Reorganizing homepage for Ike

[Andy Carvin]

Just wanted to start a thread on what features people would like to see occupying real estate on our homepage for Ike. I plan to give the forum less prominence and move up features like the blog, map, etc. Are there any other widgets we should create for it? Any thoughts on the best ways of using the blog?

[Earl McGehee]

Don't take offense. I think there is a frustration by many of us that important resources are on the Wiki somewhere but they are often not being found. We need a better way to organize and cross reference our Wiki data so it is easier to find. The categories are a big step in this direction but we need to build pages to take advantage of the categories. For now we need multiple links to important things in multiple places but that seems to break the law about only entering stuff once - we are creating a maintenance nightmare. And we also need a process for identifying the most important things on the Wiki to bubble up to the top for direct links on the Ning page. More food for thought.

Ben Tremblay said:

Debbie Cerda said:

The Texas Specific information has been on the wiki for since September 4 (or earlier), and include the GDEM and Texas Online .
Ben Tremblay said:

I've come across some Texas-specific resources ... very high quality / very timely; for inclusion on FrontPage?
[ block of dangling text deleted]
Also, more general: Texas Governor's Division of Emergency Management (GDEM)

I'm not sure what you're telling me ... I got something wrong here?
I certainly don't expect that resources like that will be posted in one place only.
You're correcting me on something?
I apologize if my posting resources for inclusion here cause offense in some way.

p.s. why do people leave text dangling? Originals are here on the forum to be seen / read.

[Earl McGehee]

Wiki usage stats for top 4 pages visited: (I forgot to pull them last night during the storm so these are for the last 48 hr)
Main Page=2,935 visits; Shelters=81 views; Interactive Maps=80 views; Who is Doing What=49 views

[Ben Tremblay]

*refactored*
Earl McGehee said:

[...] I think there is a frustration by many of us that important resources are on the Wiki somewhere but they are often not being found. We need a better way to organize and cross reference our Wiki data so it is easier to find.
1) The categories are a big step in this direction but we need to build pages to take advantage of the categories. 2) For now we need multiple links to important things in multiple places but that seems to break the law about only entering stuff once - we are creating a maintenance nightmare. 3) And we also need a process for identifying the most important things on the Wiki to bubble up to the top for direct links on the Ning page.
More food for thought.

Indeed, indeed ... I don't think we use the concept of "structuration" nearly enough. Or "praxis", either. But actually, when folk are acting as principled practitioners, design improves incrementally.

User studies are important: the "F" shape of reading is paramount ... folk normally scan the full width at the top of the page, but scan less and less as they go lower. So lower left might still be useful, whereas lower right is the death zone. Too often I find both upper left and upper right used for some sort of advertising rather than hard data. Right now the wiki seems pret'near optimal IMNSHO.

Your #2 is what comes to my mind most often: a free-standing page that is neither comprehensive nor up to date motivates little attention so is likely to get dusty ... meanwhile it distracts from more substantial pages. So better just a link to primary sources or credible collections than that.

As for #3, news items are great for generating traffic but nuts&bolts has to be prime. The upper right our our homepage here ... I can't see how it's wrong. It might be missing an item or two, but it seems to be moving in the right direction.

Again with reference to the reports filed through VoIPWX.net it's impossible and would be wrong for a project like this to attempt an independent product. Primary sources have to be the focus.

So ... seems to me all of this is basically correct!

kudos all'round

p.s. The wiki stats you posted are revealing. I'd be interested in what pages were next in that list.

[Earl McGehee]

Anyone can view the Wiki stats on the special pages link on the left side menu. See the Popular Pages link for a ranked list of all the Wiki pages.

After Ike cools down I hope we can continue these discussions and come up with some new ideas that work. There are other web sites like ours around the world for Tsunamis and hurricanes and fires and earthquakes. We should look at the others and see what we like. Maybe we should create a template that anyone can borrow for whatever the disaster is in their part of the world. Or create a site with resources for other disaster sites. Thinking big - maybe too big. But that's the kind of thing the Internet encourages.

Ben Tremblay said:

*refactored*

[Earl McGehee]

Wiki activity in the last 24 hours:
We had a change today - "Shelters: Texas" jumped two places to become the number 4 page - displacing "Who is doing what". Here are the number of views in the last 24 hr for each of the top 5 pages - Main=1295, Shelters=28, Interactive Maps=57, Shelters:Texas=184, Who is doing what=24.

Thank you Ruth Anne and others for continuing to update the shelters pages.

[Ben Tremblay]

Earl McGehee said:

After Ike cools down I hope we can continue these discussions and come up with some new ideas that work. There are other web sites like ours around the world for Tsunamis and hurricanes and fires and earthquakes. We should look at the others and see what we like. Maybe we should create a template that anyone can borrow for whatever the disaster is in their part of the world. Or create a site with resources for other disaster sites. Thinking big - maybe too big. But that's the kind of thing the Internet encourages.

Agreed.
I'm thinking of some of the emergency management documents I came across around the time Ike was bearing down on Cuba ... I really should dig them out.

But even in general: the relationship of wiki-ness and blogishness is significant, the over-lap and the complimentarity. (FWIW I think of Ning as a rather hyper-active and non-optimized WordPress. I haven't looked under the hood with Drupal or Joomla enough to make a comparison.)
Hey, I bet Jive would be willing to chip in on a definitive emergency site. And resources like VoIPWX/IRLP aren't slouches. Inter-agency networks like MARS might also appreciate a ?what? multi-disciplinary / ecumenical system.

Great fun putting together a slap-dash blog post or a couple of mediocre wiki pages, but that's the 80% that comes from 20% of the effort. AFAIK plowing in what the next 20% of the product requires ... that's spade-work.

cheers

[Earl McGehee]

Stats for the last 24 hr for the top 5 wiki pages: Main=1241 views, Shelters=26 views, Shelters:Texas=217, Interactive Maps=35 views, Who is doing what=25 views.

Shelters:Texas moved up another slot today - replacing Interactive Maps as #3. "bldarter" has been doing all the shelters updates today. Thanks for keeping them current.

Ike is gone but it left lots of work for us here in Texas.

[Ben Tremblay]

Earl McGehee said:

[...] Main=1241 views, Shelters=26 views, Shelters:Texas=217, Interactive Maps=35 views [...]

Fascinatin'!
I can guess that folk are looking at maps to get some sense of what they can rely on for next time ... that's a nice task to fulfill.

Shelters ... are folk looking for a place to go? Still? Or are they looking for alternative accomodations?
What concerns me is this: are folk scrambling to connect with kin and friends? In any case, this Ning should support that as we can.
This is for sure a logistical headache; I'm wondering if it's something that would justify some major effort ... certainly a bundle of functionality that would be re-used.

Something we grappled with during Katrina was privacy issues ... do we list everybody's location?

p.s. the google results for ike texas shelters is swamped by news reports and blog posts

[Ben Tremblay]

Concept: see what credible orgs (such as Texas Medical Association) deploy on their version of "Emergency Preparedness"; dice finely, abstract and combine. The product should be a robust and comprehensive template. I just created / started EmergencyPreparedness on the wiki, as a test.

[Ben Tremblay]

BTW: I find that map on the HomePage reeeeaaaally offensive. Web1.0 use of Web2.0 technology. Let's face it, loading 500KB of data into DOM is just plain bad manners.

A very fine Web2.0 101 from InfoQ: "Quick Look at jQuery, Spring MVC, and XStream/Jettison". That's the way to do things: load on demand.
By way of example, my rather humble Peaks, Mountains, Hills and Trails ... an experiment with GeoTagging. Point is, it loads the map and a very slight data set. It then only loads other sets on demand, by RSS (in this case, from flickr).

<>editorial>It ticks me off when personality politics dictates page popularity rather than quality. </editorial>

[Blogs2c.com]

I'm thinking that this may also be the "kiss of death" for Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

It does display the map, after a very long wait, but after that, there is no life, or Safari just crashes.

--Brian

Ben Tremblay said:

BTW: I find that map on the HomePage reeeeaaaally offensive. Web1.0 use of Web2.0 technology. Let's face it, loading 500KB of data into DOM is just plain bad manners.

[Ben Tremblay]

*re-factored for readability*
Blogs2c.com said:

Ben Tremblay said:

BTW: [...] Let's face it, loading 500KB of data into DOM is just plain bad manners.

I'm thinking that this may also be the "kiss of death" for Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch devices.
It does display the map, after a very long wait, but after that, there is no life, or Safari just crashes.

That makes sense. The "500KB" I cite is just for the map ... so it's loading that 500KB on top of the rest of the page.
Even without widgets, Ning pages are tremendously heavy.

I avoid the front page as much as I can. Or let it load til "Recent Activity" shows then stop the load so I can get on with my life.