== Report of Meeting 2023-04-27 == Present: Ed Gottsman, Devon McCormick, Raul Miller, and Bob Therriault
Full transcripts of this meeting are now available on the its wiki page. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki/Report_of_Meeting_2023-04-27 1) We started off with Ed's latest demo of the new J wiki browser. Video of this demo is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwjJQkNnayY . This version includes tags, bookmarks and searches of both the forums and the wiki. Ed has incorporated a click to lock the webview for 3 seconds to avoid inadvertent hovering changes to the webview. 2) We then turned to discussing the forum interface in depth. This is included in the demo video above. Devon suggested putting the year and month at the top of the forum threads. Ed showed the interface that creates gaps between the months to accommodate the left to right movement from year to thread without hitting a different month on the way. This leads to the gap in the month dancing as you move up and down the years which Devon felt that he could get used to. Bob suggested that staying with vertical years and months with the month extending below the selected year. This makes use of the non responsive vertical space to avoid the hovering issue. This would involve a long list of year month combos, which Ed thought would be worth investigating, although there would be a challenge of being able to track such a long list with mouse movements. Bob wondered about separating the dates column into a single isigraph and Ed suggested that there was not a great benefit to that and it would add complexity to the forum navigation independent. 3) Bob mentioned that he had a call out to his son Stephen to take a second look at the design and Ed said that he was looking forward to that feedback. Devon wondered about how deeply the viewer was tied to the wiki structure. Ed said that to use the viewer with a different website you would need a crawler and a database that reflected the structure. Devon wondered about it being useful for a photo library and Ed said that was an interesting possibility, but both agreed that the focus would remain on the current J wiki browser. 4) Ed wondered about how to update the database in a way that would not be a problem for traffic. Raul was going to look into ways that would minimize the traffic. Raul felt that it might be done as an add-on using the manifest number as an update signal. Ed had reservations about using the add-on because the webview interactivity may not work for any version of J and so we would need to just use selected binaries for webview to work. Raul said that there were ways to avoid updates using Package Manager for add-ons. This was a discussion that may be tabled until the jQt update comes through. 5) The meeting continued with showing some of the things that he had learned about moving pages that create redirections. This allowed Bob to move J for C Programmers pages to new positions that take into account the chapter numbers, as this allows the book to display in the wiki with chapters in the correct order. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:JforC_R.6.1 This was also done with 50 Shades of J. Bob had put the old pages on the Delete page before he realized that moving would have done the redirection. Pages with multiple redirection can be cleaned up by hopping directly to final destination. This can also be done for categories and would allow easier clean up of category trees if changes to categories are required. 6) Bob suggested that he was thinking of eliminating the Developer part of the category tree https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Developers_D until those pages are further developed. This would allow more focus on the Newcomers pages https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Newcomers_N to make them more accurate and this might include the J Primer which is a great resource, but probably could use an update. It was suggested that the original authors should be consulted to work in collaboration with the wiki team. The Developer branch has not really been explored and it is not clear to Bob what the audience is in the developer community. Bob feels that Newcomers could be revamped fairly quickly, that the Reference category would remain a work in progress. Ed thought that it would be a shame to move the Developers out and maybe the way is to put an warning that it might not be up to date. Ed felt that it might be a communications problem and that renaming it might be a better approach, maybe call it Advanced or some other name. Bob thought the warning could be included in the content of the category page. Bob felt that Reference would have all of the information, though is an advantage to having a narrower view of particular topics that might be helpful. Raul wondered whether the breakdown might be specialized interests such as graphics, number theory, add-ons etc. Bob felt that add-ons would certainly be an area that would be in place in the 'Developers' category and possibly interfaces as well. It may be more useful to talk to people who are developing with J and see what areas are most useful to them. 7) Ed wondered where people are lost in the journey. Is there a way to enhance Newcomers so that it encourages self starters. Bob mentioned that array languages are known to be useful to subject matter experts who are not developers and maybe this is the target audience. 8) Finally, Bob showed Phind https://www.phind.com/ which is a AI that not only allows you to set levels of explanation, but also lists the sources that are being used. It still is mostly unaware of J in general terms, but with the right prompts it uses relevant sources of J material and provides a pretty good explanation. For access to previous meeting reports https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki_Development If you would like to participate in the development of the J wiki please contact us on the general forum and we will get you an invitation to the next J wiki meeting held on Thursdays at 23:00 (UTC) Next meeting is May 4th, 2023. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
