Survey posted 2016-10-03 02:48 by Travis.

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I've been out of survey ideas for quite a while, so I figure it wouldn't hurt to post this one. :-) Basically, I'm trying to figure out a good way to subdivide the 89/basic/science (see “web page” link above) archive directory (which will ultimately be used for the science sections for other calculators when they get big enough) and am finding it more tricky than I thought.

The reorganization is still ongoing, so it's a bit messy at the moment, but in general, what do you think of it? Would you do it differently? Are there too many pages with too few files in each section to wade through, or are there too many files on too few pages? Do the categories I selected made sense, or are they confusing?

Yay, a new survey at last! I've been meaning to send in a couple of suggestions to spur more frequent changes without you having to spend your time wracking your brains. This sure seems like a lot of subdivisions, but looking through each folder, it seems that there are enough files in each folder to justify the divisions. If you /did/ want to reduce it slightly, you could consider making Thermo a subcategory of Chemistry, making Optics, Electricity, and Other Physics subcategories of Physics, and so on.

Yeah, I'm having a hard time figuring out whether to break it all up into a “proper” hierarchy tree or just try to leave it flat. The drawback with the former is that the maintenance overhead is even higher with the crude management tools I have in place right now, leading to me leaning toward making the structure as “flat” as possible.

There may also be a balance to be struck, I'm figuring, between adding enough nesting to keep things manageable, yet not adding so much it makes it actually harder for people to find things, especially those who may not be intimately familiar with the many fields of science and how they interrelate [I know I'm not; I've been using Wikipedia's science categories pages to try to figure some of this out in the first place ;-)].

I think it looks ok, but I guess if I could change anything in general, I'd maybe add an "all" directory to sections with lots of subdivisions. Something it's cool just to browse through all the TI-89 basic games for example :P

What I really want (some day…) is to have a tag-based system that would allow that and much more. It would be an enormous improvement to the site. Imagine being able to browse for, say, all games of any language in specific genres for all the calcs you own, or just for specific shells, or pretty much any combination you want, in a single query.

The work and time involved to transform a more-or-less 15-year-old code base into a completely different paradigm is really daunting, though. So for the time being, I'm trying to at least improve things a little within the current limitations. :-)

Looks fine to me now. You might want to split pub/83plus/basic/math/quadratic/ in the same way as during the 2011 April Fools joke, though.