trying quite hard to be vague/cryptic.

It's going to be hard to remember to skip months - me odd, you even. Then again, I might just do it all while you're asleep. The thing which concerned me about adding it to the date headers is that it might get too long. I think I remember a no-wrap bug/feature in headers from somewhere recently (should check that). Also the comments weren't originally next to the date or in quite the same headers. I must check the various skins for that too.

I've checked the front page in the 4 skins and also my test page (A1019684) versions.

The front page use of SUBJECT varies:
- brunel is quite different from the others in putting the SUBJECT in a coloured table/box.
- classic and alabaster show SUBJECT like HEADER.
- plain makes SUBJECT come out strangely smaller than the sub-headers.

From my test page:
- no HEADER types wrap in classic (so adding to the date could be bad)
- for some reason plain doesn't leave the normal gap after HEADER but does with SUBHEADER.
- SUBJECT is like HEADER in classic, normal text in alabaster and plain but invisible in brunel!
- all skins lose the extra gap below a header which is in a TABLE.
- TH is not the same anyway in the skins but is left aligned in plain.

Hmm. I think I'm voting for the SUBJECT comment being on a separate line from the date, in a TABLE and probably another HEADER rather than a SUBHEADER (and definitely not left as SUBJECT). I can turn July into a test of the best.

Hmm again - having looked at the past week in July 2003.

So far all the comments seem quite short and might fit next to the date. I just have this nagging recollection of a longer one. The "h2g2 -" seems a bit repetitive to me but I think it might occasionally be significant to the sense of the comment, so needs to be kept.

Oh and I forgot to mention before that brunel turns SUBJECT into capitals on the front page as well as putting it in a box (and instead of making it invisible white on white). So it isn't possible to simultaneously reproduce all skins accurately anyway.

So I think I'm agreeing with you (not that this is a problem ) except for the capitals (which I hope is agreeable to you ) until such time as it turns out that a comment is ludicrously long (when it may need a rethink). It's past time for me to logoff too now. I'll fix July later.

I started doing a few pages earlier and stopped at March because it seemed to be repetitive. Some days in later months have repeats which show that they had failed to change the comment. This looks very inappropriate on a couple of them but I couldn't find any replacements for the text even when I did find replacement front pages (for other reasons). I'll have another look from March backwards to see if the pattern picks up again to make it worth doing.

*looks at the times* That was a very late night.

I agree with you about the capitals! I didn't look at the test page for the A-number - only at the front page itself - and didn't realise that Brunel had capitalised the subject.

Perhaps we should only add the subject to the date header if it had changed from the previous day? That should eliminate most of the irrelevant subjects.

RhoMuNuQ

Yes - and I ended up carrying on talking to Farlander after saying I was signing off. I went to bed a little after 3am (BST) and was awake again at 5:15. I thought my clock must have gone wrong in a new way (normally flashes if there's been a power cut) because it seemed like it had been a full night. But when I pootled off to check another clock it said the same. So I went back to bed for a while longer.

NB Most people sleep for about 8 hours in 2 batches of 4 hours and can easily wake or be woken up in between them without upsetting their sleep. I only sleep for about 4 hours in 2 batches of 2 hours (if at all) so it was perfectly timed for me to be awake, I just wasn't expecting it to be so light outside (because I was slightly later starting than some nights) or be so convinced I'd done the sleeping thing. I'm a past master at pretending to be asleep but in this case (as in others) it was probably a big mistake to try again as I now have a terrible headache. I'm not really good at being horizontal because of my various medical problems. So now I'm paying for my poor judgement in trying to force myself to sleep more instead of getting back to the archive or doing something else.

Sorry, that was me. The system wasn't letting me login for some reason. It kept saying no email address was set up. I was beginning to think it must be a new database problem/symptom. I guess I _had_ finally made it back in as archiver instead of myself but hadn't switched back again.

By the way, I have a fun idea for a novel thread game/thingy but it would take even more planning and careful execution than the smiley one did. I'm not sure I've got the enthusiasm. It would be easier with pages but a complete waste of them.

That is late! At least you can have fast conversations with people connecting from the US/Canada.

That does sound like another database problem. It's happened to me before, but fixed itself after just a few minutes each time.

What's the idea? Can you post it on a group if you can't post it here?

RhoMuNuQ

Oh it's not top secret or really naughty.

You may be too young to remember and I don't know if there's anything much like it still around, but there used to be text-based computer "adventure" games and later some books of the sort. Mostly there was a description of what was happening and then you got some options of what to do next. Usually these were a bit limited (for soon to be obvious reasons) and failed to match anything you wanted to do but this was before the days of interpreters and cheap high-powered high-memory computers. Sometimes there was a random component (done by the computer or rolling dice for the book form). Then you would read the next page to which you were directed.

It occurred to me that this could be done as one adventure per thread (with or without the random element) on an adventure game page. The page would merely be an index of links to show just the starting post in the various story threads (&show=1). The posts themselves would contain the description and choice links. The reason it would take a lot of planning and careful execution is to randomise the posts before posting them so that people can't very easily ruin the story by reading the thread in the normal way. Lots of links would be referring to posts which didn't exist yet, eg Post 3 saying &show=1&skip=25. There would be no going back and correcting mistakes without an extremely co-operative italic (which would be a straight "no" then).

Perhaps I'm being a bit old and geeky, but I thought some people might think it was fun.

Ooh - that's an interesting idea! That just might work, but anybody posting in the thread while it was being set up would ruin it. It sounds like a perfect candidate for being set up at 3am, when few people are online to ruin it, by accident or otherwise.

RhoMuNuQ

I noticed you were slipping in your commitment to the L+++++(?) target: <./>T291780</.>

...and then the site crashed while I was trying to tell you. I'd better quit now while it's working.

[SEF specialist lurker]

Ah, but I don't have to be subscribed to a thread to be reading it.

RhoMuNuQ

Look what I've found! ( if you've already seen this!)

From <./>Development-Features#frontpage</.>: "Archive of Front Pages - A page from where everyone can access all the front pages since the launch of the site."

RhoMuNuQ

No, I hadn't seen that in the list that I can recall. Do you have any idea what date it was added? The last time I looked for a feature/bug the "wrong" one was in the list (ie not quite what I meant) but I can't remember what that was. I noted that the CA pages started linking to the FP archive a little while back. Do you still plan to make your own request to the staff for unmoderation some time?

It must have been added soon after we started making the archive - straight after I first saw a front page archive mentioned in a thread, we started making one.

I saw that CA page linking to it a few days ago - maybe we should add a reciprocal link?

I might make my own request, but I think we should advertise the existing archive pages first. If there's a uniformly positive response, that would definitely help our case.

RhoMuNuQ

I had thought about a reciprocal link but decided it made little sense. I had already linked to the 2 weekly topics long before that because those did seem to make sense.

Your last idea of an advert was to place it in the thread it was supposed to be advertising so that it would only be seen by someone who didn't need to see it. That was about the same time you also seemed to be concerned I was going to make a forward link to post 17(?) somewhere else entirely and for no particularly good reason. I was beginning to think you had heat-stroke or something that day. Did you have something more constructive in mind this time?

PS I've just been briefly cut off by a thunderstorm so I'm not sure how much more online stuff is safe at the moment.