The ChandlerGuild.com Web Site

Here we'll address the software technologies and design requirements to implement an on-line collaborative community to resembles a 21st century version of the craft guild. Of particular interest is who we implement the 'story-driven, game-oriented' design requirements for the e-commerce engine that will power the business side of the Chandler Guild community.

HOW TO - Comment, Story, Article or Diary Entry?

It is easy to feel like a deer in the headlights when you first become a member in an on-line community where you have the chance to contribute content throughout the web site. One place to start is to understand the various kinds of content that you can contribute. Once you understand the types of contributions you can make, it will become easier to decide when and how you want to make your voice heard as a member of the Chandler Guild. Comments are 'info bits' associated with particular 'info nodes', like a story, article or diary entry. Comments can't be categorized like the full 'node' bits can, since they only tend to make sense in the context of the conversation in which they are contributed. Once you make a relevant diary or story entry, you can then create a 'place relevant' comment in the original story or other 'info node' that stimulated you to contribute your new content. Then, you can include a link in your comment to your new diary entry or story. Diary Entries are actually blogs or what is also called web logs. As you 'self-publish' your own diary entries, they become a kind of personal magazine that folks can read in an on-going stream by visiting your profile page. In addition, your diary entries can be categorized and thereby linked into other places on the web site. Stories and articles are pretty much like a diary entry without being included in your diary. If you want to contribute a news item or some content for the Village Chandler Handbook, you probably want to contribute a story or article rather than a diary entry. The pivotal question that will help you to decide if something is a diary entry is to ask yourself, "Is this contribution about me and my experience as a village chandler?" If your contribution is not part of your personal story, then make it a story/article rather than a diary entry. I know, sounds confusing, but deciding whether your content contributions should be a comment, story, article or diary entry is one of the basic skills you'll develop over time as a Guildmember. And it may not be apparent how to create links and other formatting 'tags' for those of us unfamilar with handwriting HTML (hypertext mark-up language). As soon as I can, I'll create some How To advice stories to help folks learn how to jazz up their content contributions and, more importantly, to include links to content within our site as well as to good content on other sites. Down the road a bit, we'll be incorporating a browser-based editor 'plug in' that will make formatting and linking easy. In the meantime, we have to 'roll our own' with manually entered 'tags'.

Write Locally, Publish Globally - Some Authoring Best Practices

Nothing is more frustrating than mustering the creative juices to write something, then losing it before it is safely saved in a secure location. Here are some tips on how to keep your sanity while contributing content to the Village Chandler Guild web site. (These tips generally apply to any web browser-based content authoring you might do anywhere on the web.) First, let's understand the 'fragility' of browser-based content authoring... Tip #1: If the item you are contributing through a browser web page 'form' (edit boxes with a 'Submit' type button) is longer than a few sentences or is something that takes more that a couple minutes to write, PLEASE for your own sanity write the copy 'locally' and use the form, through a cut-and-paste operation, to transfer your contribution to the web server. Even if your Internet connection is maintained throughout the content contribution, there is always that very real possibility that the server you are 'conversing' with will have forgotten about your 'thread of conversation' and will respond with a 'Who are you and do you want? Let's start over response.' This is an inevitable 'gitcha' based on how servers have to 'timeslice' their attention to you and many other activities and user 'conversations'. The best strategy is to open you local text editor or word processor and capture your content without the dependency that the server will remember you and what you were two were doing together. Tip #2: Even though you have the best intentions, you will slip and write something that goes into Web Limboland. If you are lucky and this is a big 'if', as the 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' reminds us, "Don't panic!" Calmly – and this can be difficult in proportion to the size and complexity of the thing you've lost – press you Back Arrow once to (hopefully) take a step back in time to the web form you just submitted. Every now and again, this will result in your bringing back the form you've just filled out with its copy intact. If so, count your lucky stars and consider this a reminder how important it is to write locally, publish globally. Tip #3: If all else fails and you are sure that you have lost your Next Great American Novel, bite the bullet and get back on the horse right away. Chalk your loss up to experience and before you do anything else, as stupid as this sounds, rewrite your piece (locally of course) and contribute it as you intended. If you accept your loss and don't make your contribution, the Technology Gremlins will have won. You'll have a negative experience that will eat at you forever and, believe it or not, diminish your incentive to make further contributions at a later time. When you accept the loss and rewrite, you win and your readers win. Not only do your readers get the chance to read your contribution, the chances are – and this is a too-true fact of a Writer's Life – your rewrite will almost always be shorter, more to the point and better thought out. -Sohodojo Jim-- P.S. Yes, the above was writen locally and published globally as I have been bitten by this snake more times than I care to remember! :-)

Drupal selected as ChandlerGuild.com development platform!

The Open Source content management system, Drupal, has been selected by Sohodojo as the platform for the Chandler Guild community web site. The Drupal development framework's outstanding community 'plumbing' features are ideally suited to the requirements for building an on-line Guild to support the decentralized and distributed network of our Village Chandlers. A hearty thank you to Sohodojo Advisory Board member Gary Lawrence Murphy for bringing Drupal to our attention. Gary recently rebuilt his Teledynamics nanocorp-orate web site using Drupal after 'kissing too many frogs'. We'll have more to say about this excellent and powerful Open Source software as we gain experience and insights into it. So far, it is great!