Project Runeberg's front page section for September 2009:
by Hans Persson, also posted on Facebook
Project Runeberg has looked and worked in the same way for a rather long time now, and there is surely room for improvement. This note is my personal attempt at brainstorming by throwing a number of thoughts out in the hope of getting some feedback.
The notes below are not sorted in any way, just thrown out there. The most important itme may be anyone of them -- or your own idea! Any comments are welcome!
Today, users that are logged in to the Project Runeberg forum have a few extra features. This should be made more apparent, and used more. Each user should have a page with personal settings, determining for instance things like how they want their proofreading page to look (show proof text under or beside the scanned image, and things like that).
The statistics pages today only show site statistics, and they are not updated continously. There should also be statistics per user, so that it is possible to see who has done the most proofreading in the last day/week/month/year/ever, uploaded the most works, and so on. This makes frequent contributors more visible, and fostering a little competition between users should be good for productivity.
Make the front page of http://runeberg.org/ more dynamic. Perhaps some kind of automatic updates with works uploaded and/or finished proofreading within the last week? Items on the front page should allow user comments. Basically, the front page should be more of a news blog.
When proofreading, the user has the option of checking a box called "whole page ok" to specify that proofreading of the current page should be considered finished. This should be extended so that the user can specify independently that the proofreading of the text on the page is ok, that the markup on the page is ok, and that the indexing of the page is ok. Each page displayed to a reader should also show the number of people that have marked the page as ok, so that the reader knows how finished the page is.
Today, the obscure status page http://runeberg.org/status/ lists works with certain status levels (un-OCR:ed, indexing finished, proofed, etc). This should be integrated with the search page. The works should also be presented with their complete titles, not just the cryptic codes from the URL:s.
There should be an easy way for proofreaders to find works that only have a few non-proofread pages left. This way, entire works can be moved to the status of proofreading finished instead of lingering with a few pages left.
Harness the power of social networking as much as possible. Encourage people to share our content via Facebook, Delicious and so on. Every page should have a number helpers at the bottom to help sharing and tagging (like on http://networkedblogs.com/p12028758). Post periodic updates (new works, etc) to fans on Facebook and other similar places.
Allow users to upload their own readings of texts we have published. Or perhaps not. It may be better to simply integrate our pages with those of http://librivox.org/.
Today, it is already possible for users to cut out images from texts to better integrate them in the finished proofed version of texts. This makes the proofed version of a work look better, but it does not fully harness the usefulness of the images. It should be possible to tag each image with a number of tags, and to search for images with certain tags. This material should be useful to people who are in need of illustrations for various purposes, including but not limited to Wikipedia. Tagging should be possible for entire works, single poems and so on as well, and not limited to just images.
Currently, the page head on the site looks different in different sections of the site, making it more difficult than necessary to find stuff.
The recent changes page http://runeberg.org/rc.pl should be filterable for certain types of changes or changes by certain users.
The site currently displays a mixture of static pages generated by
scripts and dynamic pages. To make sure everything is always up to
date, all pages should be dynamically generated, but for performance
rea
