 March 14, 2008 - 2:27pm | Although I signed up ages ago, I'm just now having the chance to come back to this site and really start learning my way around. Lots of cool stuff. Having said that (and speaking as a book editor), it really bugs me that some of the projects are alphabetized under the word "the." That's just so very...incorrect. A, an, and the are never supposed to be used as part of alphabetizing a list. Of course, this is far from the only website or other medium that I've seen make this error, but it always bothers me. Okay, nitpick over. Back to browsing! Edited to note that I have no knowledge of website design, so maybe it's a software thing, not an intentional choice. |
March 14, 2008 - 2:39pm | Howdy, CSB, glad to have you here!  What you are pointing out is the problem with the digital medium mixed with the human element. There's not a lot we can do about that that I know of. However, it may be possible to resolve the situation, but it would take a lot of very specialized programming to resolve, I think, further increasing page load times, which are already at a premium on this site. |
March 14, 2008 - 2:41pm | Beat me to it! I had just edited my original post because I realized it might be something to do with the software/programming. Thanks for the welcome. |
 March 14, 2008 - 5:05pm | Actually, it shouldn't take too much specialized programming. It all really depends on where the sorting is happening. In theory, if whatever is doing the sorting can do regular expressions, you could do a quick check to ignore the article while the list is being alphabetized. I could throw out a Perl script example but I don't thing that would be much help as I suspect this site is written in JavaScript or PHP which I know little and nothing about respectively. Plus for it to be relevant I'd really have to see (and at least somewhat understand) the site code in question. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
March 14, 2008 - 5:10pm | The site is actually thrown together from several scripting styles, including Drupal, php, asp, and javascript. I believe it's the handler scripts that he has to write that takes up all the page load time. |
 March 15, 2008 - 11:34pm | The sorting is being done via sql query. The site uses PHP to serve up html and javascript to client-side browsers, and is built on a sql backplane. It started as an open-source site built on Drupal, but since then I've hacked it up too much to make it fully Drupal compliant. I know I could perform the query to return an array, then use php to work out the details on the erroneous article alphabetizing. PHP script is not too dissimilar to perl, it seems a subset of perl actually, but I'm not totally sure about that. Welcome to the site CSB! I don't know when I'll have time to get to it, but it's a valid point you make. 3. We wear sungoggles during the day. Not because the sun affects our
vision, but when you're cool like us the sun shines all the time. |
