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A comment on the pace of macosxhints...
Authored by: pcunix on Mar 28, '03 10:52:10AM

Well, if I were more patient I wouldn't have made my comment.

I understand your problems. I run a fairly large website too, and like you, I'm it: maitre d', chef and bottle washer. It sometimes takes me days to get to submissions too, and I don't get as many as you do.

I apologize.

But a couple of questions: although you only require someone to be logged in to submit hints, your link submission could pick up the login info if the submittor were logged in, and could pass that to you. So that doesn't always have to be a black hole.

Your own posting/approval process could also pick that info up when available and send out automatic email telling the person that their submission/lin/whatever was accepted and will appear.

Likewise, you could design a simple trash bucket that looked for that info and sent polite automatic rejections. If you wanted to add comments that would be fine though it probably isn't necessary - most of your rejections probably aren't from real people anyway.

So - now that I know that it isn't quite the black hole I thought, I will add things now and then. Sorry for my impatience, but it probably doesn't hurt that other folks read this and maybe you can easily implement the suggestions I had too.

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Tony Lawrence
Free SCO, Mac OS X and Linux Skills Tests: http://aplawrence.com/skillstest.html



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Coding...
Authored by: robg on Mar 28, '03 11:11:26AM

All of your suggestions are valid ... but there are two problems.

The first, and biggest, is that I'm not a coder :-). I dabble in PHP and MySQL, and can occasionally do useful things (the What's New box is my code, as an example). But when it comes to adding fields to databases, getting those fields in the right spot, adding auto-responders, etc., that's where I have to say "Huh?" and plead lack of skill.

Second, I rely on Geeklog to drive the site. If I modify (or have others modify) the core engine at all, then upgrading becomes a nightmare. I've seen it -- I had a heavily tweaked site based on Geeklog 1.1, and it took the better part of five months to get all the customizations removed and recreated (in a manner that didn't tweak the core too much) on version 1.3.7. So I'm sorta stuck -- I'd love to hire someone to code all of the solutions you mentioned (and more). But if/when I do, then I can't upgrade to the next release of Geeklog very easily at all. In that sense, I feel trapped between the proverbial rock and hard place.

So the ideal solution is that all these tweaks wind up in the core Geeklog product. But that will take a lot of time. In the interim, if you (or anyone else) is willing to take a look at creating some of this stuff, I'm more than willing to pay for (some level!) of custom code work. To anyone that might be interested, please drop me an email.

Thanks for the (kind but not necessary) apology;

-rob.



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Coding...
Authored by: pcunix on Mar 29, '03 05:01:13PM

Well, that's exactly why I refuse to use anything I didn't write myself on my site. It hurts me in some ways: I don't have the skills or the patience to do something like Geeklog, so I remain much less polished and awkward.

On the other hand, I gain the ability to control things MY way.

It's a tradeoff, and there is good and bad either way. You went one way, I went another. I envy the polish of MacOSXHints, but I'd never want to give up the control that I have.

I can't help you with Geeklog, sorry.

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Tony Lawrence
Free SCO, Mac OS X and Linux Skills Tests: http://aplawrence.com/skillstest.html



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