Entries, System Sally « A System Sally

Entries, System Sally

Published May 16, 2009 blogging , meta 5 Comments

Rationale:

Update

System:

Entries will have both @next and @previous links if necessary.

Advantages:

Full navigation forward and back in a system’s evolution.

Status:

@current

5 Responses to “Entries, System Sally”

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1 jacob May 17, 2009 at 1:27 am

this isn’t working the way i thought it would. are next and previous supposed to link to the next and previous versions of the system, or just the next and previous post? because they are doing the latter, and leaving trackbacks on the next and previous posts, which makes a redundant and confusing situation. in wordpress you can alter the individual post view to link to the next and previous posts in a way that doesn’t create a trackback: http://codex.wordpress.org/Next_and_Previous_Links

as mentioned before, if you want to create links to previous versions of the system, you’d need to do it by hand, but then a link to the newer version would automatically appear mixed in with the comments as a trackback.

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2 systemsally May 17, 2009 at 1:46 am

jacob, thanks for the tag-to-category tip from the very get go. i was slow in adopting it. but now that i see it, it’s way better.

one thing that i think confused you is that in this particular case, all of the next and previous links happen to refer to posts i did one after the other. if you check out the @current public library post, however, you will see that it links back to the last iteration of the system, not just the previous post.

so, i think i’ve done you last thing (‘as mentioned before…’), which i did do by hand. i’m a little confused by the trackbacks, but i think it’s good.

let me do a few more and see how they go.

i’m very happy with this new shift, and while i did redo the whole catalog of systems into categories, i’m not going to spend too much time worrying about doing the “next-previous” linking system for older posts. i want the blog to reflect it’s own evolution. i want the systemsally blogging system evolution to be evident in the blog itself.

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3 jacob May 17, 2009 at 8:24 pm

if you check out the @current public library post, however, you will see that it links back to the last iteration of the system, not just the previous post.

this makes no sense. why would “current” link to a non-current version of the system? also, if you update the system, you’d go back to this post and edit this part out? here’s my proposal for an integrated system of documetation that uses trackbacks:

ok, first, what is a trackback? a trackback is an automatically generated link that appears as a comment when one page links to another. you may notice that a link appears now in every post (a) that you link to from somewhere else (b), in the form of a link to b.

one problem with the current system is that since you include links to the previous and next posts inside the body of the post, these links create trackbacks, making the “@next” and “@previous” links themselves redundant, and causing confusing links to appear in the comments section.

one solution is to use information from http://codex.wordpress.org/Next_and_Previous_Links to put the “next” and “previous” links in the individual entry template, and NOT in the body of the text– this would remove the redundant trackback problem.

you could also solve this problem by turning off trackbacks, but i think trackbacks could be very valuable in this setting, in that they allow you to easily see other pages (of your own and that of others’) that link to a particular post. so for example, if you’re writing up a new system regarding pocketwatches, you could link to the old post and this would automatically create a link in the comments section of the old post to the new post. so someone searching “pocketwatch systems” could easily find the newest version. also, since the trackbacks appear in the comments section, the revision is effectively included in the conversation. like, if someone comments about a better pocketwatch system and you make a new post (and in so doing, link to the old post), the link to the new post appears as a reply to the comment.

it may be a bit of work to locate the last version of a system (in order to link to it) every time you revise it, but it might also prove a valuable experience to look at the old version every time you re do it.

very happy about the “rationale” “system” “advantages” format.

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4 sam boyd November 6, 2009 at 12:58 am

come back system sally

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