Anne - more posts for you/"Nothing new"/acronyms

[a_reader2003]

--- In HPFGU-Catalogue at yahoogroups.com, "annemehr" <annemehr at y...> 

>This suggests a second stage to the project (why do I hear 
screaming?) -- after all the coding is done, combing through the 
categories to cull them even further.  

Carolyn:
No, you are absolutely right, this has to be stage two, and has 
always been my intention (although I cannily didn't tell anyone !). I 
was thinking only this morning on how best to organise it. The chief 
difficulty is that at present you can click on the 's' (=show) after 
each category, and see a list of the posts coded there, but it is not 
a live link showing the full texts of those posts.

If it were possible to run through a live list of those actual posts, 
as we are doing during the coding process, we could quickly edit or 
change those which (on second thoughts) shouldn't be in that 
category, or were just endless repetition of the same point.

The reason we can't do this yet is that Paul is still pondering on 
how to write this routine, which will be essentially how club members 
eventually get to see the posts. (Although it will be locked, and not 
editable, obviously). I suspect that we will additionally have to 
break strings of posts into separate threads (arranged in date 
order), just to keep the thing managable.

PAUL: any comments here ? I know the essential problem is about the 
number and size of entries which might be called up by any search. On 
another commercial database I worked on, we had a similar problem, 
which I gather was solved by creating 'temporary' pages for every 
search you did using multiple criteria. I believe the technical term 
is 'record set' (but don't quote me !).

Another reason for starting to work on this problem now is that there 
is a long way to go, and I think we'd all find it quite useful (dare 
I say exciting ?), to see this edited list building up behind us as 
we go on. If necessary, we could even launch part of it to the 
startled membership as we continue to work on the project..



> On the acronym categories:  while their presence does make scrolling
> more tedious, won't it be easier to decide which to remove in
> hindsight?  Or do you actually know already which ones only have one
> or two posts?  If you already know which ones to get rid of, I think
> I'd vote for doing so now because they certainly slow me down,
> especially scrolling through the character names.  All those extra
> seconds will add up over thousands of posts.
> 

Carolyn:
I don't know which ones off-hand, but Dicey does - she posted about 
this a week or so ago. I've been dithering over it - on balance, I'd 
rather take the whole lot off rather than leave some, I think. 

What does everyone else think ? Happy to do it in the interests of 
speed.