Community Ideas

[rrrene]

I'd like to collect the ideas from various discussions here to have a central place of discussion for what's on the table.

• [x] Hide big submit form behind button (thx @nithinbekal)
• [x] Make it clear that the title is tweeted after publication (thx @joekain)
• [x] Make it clear that user names refer to GitHub accounts (thx @dbeck)
• [x] Add an optional field for the author's Twitter handle (thx @slogsdon)

Let's hear how we can improve further! :+1:

[dbeck]

The text in this screenshot is misleading because it suggests that my post will go to twitter referring to my twitter account. This is an issue for those like me who has different account name on github (dbeck) and twitter (@dbeck74).

[rrrene]

Very true.

My idea would be the following: We add an octocat to the username to make it clear that these are GitHub users. I would not want to use real names here, nobody remembers "René Föhring" but some people might remember "rrrene", especially if they read it in pirate-voice.

We furthermore remove the "by @elixirstatus" part from the title placeholder, because this indeed refers to a Twitter account which is really misleading. The important message in the placeholder should be that it will be tweeted and should be phrased to suit that.

[slogsdon]

Here are a couple suggestions that I'd be willing to help with:

• Add an optional Twitter handle field for the author so that via @handle is included in the tweet, adding author attribution on that platform.
• Not sure of the exact UX flow here, but once a hyperlink is referenced, it would be nice if the site automatically grabbed meta information for the link, title and description mostly. This would improve the posting flow, reducing friction for actually posting.

I'm not sure if these have been suggested before elsewhere (currently on mobile), but let me know your thoughts.

[rrrene]

Hi Shane,

• Twitter handle: I think this could be a great addition. http://rubydaily.org/ has this as well and this feature would promote the coder's Twitter account for those interested.
• Fetching link meta data: Could you elaborate on that? So while I'm typing my announcement in Markdown, then I am pasting a link to Github or my blog. What should happen "behind the scenes" and how should the UI react?

I really appreciate your input!

[dbeck]

HI There,

For the meta data I would suggest to look at twitter card meta tags.

Best regards, David

sent from my too smart phone. sorry for the typos.

2015. aug. 16. 15:51 ezt írta ("René Föhring" notifications@github.com):

Hi Shane,

• Twitter handle: I think this could be a great addition. http://rubydaily.org/ has this as well and this feature would promote the coder's Twitter account for those interested.
• Fetching link meta data: Could you elaborate on that? So while I'm typing my announcement in Markdown, then I am pasting a link to Github or my blog. What should happen "behind the scenes" and how should the UI react?

I really appreciate your input!

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/rrrene/elixirstatus-web/issues/25#issuecomment-131553728 .

[optikfluffel]

And/or Open Graph ?

[dbeck]

Yep. That one too :-)

sent from my too smart phone. sorry for the typos.

2015. aug. 16. 17:04 ezt írta ("Udo Kramer" notifications@github.com):

And/or Open Graph http://ogp.me ?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/rrrene/elixirstatus-web/issues/25#issuecomment-131570055 .

[rrrene]

Maybe I should have phrased that second part better: (this got long fast, sorry for that)

It's clear that you can extract meta description and title from webpages. What was not entirely clear to me is what @slogsdon supposed to do with it.

If the suggestion is to use that data to auto-fill the announcement then I am not sure that is a good idea. @slogsdon's blog post is perfect for the suggested "auto-fill" functionality, but most announcements posted to ElixirStatus aren't.

Let me illustrate using two recent announcements written on elixirstatus.com recently:

Example 1:

# InchEx v0.4.0 released

I just released v0.4.0 of InchEx which brings Elixir v1.1 compatibility.

InchEx provides a Mix task to evaluate your inline docs and show you where they can be improved. Its `inchci.add` task can be used to add Elixir projects to Inch CI.

If we took the meta descriptions, it would contain GitHub's standard repo information:

# rrrene/inch_ex

inch_ex - Provides a Mix task that gives you hints where to improve your inline docs.

It loses the important message ("new version" and "Elixir v1.1 compatibility").

---

Example 2:

# P2P WebRTC file sharing app: Broker using Phoenix

In this blog post we discuss the few design decision that was taken in building a simple broker (in Phoenix) for connecting multiple browsers using WebRTC.

http://www.zohaib.me/p2p-webrtc-file-sharing-app-broker-using-phoenix/

I love both the article and the "appetizer" @zabirauf provided in the announcement. Using meta information it could have looked like this:

# P2P WebRTC file sharing app: Broker using Phoenix

WebRTC was created primarily for video and voice communication but it has the API to send raw binary data between two browsers as well. This opens up a lot of opportunities to create more peer to peer web application which...

Not terrible, but the hand-written version is so much better (as it should be) ...

---

Possible compromise

Announcements like this:

# How to add and test HTTP basic authentication in a Phoenix app

http://www.cultivatehq.com/posts/add-basic-authentication-to-a-phoenix-application/

that only contain a link could be transformed into something akin to Twitter cards.

---

@slogsdon @dbeck @optikfluffel What do you think?

[slogsdon]

@rrrene There are a couple of ways to handle this that I was thinking about originally.

Your possible compromise idea is definitely a good open for posts that contain only a link. This is also similar to one of the options I was thinking of when suggesting this in the first place, which is to display the grabbed meta data independent of the poster's content. Facebook and Google+ currently have the ability to do this for posted links.

Another, simpler option is to provide a "Suggest" button to the poster that would be entirely opt-in. The button would go grab the meta data and inject it into the title/description fields for the poster to edit as they see fit. Reddit has this ability for link posts, although it is limited to the title only since they do not allow accompanying text descriptions on link posts.

[rrrene]

@slogsdon I certainly find the idea appealing, esp. as extra information about the posted links. It is a feature I like alot in chat apps, when they give you a preview of posted links.

The only thing I am uncertain about is how we implement this visually, on the frontend side, in a way that does not look "tacked on".

[rrrene]

@slogsdon I just added the ability to add your Twitter handle on ElixirStatus so that it is tweeted out. :+1:

@dbeck This might be interesting for you as well!

[dbeck]

@rrrene thanks for the heads up! I appreciate this feature a lot, and of course your initiative from day one :)

[sairam]

Having a expertise level for the post might be useful like PragProg . Example link - https://pragprog.com/book/phoenix/programming-phoenix

[rrrene]

@sairam This is an appealing idea. I would have one concern: Who would be the judge of that? The author?

[sairam]

It could be the author at first, but may be later readers can suggest where it'd fit properly. On Jan 4, 2016 12:43 AM, "René Föhring" notifications@github.com wrote:

@sairam https://github.com/sairam This is an appealing idea. I would have one concern: Who would be the judge of that? The author?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/rrrene/elixirstatus-web/issues/25#issuecomment-168532287 .