A new way of looking at the Niantic Project website
A new way of looking at the Niantic Project website
As part of working on the ADA (for programmers) project, the first thing we needed to do was collect any information about her that we could, starting from the beginning. Trying to go through all of that info started getting... tedious.
Early on after I'd joined Essex and started looking over the info from the original website, I found code in the HTML source that I could use to display the info in a way that would be much easier to navigate than the board itself. I started work on it back then and got it functional, but when I realized it would be incredibly useful now, I decided to go back and "finish" it.
I put that in quotes because given that I do it for a living, it's nowhere near what I'd consider a "finished" website. But it's readable, and it makes going through the info SO much faster. ADA project aside, it's a really fast way to go through and look for anything. Or like my friend is doing, to go through and become more familiar with the story in the order it was presented.
I figured other people here might also find it useful, so I decided to share. Just be gentle, I'd call this a pre-alpha release. But hey, what better testers? :-)
ocdcoder[dot]org/ingress-niantic-releases[dot]html
(Apologies for the obfuscated URL, I'm doing everything I can to keep this site hidden from the search engines for now.)
As I say on the main page, I am still working on it. I haven't had time to closely examine all 1463(!) items to make sure they're displaying exactly right. (For a few, I had to put in special code specifying title and date to fix broken HTML that was wrecking the entire page. At least I think I got all of those fixed now.)
Oh, also as I say on the main page, this is only the info from the website and we're now... eight months past that? We plan to go through the Wiki and start adding those, after first going through the months we do have and adding all of the hidden releases that weren't listed on the site. We'd LOVE some help with that if anyone wants to volunteer. We need the info, but I don't want it to take too much away from the original ADA project.
(Here's where I add again that I think abandoning the website was a terrible idea. At the very least, a user account used for JUST posting story releases would be really helpful.)
Anyway, questions, comments, bug reports, OFFERS OF HELP all welcome. :-)
As part of working on the ADA (for programmers) project, the first thing we needed to do was collect any information about her that we could, starting from the beginning. Trying to go through all of that info started getting... tedious.
Early on after I'd joined Essex and started looking over the info from the original website, I found code in the HTML source that I could use to display the info in a way that would be much easier to navigate than the board itself. I started work on it back then and got it functional, but when I realized it would be incredibly useful now, I decided to go back and "finish" it.
I put that in quotes because given that I do it for a living, it's nowhere near what I'd consider a "finished" website. But it's readable, and it makes going through the info SO much faster. ADA project aside, it's a really fast way to go through and look for anything. Or like my friend is doing, to go through and become more familiar with the story in the order it was presented.
I figured other people here might also find it useful, so I decided to share. Just be gentle, I'd call this a pre-alpha release. But hey, what better testers? :-)
ocdcoder[dot]org/ingress-niantic-releases[dot]html
(Apologies for the obfuscated URL, I'm doing everything I can to keep this site hidden from the search engines for now.)
As I say on the main page, I am still working on it. I haven't had time to closely examine all 1463(!) items to make sure they're displaying exactly right. (For a few, I had to put in special code specifying title and date to fix broken HTML that was wrecking the entire page. At least I think I got all of those fixed now.)
Oh, also as I say on the main page, this is only the info from the website and we're now... eight months past that? We plan to go through the Wiki and start adding those, after first going through the months we do have and adding all of the hidden releases that weren't listed on the site. We'd LOVE some help with that if anyone wants to volunteer.
(Here's where I add again that I think abandoning the website was a terrible idea.
Anyway, questions, comments, bug reports, OFFERS OF HELP all welcome. :-)
Figures I announce it then immediately break it. It's fixed now. Try again?
ReplyDeleteThanks! I can't wait for people to start digging into it. Not just hoping they find it useful, but maybe even having suggestions for making it more useful. (Or for getting all the rest of the entries in there in some way that's not as painful as it feels like it's going to be...)
ReplyDeleteCherie Brush , oh wow! That is way easier for sorting. I wish I would have discovered that when archiving the original content from nianticproject.com, may have saved a lot of time. Hahaha. :P
ReplyDeleteNow I am trying to catch up with the G+/Facebook posts. That's where the real fun starts. It's a whole new world.
Your commitment to the cause is inspirational, Cherie. Keep it up. :)
Very useful! I've been telling myself I should go back and review the old stuff. This just made that so much easier! I know I'll be hitting it and I'll let you know if I see any problems.
ReplyDeleteJoshua Zaelos Any opportunity for me to do something geeky, I'm all over it, especially if I learn from it at the same time. When I saw all of the site's content was just sitting there in a JSON string waiting to be parsed, I knew I had to do it. ;-)
ReplyDeleteThe reason my friend and I are so into the idea of the ADA project is we both have a huge interest in AI. It's as much about learning more about that as it is learning more about ADA.
We definitely plan to work on a timeline as far as the ADA releases. However we end up doing that there could apply to all of the info. As we work more on the interface we're using for the ADA project, there will be a lot of things that will be able to be used for other Ingress-related research projects.
ReplyDeleteBasically, we couldn't find a collaborative research tool we liked, so we're building our own. :-) And luckily, MODX has a really nice range of add-ons that's making it go a lot faster than I expected for something so complicated.
Rather than building timeline sorting directly into any individual project, I might see how it would work to make that an entirely separate part of the site, and then just pull in the order defined there for any projects that needed it. Although that is definitely something we'd need a lot of help with from people who know a LOT about the story.
Not to mention we need to get those other months of story info in there in the first place. One of the most valuable ADA docs I've found so far came out after the website ended, so we don't even have it in there yet.