Re: Experimental FAQ relocation (PROXY solution)

[mgs(at)ivsoftware.com (Mike Schienle)]

In article <7h60l5$iiu$1@nnrp1.deja.com>, rmlongfield@my-dejanews.com wrote:

>Hi Mike,
>        Thanks for the explanation.  The AND is the default when I get your web
>page.  So any blank spaces ("fields") means that there will be no
>relevent FAQ's found. 

OK. I'll see if I can start the page off with something selected in the
category section. I'll also put in an explanation of how to use it, which
will be ignored, of course :-). If anything is selected (category,
question or answer), you'll get a real response. If nothing is selected,
it should probably do the same thing as if "Find all records" was
selected. Currently, you'll get no records found when nothing is selected
with either "And" or "Or" selected. Technically correct, but not
intuitive.

>At first, I didn't understand what the Question
>and Answer referred to (forgetting what the Q in FAQ means) After your
>explanation and once I got used to it, it was ok. If someone is trying
>the FAQ for the first time, it may be better to have the default set to
>OR. (I actually didn't notice this choice when I tried last week).
>Or maybe a "First Time User" button for a short explanation, similar to
>what you just wrote.  

That makes sense. I can make a link to that from amny of the screens,
particularly the first screen and any error screen (no matches found).

>(Although I had to think for a moment what you
>meant by "fields", I'm not too familiar with terminology) The search
>method is a little bit different from what I am used to with typical Web
>search engines (which have only one area to fill in keywords and are
>ineffective in many ways).

My feelings exactly.

>
>I hope this helps you.  My personal FAQ consists of one directory where
>I save all interesting questions and answers from the newsgroup.
>Using 'grep' for keyword search is about as sophisticated as it gets.

Some folks have asked about archives previously through the newsgroup or
email, I have a direct newsfeed now. This is different from just a
newsreader, since I actually receive the feed automatically and can server
it out to other systems. I need to write some software to extract the
articles from the newsfeed and put them into a format the database can
read. Once this happens, I'll put them into a searchable database. I
expect to use Subject, Author and Body for search areas. Let me know if
something else would be helpful.

-- 
Mike Schienle                                 Interactive Visuals, Inc.
mgs@ivsoftware.com                  Remote Sensing and Image Processing
http://www.ivsoftware.com/         Analysis and Application Development