Reply To: Fantastic news.

[Rezwan]

Confusing title. I kept deleting the notifications in my inbox because I didn’t think it related to me.

Using my fabulous administrative powers I am going to change the name of this topic to “Gestation”.

Deal with it.

Brian, you have ADHD. Yes, you should consider the posts closed until further notice. Go on vacation. Come back when we ask you. What have you done for me lately, Brian? Did you get me a Christmas present? Kwanza pie? I didn’t think so.

There’s a lot to report, and a lot of structural work to do, and my circuits are overloaded. For example, they’ve set up the time of flight detectors and were adjusting those. So – should I just twitter “they set up time of flight detectors?” I could. That would be the easiest thing to do. But then you’d badger me about that. Badger badger badger. Nag nag nag.

What is that. What does it do. Can we have a picture. What happened to the shot? I want every data point. Now, free, perfect.

Basically, you think your request is simple. You want me to hang out in the lab and post things, blog style, like a reporter. In fact, I do hang out at the lab from time to time and watch what the guys are doing. Then I ask questions, and this breaks the flow of their work. Although, sometimes it’s very useful, because I provide comic relief which makes work more fun, and because they think out loud and work things out, and it’s always good to have a sounding board. But then – due to my limited knowledge of everything, when I go to write up what we just discussed, I ground to a halt over some gaps. I have a bunch of questions to ask to fill in the details. But by this time, I don’t want to break their focus again just to have them give me elementary physics and engineering lessons. I figure I will do that in my own time. So, I’m doing a lot of reading on these topics. The learning curve is steep.

Upshot: I have a bunch of half, or quarter written articles here, piling up.

The good thing is that, as time goes by, the picture gets clearer, its resolving. Gestating. Each of the articles are taking better form.

I loathe writing something if I don’t understand it completely. I also loathe blogging. By that, I mean that I don’t like to just write things as they come up, in a stream of consciousness and events. I have to have structure. It has to have a place to go. I have to be organized. If things aren’t organized, I simply stop, and organize.

Right now, it’s organization time.

There’s a lot of material that needs to get through, and I am a narrow funnel. So my priority is to set up this website so that other people can do some of this work.

Or, say there are a series of articles to be written about the instruments LPP will be using. I could just write it up in standard blog format with a category. But it occurs to me that this is data, and I should set up a database for it. There are fields to set up for it. name, description, purpose, cost, issues, images.

For the casual user, that’s probably not important. But I’m thinking long term. Tonight (SUNDAY NIGHT! I should be watching TV!) Eric and I discussed how to develop the “Plasma Network” component of the site. We want to make a useful place for plasma physicists to collaborate. That’s great, because I just purchased MSM, the Multi-Site Manager – so we can set up a whole new forum for physicists (we’re trying to keep the rabble off that – although you can see what the pros are posting). Now, this is a crowd that’s going to want more details on equipment and suppliers so they can compare. Eventually the site will evolve into something that can support their discussion of such mundanities.

MSM is not hard to use. But it takes time to set all these things up. And I do a little on several fronts at a time.

Oh, and about user posting. I made some progress there, and ran aground. Note to self, still need to put out a query on the expression engine forum about why this isn’t working. So many facets of it to iron out. And they WILL be ironed out, because it’s just code. But I never studied computer science. I am self-taught here (I guess everyone is). So it takes quite a bit of focus to track down why something isn’t working. Take a look at this test of the SAEF for a logo submission. Is logo submission a high priority? No. But the steps I have to go through to set up the SAEF and get it to work for users is important. The same steps will be used for every other type of thing we set up to allow users to post. With various permissions. Member management. Because eventually, we want a lot of pros posting. Quality stuff.

If you look at this draft – never mind the formatting. The trouble I’m having is that as an admin, it works perfectly. But when I log out and log back in as a mortal, it doesn’t work. Actually, it did work at first, when I set it to upload to the main upload directory – to an extent. I could upload an image and words, preview the screen, but when I submitted, nothing showed. Later, as admin, I saw that the post was, indeed, made, and I was notified, but the status was “closed”. So admin had to “open” it. But in the logical place where you put permissions, I have told it to be open, and to allow posts. It should have done so automatically.

Then I changed the folder for images – since I noticed the “upload” window that opens gives a bit too much info to people and may confuse them – and I don’t want to find where that even comes from or how to edit it… Then, on the page where you can view the images the comments don’t show – but they should as I haven’t changed anything.

These are just a couple of examples. Each of these things is a perplexing problem. And I have to solve it. And that takes focus. And meanwhile you just want your fix.