Yes, it’s not July, but I’m finally back. I’ve got some news for you “25 readers”: I’ve performed a full revision of the entire project. The main concept is to make the administrative side looking like a daily newspaper. With this comes many other improvements like Dublin Core metadatas (data about data), iTunes-like content browsing and no more than three links ( = choices) per pages on the average. Let’s go in depth:
One of the major improvements reside in the “metaphor”. I mean that now all the thing looks and is very similar to a daily newspaper. Browsing the administrative pages of your site will look more lake leafing through your preferred daily. I that this will help many people thanks to this known behaviour: you can read articles that gives you informations on many things, those information could only “informative” (tips, helps, explanations of what’s going on on the page) or a little more “active” that is to say they contains links.
Using a metaphor brought a bunch of automatic choices already made (that is very good while designing a web-app), a simpler, lighter and more elegant layout, and a clearer direction for the project. All the contents now consists of a body with some meta-datas like title or author attached that will be used to render the contents within the online pages
Browsing in iTunes-like way of the contents is very cool, I think that many people already know how to act in this kind of environment, and the remaining will easily learn with the right hint on the screen. The browsing is based on the metadatas attached to every content, so you’ll able to browse by author, by page (in which the content is present) and by categories associated with every content (yes, the fashionable tags). Obviously If you don’t select any criteria you’ll browse simply by title or by the first words of the content.
I’ve mentioned metadatas, this is very powerful. The more the content is structured with metadatas (i.e. to increase its meaningfulness) the more you’ll be versatile and future-ready. Examples? the iTunes-like search can be very narrow this way and if one day I’ll find that the actual criteria are not so meaningful, I’ll change them in seconds, that’s agility! RSS of your site can be implemented automatically. And also “Dublin Core”: if you know what it is you already know also what I’m thinking to, otherwise will be enough to know that if you add DC information to your site you’ll be ready for the future web-searches (think of a google search by author).
That’s all.
Soon I’ll add some screenshots and the address of the new SVN repository.
Filed under: Ajax, CSS, Design, Dublin Core, Google, Graphics, RDF | Leave a Comment
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