Monday, September 19, 2016

Weekly Report 9: More topics

This week I wanted to extend my program, with the lists of cards containing information. In the past few weeks, I made examples with topics such as conifers and zika. In the previous report I explained how I got the facts, and how other people could get them as well. But I felt it was a bit too complex, and mainly too messy. Executing nine previously unused commands while keeping an eye on the file paths, and change the scripts as well: not user-friendly.

So I made a GitHub repository ctj-cardlists, where people can submit topics with pull requests, and where I can improve the HTML, CSS and JavaScript without having to update every single HTML file. For getting facts I made a Bash script, and a guide on how to use it and how to submit a topic when you have the facts.

Cardlist page with the topic conifers (code co1)

I expect any interested person to be able to add a dataset to view with the page. Any part of the page is linkable, and it is a nice way to quickly glance at a lot of articles, and see common recurrences. Even if it currently mainly means "most misspelled plant names" (Pinus masson... uh... massonsana... no, I got it. Pinus massoniaia!). It will become more interesting with new columns like in the example below.

I'll improve the page in the next weeks, for example search auto-completion and shorter loading times, and in the end extra features like new columns about e.g. popular genus-word combinations. One problem is that you currently can't scroll down much anymore. This is because it shortens browser rendering times a LOT, and a fix on my side isn't in place yet. Search results and subpages focusing on a specific article/genus/species work as expected (actually better, because the shorter loading times allow more cards in general). I'll try to fix the scrolling problem soon.

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