Robert K.'s dashboard

None currently.

To be honest, I wasn't aware there were NPR stations in Europe. (Wouldn't that make *Inter*national Public Radio? ;-) ) If you can provide/point me at a list of stations, with their lat/lon, power, and frequency, I might be able to whip something up however.

Currently your lists are only available at lists.zenbe.com. A future release of zenbe will make these lists available as part of the main zenbe site however.

Hey Scott, thanks for the apology. And I'll apologize in return - I'm sorry for letting myself be one of those prickly users that is a pain in the ass to deal with. Trust me, I know what it's like to have to juggle the demands of your job as an engineer with all the non-engineering stuff, including dealing with a constantly attention-starved user community. I appreciate you taking the time to respond to this.

I don't think we need to belabor the popups .vs. iframes .vs. autosave issue any more. You get it, and I trust you are more than capable of moving forward with that idea should you choose to do so. (For my part, I don't feel strongly one way or another about this issue. My prickliness came not from feeling this is urgent, but because it seemed like a good solution was being dismissed for trivial reasons, something I've become rather sensitized to in my career as a developer. Bygones. :-) )

It's not your responsibility to make people understand OpenID. If a user is logging in with an OpenID they already "get it". If they aren't, none of this is an issue for them.

I disagree. I think it is my responsibility to educate users on the features of my application and ensure to the best of my ability they don't get confused by any widget.

I guess I misunderstood your original statement about OpenID being hard to understand. I assumed you were referring to OpenID, the concept, being hard to understand (which it can be), which implied it was your responsibility to educate people on what OpenID is and what it can do for them. I feel pretty strongly that is not a job you guys should be taking on. That's the responsibility of companies like us, Zenbe, who will come to rely on GSFN and want to allow our users to login with their Zenbe credentials - i.e. we would educate them as part of the process of referring them to the GSFN forums.

But if you are just referring to the operation of GSFN's OpenID login feature being hard to understand, than I agree with you 100%.

Cheers!

LiveHttpHeaders Firefox plugin - picks up where developer docs leave off. :) – Robert K., on August 31, 2008 00:32

Wait a minute... I'm just trying to help out here. Everything you and Lane said above is based on the premise that the only solution to the problem is to auto-save form data, which you don't have time to implement. Which simply isn't true - logging in using a separate window solves the problem quite nicely, and with 1/10th the effort required to autosave.

So why are you coming back with strawman arguments about popups and users' ability to grok OpenID? The least you could do is acknowledge this is a viable solution. Not to mention ...

- I'm sure you're perfectly aware that an iframe can be used to work around whatever issues you may have with popup windows.
- It's not your responsibility to make people understand OpenID. If a user is logging in with an OpenID they already "get it". If they aren't, none of this is an issue for them.
- I have no idea how you're connecting popups and cross-window scripting to a user's ability to understand OpenID. – Robert K., on August 30, 2008 14:38

I'm not sure I understand the case you're describing. Gravatar doesn't cache the default URL you provide - it does a 302 redirect. GSFN would (still) have control over both the URL of avatars, and the associated caching policy.

(BTW, gravatar are given a max-age of 5 minutes, so they update fairly quickly once changed by a user)

Instead of tossing up an alert when the user clicks the OpenID login option, just spin off the login form in a subwindow. After the user logs in, have the OpenID provider redirect back to a page that tells the opener window to go ahead and submit the form, and then closes the login window.

Problem solved.

Urr... or you could just add ...?default=(user's gsfn avatar URL) to the Gravatar URL to redirect to the user's GSFN image if they don't have a Gravatar.

Great suggestion! – Robert K., on August 29, 2008 18:16

fyi, our community site is actually here – Robert K., on August 27, 2008 17:10

There is definitely a usability issue with the comment and reply system. The problem (and solution) are simple. Currently user's are given two options for contributing to a topic. They can either "Reply to [topic author]" or they can add a comment on one of the replies.

Unfortunately there's no option for "Reply to [someone else's reply]". As a user, I'm left wondering, "I know it's Fred's topic, but I want to reply to Barney's reply... how am I supposed to do that?"

The solution is to label the reply form, "Add a Reply", instead of, "Reply to [topic author]". That way there's no assumption about who my reply will be directed at.

Hey Thor, the bookmark is very slick, thanks! One question though...

Currently the bookmarklet workflow is this:
1. Click "add to trac"
2. Edit fields in the bookmarklet-provided form and click "post"
3. Edit the same fields in Trac's form and click "create ticket"

'Seems like it would be better to skip step #2 and just take the user directly to their trac ticket creation page... not that I'm complaining, mind you.

Hi Amy, I didn't see the profile option for setting my title. That's exactly what I had in mind.

... but is that title shown to users anywhere? If I click on somebody else's avatar or name I see a profile page for them, but I don't see any title information there. i.e. As a user, how would I know what role/title a person has within their company?

Only if you know some great rails/javascript developers interested in moving to Bend, Oregon or NYC. ;) – Robert K., on August 04, 2008 18:10

As a person with a GSFN account, I have three "hats" I wear, and the roles you're discussing vary in relevance dramatically based on the hat, as follows...

As an employee, the way I want to be seen is by the title that's on my business card. And I've never had a card that says "employee" or "official rep". i.e. Give me a "title" field on my profile page. (BTW, I'll be needing one for each company I happen to represent, of which there may be more than one).

As a GSFN administrator, I want to know what exactly are the permissions I'm granting when I assign someone to a role. Having a table that shows which roles can do what on the admin page would be really useful for that.

As a user making suggestions and reporting bugs to some other company, here's how my interest in the roles of other people breaks down:

50% - "Can you fix my problem/contribute to my topic?"
40% - "Do you work for the company?"
9% - "How much influence do you have? (a.k.a. 'what's your title?')"
< 1% - "What is your role in the GSFN permissions system?"

In other words, don't bother showing me the employee-official rep distinction anywhere except on the "Accounts & Roles" UI for managing the employees of our company.

Just my $.02