If you haven’t noticed lately there has been a lot of changes to TheExperiment itself and its sub sites/experiments.
If you haven’t noticed lately there has been a lot of changes to TheExperiment itself and its sub sites/experiments.
We realized that for the site to expand in the future we needed a different way to organize how the information was stored. Previously we had what was called a category. All the “articles” were sorted into one of four categories (technology, national, international and commentary). Now we do things a little differently. Each piece of “information” can be inserted into different sections.
The sections are:
- News – Almost all the previous articles are sorted into this section.
- Commentary – All commentary articles from the previous database are now in this section.
- 101 – Not up yet but will house an education/101 crash course series of information tidbits.
- Announcement – Where site related information goes, like this posting that your reading.
We chose this configuration because this will make it easy for us to add new sections when they come along (e.g. reviews, lectures, questions, etc).
Next each of these pieces of “information” has an area of effect rating associated with it. The area of effect should be considered the immediate area of effect or what area the information most pertains to.
The Area of effects are:
- Technology
- National
- International
- Mind
As you might have noticed the first three areas are directly related to the previous Experiment article configuration. The new area added is “Mind”. Which represents more of a thought process or idea.
The third set of changes related to the backend information area is the topics. We now can append a list of related topics to each piece of information. These topics can be used to cross reference information to find similar material. Right now the related topics are in there infancy stage but should soon to grow a powerful mechanism that should help a lot when browsing the site.
Examples of uses:
- When viewing an article you will be able to see related pieces of information.
- A way to connect all information across multiple sites and areas.
There are a few cosmetic changes. We now included a top “TheExperiment Network” navigation bar. This is used to provide a consistency throughout all the Experiment Network sites and can be used in the future to house useful features.
We are constantly trying to figure out new ways of organizing the site and make it the most it can be. Please feel free to send any questions, critiques, problems or anything else you would like to us. We are always happy to get email from readers. Send email to info@theexperiment.org
Author: Jason Soares
News Service: TheExperiment Network
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