Re: Gaging interest/comments for an Apple 2 Snippets Library

[Polymorph <polymorph69@hotmail.com>]

Martin Doherty wrote:
> Terrific idea Mike! I registered a couple of minutes ago.  May I make
> a few suggestions? (to prospective contributors as well as to you as
> site owner)
>
> 1) It would be VERY helpful if each snippet contributor includes in
> the snippet's description the names & version numbers of the
> prerequisite software that the code snippet assumes.  For instance, a
> snippet of assembly code may have assembler directives that are
> specific to a certain assembler package or a Pascal snippet may depend
> on a standard unit that was introduced with release 1.2 of Apple
> Pascal. Actually now that I think about it, this data would be even
> better placed directly in the code as comments as well as in the
> description, in case the two become separated.
> "Assembled with Merlin Pro 1.5 on a 48K Apple II+"
> "Written with Apple Pascal 1.3 on an enhanced 128K Apple IIe"

Yes, the current setup stores each snippet as a text file on the
server along with a separate file for the description. This seems a
bit cumbersome to me, and I think I'll rework it so that all info
(including the snippet) goes into a database. This will allow me to
add additional descriptive fields - eg. version numbers, Complete
Pascal, Orca Pascal, etc etc....  It will also enable a search
facility to be developed at some point.

> 2) The page that lists the snippets in a category shows only the first
> few words of the long description.  Is it possible to add a field for
> a short, length-limited snippet description for use on the category
> listing page? If not, then we contributors could at least make sure
> that the long description begins with a concise summary that will
> appear in the category list.  A good example is the snippet "Load an
> image into memory" which begins "This snippet loads a standard
> uncompressed image or a packed image from disk into the memory
> pointed...".  A not-so-good example is the snippet "ProDOS Formatting
> Code" which starts "Hyper-FORMAT II - ProDOS Formater This Program was
> made with the novice programmer at heart..."

I'll see what I come up with. Shouldn't be hard to include a short
description in addition to the long one.

> 3) The login page requests "Username / Email" but the registration
> page only allows usernames with letters, numbers and underscores,
> which rules out using an email address there.

The login page allows you to login with either the username you
entered during registration *or* the email address you entered during
registration. For example, if your username is "Fred" and your email
address is "fred@myhost.com", you can login as "Fred" or
"fred@myhost.com" using the password you chose. This can be handy if
you've forgotton what Username you created...

> I'm looking forward to watching and helping this resource to grow!
> Thanks for taking the initiative.

This site can only be as good as the contributions from the community.
I'll keep working on polishing it somewhat and see if I can make it a
bit more usable.

Thanks for the feedback.  :-)

Cheers,
Mike

--

Mike Stephens
Central Coast, Australia

Find my Apple II projects online at:
http://apple2.sytes.net/