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

Well, here we are, a mere hour or so before the official launch of this beast. They're all swanning off enjoying themselves at the TV studio, and I'm left here to throw buckets of cold water over our servers when they go into meltdown. Which they probably will. Plus ca change. Ah well - how much fun can you have in a TV studio, anyway?
 

I came ...hi I am a genuine user
and sadly not asleep
if your servers melt you can use my sparc ultra 60 ..
which cost 25000$ more than my car did
but then my laptop cost 2 * £ what my car did !
am I sad or what ?
cest la vie too

Anyone here from London.

Hi H yes in wimbledon and you?

Congrats on your new site. Consider me chagrined that it took me three weeks to find it.

I love it. It sucks. Not in a bad way, in a good way! Any newly released product sucks. This one's
bursting with promise. I'm sure you have a list a mile long of features you plan to implement.
Please consider the following suggestions:

1. To start with, how about a way to reply privately to a writer? I haven't yet found anything that lets me do this. See http://www.slashdot.org for an example.
2. How about some kind of perfuntory login procedure for users who (1) use more than one computer, or (2) share a computer with someone else? See above.
3. Your composition widget is pretty lame. No, let me correct that. It's very lame. Can't you at least wrap text in it? (See above.)
Making it dynamcally resize according to the enclosing window would be nice. Making it more than 5 lines tall would be nice, too.
4. The whole value of an online guide, to me, is being able to really surf through it. To enable this, your page engine should
automatically link all "interesting" words in user pages to somewhere else, be it search results or other user pages. You
could let users specify which keywords they want their page to respond to (and your search engine could add synonyms).
The short of this point is, your site is currently way too static! For a good dynamic site, consider: http://work.ucsd.edu:5141/cgi-bin/http_webster

Please accept my comparison with Slashdot as a mark of praise. Slashdot is the single best implementation of a dynamic,
community-oriented, discussion-oriented web site I have yet seen. It is technically much better than this site at present, but
I would argue that your community is better. Keep up the good work!

>Any newly released product sucks.

How very true.

> I'm sure you have a list a mile long of features you
> plan to implement.

You have no idea . Or perhaps you do.


> 2. How about some kind of perfuntory login procedure for
> users who (1) use more than one computer, or (2) share
> a computer with someone else? See above.

Yes, this is one of the features we will add in the short term. We hoped to have it done in time for launch, but time was not on our side.

>3. Your composition widget is pretty lame. No, let me correct that. >It's very lame. Can't you at least wrap text in it? (See above.)

Wrap text? It seems to do that for me. It's just a standard HTML form edit box as far as I know.

>Making it dynamcally resize according to the enclosing window would >be nice. Making it more than 5 lines tall would be nice, too.

You're not wrong there.

>4. The whole value of an online guide, to me, is being
>able to really surf through it. To enable this, your
>page engine should automatically link all "interesting"
>words in user pages to somewhere else, be it search
>results or other user pages.

Yes. Defining 'interesting' automatically is tricky though.

> You could let users specify which keywords they want
> their page to respond to (and your search engine
> could add synonyms).

But that's an easier way .

>Please accept my comparison with Slashdot as a mark of praise.

I'm trying to .

Thanks for the comments.

Tim

I'll try dissecting your site one piece at a time.
By the way, you should do something about that echoed text thing after the smiley.

I checked the code in your page and in a reply form that I know wraps text. (Slashdot, if you must know.)
The difference I found is that their textarea includes the attribute: wrap="virtual"

I'm not pretending to be an expert on HTML forms, but adding this attribute does seem to change a text
entry widget from an infinitely wide scrolling area into one that wraps text.

- AA

I can't click on 'my home' without it saying that the server is down. is it just me having this problem?

that's error 316 if it's any help...