[Chaos-l] Too much calendar? Let me know, please.

[Robert Nielsen]

Jon,

A couple of comments ...

First (and I don't want you to try to fix this ... I might in my upgrade 
to the CHAOS site) I know that we have diffferent "groups" in our club, 
and the calendar could easily be too "full" or "busy" for them.    
Having all the Galilean moon information is great for me ... but what if 
I didn't observe and all I wanted to see was club meeting and observing 
sessions where I could go and look at someone else's scope?   To fix 
this, I think we might need to introduce a filtering mechanism to show 
certain sets of events ... completely selectable by the user and stored 
in their browser so that next time they view the calendar, it is already 
setup the way they need it.

Second, some of the "codes" you use to compress the entries in the 
calendar are a little obscure, even for me.   So I was thinking that we 
could add a little more verbose versions of the entries if you hovered 
your mouse pointer over the entry.  It's pretty simple to do, especially 
if you are programming the interface rather than just hand-coding some 
HTML.   So, for example, if you hovered over the "Cal X - 4:32a" entry, 
it could say "Callisto Transit starting at 4:32 AM".    Another 
possibility might be to add small icons to each entry to give people a 
better idea of what each entry represented - one icon for meteor 
showers, one for Jupiter moon stuff, another for meetings, another for 
observing sessions.   Again, this is not something to hand-write in the 
HTML ... this should be done by web site programming.

Finally, I think the calendar needs to orient itself so that events that 
are coming in the next week or month are shown at the top ... when a 
user visits the page.   This would just make things easier for users.   
Again, this is a web site programming thing ... not something that can 
be done in static HTML.   So it will have to wait for the site redesign.

I agree with Mark.   It needs to load quickly (which it currently does) 
and be concise (which it currently is).   The general idea and structure 
is great!  I'm just talking about some minor fit and polish types of 
changes ...

Robert

Jon Stewart-Taylor wrote:
> Hmph.. Every time you try to hurry....
>
> The newCalendar _with_ the Galilean moon events is now in place.   
>  You may need to clear the browser cache if you visited the previous 
> newCalendar.
>
>> Hi all.  Please take a look at www.rtpnet.org/chaos/newCalendar 
>> <http://www.rtpnet.org/chaos/newCalendar> This is the current CHAOS 
>> calendar, with Galilean moon events and more meteor stuff added, plus 
>> i've tried to shrink the text to make it fit on small windows better.
>>
>> Have i gone too far?  Is it too busy?  Too many abbreviations?
>>
>> Please let me know.
>>
>> J.
>> --
>> Jon Stewart-Taylor: joncst (at) arthlink.net
>> Chapel Hill Astronomy: http://rtpnet.org/chaos/
>> CHAOS Webmaster and Secretary: chaos (at) rtpnet.org
>>
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