Formatting Profiles

It's pretty standard wiki formatting -- the toolbar should make it a bit easier. What would you recommend instead?

It flat doesn't work for me. I use Firefox. Could that be the trouble?

Many of us here at Geni use Firefox. What version are you using? Mac or PC?

PC, and you're right, it's not the browser. I just switched over to IE and tried to make a couple of Profile graphs boldface. They instead came up in a different font and still lightface.

A discussion board software company with simple, foolproof formatting can be found at http://ultrabb.net/

UltraBB is wholly incompatible with our operating environment, and there were a number of factors involved in our decision to choose wiki formatting over bbcode.

I'd like to better understand where the toolbar is failing for you. Feel free to use the Geni Help Project ( http://www.geni.com/projects/Geni-Help ) to experiment -- that'll enable me to see your changes. When you select some text and then click the bold button (B), does it surround the text with triple-quotes? If so, when you save those changes is that where you're seeing the different font?

Mike, the formatting tool works perfectly in the Projects test space.

Interesting! Okay, can you send me the URL of the profile that demonstrates the problem? If it's a private profile that you'd rather not post in this public forum, feel free to send me an Inbox message. Thanks...

Sure, no problem. I'm going to post the Profile's URL on my public Projects page if I can ever get the formatting right. The issue is recreating the newspaper headlines in various sizes and weights and making the body type bold.

Private

Wow, I think that's looking really good. The first thing I noticed that may not be intuitive, is that if you start a line with spaces, the wiki formatter assumes you're trying to line up the text like tabs, and so it switches to a fixed-width font. I see from the revision history that you had tried the bold and took it out -- maybe there was some interaction with another tag? If you can point out what you think looks wrong or how you'd like it changed, I'd be happy to see what I can do with it.

Also it begs the question, what belongs in the about section and what should be treated as a sourced document?

Thanks, Mike. The problem was the indents. Who's to know? Perhaps that needs to be mentioned in the Wikitext Formatting space.

It's a cranky system but not as bad as the ones I grew up with. One — Atex, I believe — would remain stable until you were just about finished with a task. Then, POOF, the whole thing would vanish, never to be retrieved.

By the way, if you want to read my version of the murder it's at http://www.geni.com/projects/Family-Stories-from-the-Stewart-Ishmae...

And, Victar... Different strokes for different folks.

Thanks for the suggestion -- I'll see if there's a clean way to insert that information into the formatting help. ("Lines starting with space" is mentioned under the "Preformatted" section but why would you look there?)

Mike , here's a little formatting mystery for you. Look at my Projects page http://www.geni.com/projects/Family-Stories-from-the-Stewart-Ishmae...

You'll see that I used three asterisks to separate items. Now, go down and look between "The Bundling Board Slipped" and "My Little Blue Notebook." Suddenly, the first asterisk turns into a black dot. No amount of keyboarding will turn it and the ensuing dots back into asterisks.

Intriguing, what?

Maike said "...there were a number of factors involved in our decision to choose wiki formatting over bbcode"...

Why wouldn't you want bold to LOOK bold as you type for the average user? Was the number of factors just that you guys like wiki, or is there a real reason to avoid wysiwyg?

@ James,

There are a number of javascript engines that can do wysiwyg for wiki formatting. I'm sure it's just a matter of time before Geni can provide that as another option.

Bob, an asterisk is the wiki code for a bullet point. I fixed it by preceding them with spaces, which tags that line as preformatted text.

Jim that's not as easy as it sounds -- see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor for a writeup of why you don't see a WSIWYG editor in Wikipedia. Our wiki grammar is a subset of what Wikipedia uses, however, so maybe one of the editors mentioned would work for us. At this point it's really a question of allocating the developer resources to investigate the various packages out there -- we're a pretty lean team and everyone's got a pretty full plate.

I'm actually fine using the wiki formatting, I just thought a Family Tree company would want it as easy for Grandma as possible.

Thanks, Mike.

Truly novice users are going to just type plain text no matter what tool you give them. Better to cater to the power users in this case.

Who you calling a novice there Mike:)

When typing one handed it's useful to have an option to switch to plain text ya know.

BTW this is a call to action for all those grease monkey script writers to get themselves going on easier wiki grammar for geni.

Bob Stewart already gave me Atex nightmares.

Atex was a doozy, wasn't it?

I also recall the creative barriers of early computer hardware. The system at a newspaper where I worked had one very big problem. You would just be finishing a tip-top story with your finger hovering over the send button when someone would walk up and place his hand on your shoulder. He would be charged up from walking across the office carpet and static electricity would flow from him to you to the computer and ZA-A-A-A-P! Your story would disappear into the ether.

Now I never worked newspapers but I did work around the corner from the old New York Times Building managing audio/visual production.

http://photo.kirkbrown.net/ForoxSeries2

The type shop still pasted up!

seems to me if we're just talking about allowing a bit more robust and easy to use method to stylize and format "about me" and similar profile-related text, maybe allowing select CSS syntax would work as an interim while geni.com evaluates best solutions.

i know in my case, once i'd worked out the basic formatting, i would likely apply the same CSS styles across the board for future "about me" sections as i create profiles.

this could work fairly easily by selecting an "advanced" interface which would provide select CSS attributes (real time) to style the content/text. saving the settings could either embed the attributes "in-line" or spawn an external css stylesheet for the html to access for rendering the text of that specific content.

i personally notice that using the toolbar provided results in mixed success at best, and pretty confusing overall.

there are quite a few CSS "snippets" out there that could serve as the starting point, and even a couple that could be "plug and play," so to speak.

i'd happily volunteer to beta test for proof of concept purposes if an attempt to explore options were undertaken.

don't know if any of the geni.com dev team reads this sort of post or not.

Erica Howton isabel howton absolutely with the greasemonkey scripts, although that is client only solution, and all the pretty work you do will only be seen by you.. however, it would serve well as a proof of concept mechanism.

-tris

I'm actually a fan of "keeping it simple" and adding html and css support would not be a good choice in my opinion.

Here's my reasoning for what its worth:

1) Visual Look
Having a limited "palette" of formatting choices actually keeps each profile looking similar and cohesive across the entire geni.com website. I feel this is desirable.

One only needs to remember myspace pages for examples of people with no design knowledge let loose with over-use of color, size and other features.

2) If the current markup were to "feature creep" into a substantially more complex syntax I worry that "about me" sections, when exported to gedcom, would then contain such a hodgepodge of markup syntax making them much less readable in 3rd party programs.

Keeping this site's markup simple helps ensure that exported markup also needs less parsing when used with other apps.

3) Resource Allocation.
The sense I have is that for every new markup feature added it would please a dozen people and upset a dozen more. Most people haven't used markup and those that have are going to naturally like the one they've used in the past and probably totally hate all others. For example while I am a big fan of the markup syntax of restructuredText (because of my Python programming background), others will prefer Markdown, or Yaml or MediWiki or Confluence formatting etc. Geni programmers should keep it simple if for no other reason that we could get into a formatting enhancement request war that would be a time sync for programmers to implement.

4) Overall Goal
The trick is to have just ehough to get the job done but not so much that it makes the markup unreadable when composing it.

5) Requests
Even given point number three, I'd still lobby for a very short list of additional syntax because I feel that they'd add more than they would detract. My wish list would just add markup that would allow image links, horizontal ruled lines, and columnar data. :)

And now for my number one request that doesn't even involve a syntax change...

I'd be happy if they made the width of text fill in form for discussions and "about me" sections larger.

Granted I'm not always on a my dual monitor 24" screens but even on my little notebook I'm feeling that text entry widths are too narrow. Is there a reason they are so small in width? I'd love it if they extended the edit with by 1.5 or 2.5 inches in width past what they currently are.

--Randy

Randy, the problem (if there is one) can be solved by good communication between you techies and us word people. Now Mike did a good job of explaining to me why my text was screwed up, but that was after the fact. I had no idea what Wikitext was or how it works. That needs to be addressed in a prominent location, not buried in a maze of links. It's basic. Every Geni user has occasion to put some type in larger letters or emphasize a word with italics. A simple explainer in a prominent location would be a good start. But the block needs to be written by a word person, not a techie.

What Bob said:)

I learned the "plain text in Notepad" trick first from a quite advanced CPP programmer (former day job: drummer for best unsigned blues band in ... ).

Now I "read" techie well enough to agree with Randy's points. I also agree with the choice of MediaWiki as the Geni tool and Stangel's "cater to the power user."

My "nice to have" is an option to have an option for plain text wherever possible.

Thank you all for your thoughtful comments. Randy, regarding your very reasonable wish list, we've talked about image links (the problem being the potential for Geni to become a photo-spamming site) and may come up with a way to do this in the future [though it may be limited to Geni media, not any random image URL]. Horizontal rules make sense and I'll see what we can do about that. Tables are NOT on the short list -- the wikitext formatter that we use does not support them, the author of said formatter does not want to support them, and we share enough of his concerns that we're not (yet?) going to allocate an engineer toward implementing them ourselves. Finally, I'll ask the designers to take a look at the size of the textarea inputs.

Bob, I would argue that the explanatory text you're asking for belongs right behind that "formatting help" link that's at the top-right corner of the input field -- do you disagree? Is it just that the contents of that pop-up help is hard to understand? Could you suggest something that would make more sense?

Erica I'm not sure I understand your point... do you mean plain text input, or a plain-text version of wiki-formatted text? Plain text input is automatic -- if you don't enter any wikitext formatting, you'll get plain text. Stripping the formatting from existing wikitext is something we also do, for example the "about me" summaries that you see on the popular page: http://www.geni.com/popular

I think I mean stripping formatting from existing wikitext in the "about me," which until this very moment I did not know was possible. It would make the task of revising "overviews" much easier.

I know, I should go read the "formatting help." It's probably there written in "geek."