Content Musings

Sorting

This is a list of a different things in no particular order.

Unsorted List

El Paso, Texas
Saint Nicholas, Belgium
The Lord of the Rings
Newark, New Jersey
XVIIme siècle
.38 Special
St. Louis, Missouri
New York, New York
1001 Arabian Nights
The 1-2-3 of Magic
Albany, New York
#!%&: Creating Comic Books
The Hague, Netherlands
$35 a Day Through Europe
H20: The Beauty of Water
Plzen, Czech Republic

To sort this list, we can approach it through Exact Organisation Schemes which include alphabetical/alphanumeric (in order of number/letter), chronological (in order of time) and geographical (by location). The simplest would be alphanumerical "dictionary sort" in ascending order. I sorted the following with GNU Sort's dictionary sort (sort -bdf).

Dictionary Sort

1001 Arabian Nights
$35 a Day Through Europe
.38 Special
Albany, New York
#!%&: Creating Comic Books
El Paso, Texas
H20: The Beauty of Water
Newark, New Jersey
New York, New York
Plzen, Czech Republic
Saint Nicholas, Belgium
St. Louis, Missouri
The 1-2-3 of Magic
The Hague, Netherlands
The Lord of the Rings
XVIIme siècle

Let's consider some problems with this blind alphanumerical dictionary sort:

• Place names with prefixes such as The and El get sorted by these prefixes first and then the actual name. To this effect The Hague gets sorted under T rather than the secondary, possibly more meaningful and useful H. Likewise El Paso gets sorted under E rather than P. This problem makes this "exact" organisation scheme a bit ambiguous and the solution may be to simply ignore this problem if content isn't too clustered around common prefixes.
• Newark, New Jersey gets sorted before New York, New York because the a in Newark immediately places it above the Y of the same position in New York.
• Saint Nicholas, Belgium is before St. Louis, Missouri because the a in Saint Nicholas is sorted before the t in St. Louis. GNU Sort does not take into account that St. and Saint are the same thing, else they would have their positions swapped. Similarly XVII in XVIIme siècle is not taken to be the more literal 17 instead and ends up at the end the list instead of the beginnig.
• Numbers are handled as the precursors to letters. If you had 1st Birthday, 2nd Birthday and Third Birthday they would appear to be sorted in that order.
• Punctuation and special characters are basically the same thing, however it is worth noting that the options I specified to GNU Sort told it to ignore the space if it was the first character. GNU Sort orders these characters by their position in the ASCII Table. The sorting options I used also ignored capital letters - if you look at the ASCII table linked above you can see that this makes a difference to the program as capital letters appear before lower case. Having capitals appear first may be desirable in some cases, it may be a quick way of separating out Proper Nouns in English texts (though obviously error prone).
• If we assume that the italicsised items are book titles there is a more useful way to organise this list such as books first. However if there is a book with a name that is also a location this scheme could get confusing due to insufficient formatting a metadata to clearly express the difference.
• If the cities represent places you’ve visited and the book titles are ones you’ve read, chronology could be used to represent a timeline of these events. Though, it is worth noting that events can overlap with this scheme and people in the original set are discarded..

The following table represents places visited and books read over time. In intervals where books were read and places were visited in the same year I put the books last in alphanumeric order.

The above table makes sense if you regard reading a book and visiting a place as just generic events, but an even more useful representation of the data would be the books read in those cities regardless of year, but in chronological order. Andreas Lukita has suggested this in his blog.

Labelling and Navigation

Once a system for organising content logically is established, the next step is to implement a labelling and navigation scheme.

My main personal website: DDEVnet.net

The following table describes the coherence (or lack of) in the labels and navigation of DDEVnet.net.

There are a few problems that have become apparent in this table. Because this is my site I know why they are this way - inflexiblity of the Nikola static site generator, at least the version the site is based on anyway. For example the Blog page's Title should be "Blog | DDEVnet.net" however it isn't due to a quirk to do with making the post summary page (aka. the Blog page) not the main page for the site. I will query the Nikola developer about ways to fix this. The Articles page has the heading and title "Tags". This is because I could not get Nikola to do a nice listing of articles and so I decided to link to the tags summary for the set of posts of the Article subtype. It is like I could write some custom templates to fix this. Finally the last unsatisfactory item is my contact link in the footer. Using mailto: links is an archaic idea and I really should link to the Contact part of the About page instead.

Throughout the site there are a few inconsistencies in labelling. The post listing on the main page is not formatted the same as the listing on the Blog page and is missing some fields (date, number of comments). I can fix the code I use to get the listing on the front page to make it be the same as the listing on the Blog page. Although it is consistent, there are some pages where the headings are not also links - these appear in orange and when you have a page which has both styles of heading it can look a bit odd. On the About page the "Source" link for the article appears next to the search box and it appears to be the label for the input field - this needs to be fixed. It would make sense to move the Source label out of the header (maybe into the footer). The About page should not have a Source label - I may be able to disable it for that page. Thankfully the state of the post and article pages is quite satisfactory appart from the aforementioned positioning of the "Source" label.

None of the above issues will bother (or be particularly noticed) by my target audience who are used to trudging through terrible websites; but usually arrive directly at a page via search engine). However fixing the Articles section will increase the chance of users who browse the site to discover other content they may be interested in.

Sites in the style of DDEVnet.net used to be very popular a few years ago before social networking sites exploded in popularity and the majority of the tech community became largely apathetic in regards to personal online presence (I'm resisting a rant; perhaps I'll expand on this later). In my immediate social circle I was unable to easily find a site comparable to my own, though I am sure they are there if I look hard enough. Pressing out into the edges of my social circle I found that Adrian Sutton a fellow (but non-current?) HUMBUG member has a blog - but what makes it actually similar to mine and not just a blog is that he has a clearly shown About page and also a Résumé. More similar to DDEVnet.net than Adrian's is that of Chris Neugebaur because his main page is similar to mine in that it has a quick summary of who he is and what the site is, with a listing of recent blog posts and additional sections including an About linked off to the side. It is hard to say definitively whose is better but if I had to rank them I would say My site, Chris's and then Adrian's - though I feel a truly excellent site would combine aspects of all three. My site should include a Month/Year archive of blog posts like Chris's and it should contain a clear link to my résumé like Adrian's.

If you have a website I can recommend reviewing it as I have in this section - you may be surprised to find mistakes you assumed you were too clever to make!

Smug IA Bear is so smug.