pcplantdb

[Bear Kaufmann <bear@ursine-design.com>]

Hi all,

I'm just back in town, reading through things. I'm still in the process 
of getting settled, so these are all relatively quick responses.

Congrats to Chad as well on the improvements on dev. It looks good. 
Looks promising. I'm thinking about some design improvements for the 
look/formatting.
Personally, I think it might be good to downplay the comments format.

> -Regarding funding, I am not so interested in advertising for 
> nurseries.
> I would rather have PIW not contain any ads – but I guess if they’re
> embedded in comments, they’d be less intrusive.  What do others think
> about this?  The Pay Pal idea is a good one – but I believe it costs
> quite a bit of money and work to set up a Pay Pal account.  I’ve asked
> Scott, so I’ll report back.  And I will also be submitting more grant
> applications.
I believe I was the one that accidentally started this whole thread. I 
used the example of nursery listings as an example of how RDF/XML could 
help interface and provide access to information outside the DB. It was 
a poor example. I was thinking more along the lines that we could check 
if the plant occurs on USDA Plants and link to it, link to CalPhoto 
plant photo archive if available, Google image search, etc.

> > Not very advanced
> > compared with the http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/D_frames.html
> > engine. Maybe I'm wrong???
> >
> > Why don't you expand/improve the pfaf-engine instead of building a
> > own system?
>
> How do we make it obvious to users that Eden IS an improvement on the
> PFAF-engine?  Once again, how is this database different from all
> others...

OK, interesting question from a design POV. Having a great search 
syntax, without any obvious signs of it's existence doesn't make the 
site look impressive. So, as a basic improvement, a quick help page 
would be good.
I think an advanced search form would also be good, and provide users a 
greater idea of what's available to search by.
I notice the eden urls using ?family=, etc, is it possible to access 
other columns that way, without passing a single string search syntax? 
That would greatly help in extending the advanced search form.

> People might be interested latest stats from the PFAF website.
> These are from the ibiblio US mirror over the last two years.
>
> Hits shot up from about 100,000/month to about 400,000/month
> around the time the old Leeds website went off line.

This is fun info. It reminds me of the Google Zeitgeist. It'd be fun to 
format this info (maybe just this static batch) into something like the 
zeitgeist, just for kicks. It's fun to know what's popular. Maybe Chad 
can implement a search logger/output when other tasks are done. :-)

> > Results take the form of ``Family name [space] Genus + Species name.''
> > For example, a search for co rn gives ``Gramineae Zea mays.'' I fear
> > that users will click on the family name thinking that it w ill take
> > them to the plant (in this case, Zea mays) and will not realize that
> > this is what they did . Can we perhaps put the family name on another
> > line, or separate both with a comma?

> This is where I like to take direction from Bear.  I get the confusion
> though.  I prefer the later (one line) and will go with that until I
> hear different from Bear.

Please take a look at http://permaculture.info/test/search_improved.php
There are a few different ideas, regarding search results formating, 
alerts, and collapsable forms for advanced search.

Good work everyone.

Cheers,
Bear