Better feature request and information tracking
sit
Registered Users Posts: 87 Big grins
smugmug is a great service and site, and it seems that there are lots of good suggestions, news and comments in this forum. Unfortunately, while forums might be good for support and discussions, I don't find it easy to find out what's in them short of scanning every thread manually. For example, the features thread is getting kind of long and doesn't even hold every feature request.
I think that a wiki and a blog might be a very good way to help organize this information. The site maintainers could post information about new features etc to blog.smugmug.com, and we could easily monitor (via RSS) and explore old information, comments would be relevant to specific posts about specific features. Something like wiki.smugmug.com could be used to host user feature requests (in a nicely organized way, e.g. by functionality), information about API-based extensions (e.g. smugmug.py or SE). We'd be able to directly organize information, FAQs, etc.
As some examples, fastmail.fm is a web mail service that uses blog.fastmail.fm to disseminate information about new features and wiki.fastmail.fm to host feature requests and documentation. ubunutlinux.org uses a wiki to sketch out new documentation and then transfers completed content to a more static non-editable form (I think).
I'm curious: what do people think?
I think that a wiki and a blog might be a very good way to help organize this information. The site maintainers could post information about new features etc to blog.smugmug.com, and we could easily monitor (via RSS) and explore old information, comments would be relevant to specific posts about specific features. Something like wiki.smugmug.com could be used to host user feature requests (in a nicely organized way, e.g. by functionality), information about API-based extensions (e.g. smugmug.py or SE). We'd be able to directly organize information, FAQs, etc.
As some examples, fastmail.fm is a web mail service that uses blog.fastmail.fm to disseminate information about new features and wiki.fastmail.fm to host feature requests and documentation. ubunutlinux.org uses a wiki to sketch out new documentation and then transfers completed content to a more static non-editable form (I think).
I'm curious: what do people think?
Do you think a blog or wiki would be useful for smugmug? 8 votes
Yes, have both!
25%
2 votes
A wiki alone would be sufficient.
0%
0 votes
A blog alone would be sufficient.
25%
2 votes
No, the forums are enough.
50%
4 votes
0
Comments
What's a wiki? I've heard of blog, What's RSS and how does one use it? What's an API?
I just want "my threads" like dpreview :-)
Still finding navigation a little non-intuitive (Mac user here) and I'm an artist not a programmer.
http://www.twitter.com/deegolden
Sorry for not expanding on the vocabulary...
A wiki is basically a website that anyone can edit directly. It does that by having an 'edit' button somewhere on the page that takes you to a form where you can edit the page, much like the 'reply' button brings up a page where you can post to the forum. But a wiki is oriented towards presentation of information as opposed to discussion of information (in a forum).
Examples might be http://www.wikipedia.org/ or http://wiki.fastmail.fm/ among many many others.
I think it'd be useful since then we could post requests for new features and organize them on separate pages depending on what part of the system they concern. Documentation could also be posted there and updated by users with new tips and tricks, without intervention from smugmug.
RSS is a special data format for blog postings that can be monitored automatically by software. The software can monitor RSS "feeds" from multiple blogs and display them for you in a single screen. A MacOS example of an aggregator is netNewsWire (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/).
The blog would be nice because it is software specifically designed for presenting time-sensitive information (such as news about new features, scheduled downtimes, etc).
That means an Application Programming Interface, a way for programming-inclined users to write code that calls into the smugmug website to do things like create albums or upload pictures. This is what the MacOS smugmug uploader app uses to access your smugmug account. Most users wouldn't care about this. It's just something that could get documented on the wiki and then updated easily by anyone who sees the need to update it.
I'm not familiar with dpreview's forums; my thinking is that forums are good for discussions but not as good for managing and organizing actual information. Perhaps I should have added a 'Don't care' option to the poll!
So let's see if I understand all this. I can post a web page on a wiki site. Anyone can come in and change my web page, deleting or adding stuff? So when I go back my wiki page would or could be totally changed yet still look like it was my page?
http://www.twitter.com/deegolden
Yes. It's not something that you might normally use for your own personal homepages. In this context, I'm suggesting it as a more collaborative effort to build something useful to everyone. So you might start a page with ideas about how to improve (say) smugmug's gallery customization pages, but then I might come along and change it with additional suggestions. You could then refine the idea.
Most wiki software can also send e-mail when pages you are interested in get updated, and keep old versions of pages around for reference and comparison.