Wiki/Report of Meeting 2022-11-17

Report of Meeting 2022-11-17

Present: Art Anger, Devon McCormick, Raul Miller and Bob Therriault

1. We looked at Art's index to the Essays which now includes difficulty levels. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Anger/Essays_Index Difficulty was assigned subjectively and might be adjusted by other's input over time. Then a discussion about whether there might be a way to have multiple pages of indices into Essays, which would allow different views of the essays, either by difficulty, category or alphabetic. This is probably aspirational. The initial prototype has been alphabetic, but the working copy is most likely to be done by category. The prototype also features characteristics that span across essays which are known by more than one name.
2. Raul initiated a discussion on how to extract information from the wiki pages either from html or the view source on the wiki page. View source is usually preferred and J primitives can be created to manipulate the text files. There are times that manual changes can be effective if the occurence of changes is rare.
3. We investigated the rebuild pages for the Essays to create a list of links that are then manipulated into alphabetical columns of the essay pages within a table. Raul then showed the J code that is used to build the wiki. He was given access to this through the process of migrating documents from jsoftware.com to the wiki .
4. Bob showed the work that he had done with the navigation bars and the search bar which now includes the J Code Search and Nuvoc and the page map. https://code2.jsoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page This is all part of creating a more organized front end that will function as the wiki for most of the users. The archived pages will include the information that has not been modernized for display in the front end that is organized by the navigation bars. As time goes on archived pages may be promoted to the front end as user require it. The initial change to the current wiki would be to create the front end similar to the prototype wiki and then over time make updates as either new information or promoted material from the archived pages is added to the front end. Raul suggested that we want to get this in good enough shape to deploy and then throw a bunch of high school kids at it to see what the reaction is.
5. Devon asked about how the NYCJUG meetings would be added to the wiki and whether they need to be updated if they are going to be archived. It was felt that there is useful information in the techniques and the fact that it would make sense to put it in the Community area because it is history of a user group. The code might be brought forward to other areas over time, but the raw material would stay in the NYCJUG subsection.
6. Bob sees that NuVoc will have a prominent roll in the front end especially if it is coupled to the J Playground where links could provide interactive examples to allow more user discovery.

For access to previous meeting reports https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki_Development

If you would like to participate in the development of the J wiki please contact us on the general forum and we will get you an invitation to the next J wiki meeting held on Thursdays at 24:00 (UTC) Next meeting is November 24th, 2022.