Report of Meeting 2023-11-23

Report of Meeting 2023-11-23

Present: Ed Gottsman, Raul Miller, and Bob Therriault

Full transcripts of this meeting are now available on this page after this synopsis

1) Bob had read out an email from Brian Schott thanking the group for their work on the J wiki project and also several comments from the YouTube site which were very positive. https://youtu.be/SLJS84u4eVc Ed plans to roll out future changes gradually introducing fixes and features on a monthly basis. The first method of making people aware will be through the J forums. https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/J_Viewer

2) Skip has replied to Ed about the Quora entries that Skip Cave has posted to attract people to J. Ed now has a list of links to the documents that give him access to Skip's posts, but since there are hundreds of them Ed is looking for a more automated approach. Ed has looked into several scrapers, but Quora is vigilant in the ways that it prevents scraping. The Journal of J seems to have very large articles in a number of formats and may not be a good target for the J viewer. Ed has solved the bug that was slowing up the J viewer, but will leave the category column as is because it is a better functional solution for the user.

3) At this point we have had no requests for the J viewer and Bob wondered if we need a stronger call to action. There could be one put in the video description easily and Ed sent Bob and Raul his proposed message to the forums. Raul mentioned that Ed had not given himself enough credit for the development to which Bob agreed. Bob suggested changing "If you would like to take the J viewer for a test drive" to "To take the J Viewer for a test drive" as a more direct approach.

4) Bob mentioned that Eric Iverson had suggested that the J on AWS server https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/System/Installation/Cloud may be incorporated with the J Wiki. Ed felt that Eric's solution could work very well and then there was an extensive discussion about how this might be done. There were no definite solutions, but the discussion was meant to explore the possibilities. The transcript below will fill in many of these details. It was agreed that the approach taken should be that a terminal window that opens on the wiki page and does not require the user to leave the page. A good format might be something similar to BQN's approach of documentation. https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/doc/quick.html

5) Bob did a quick demo of the Home Page https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Home and the Newcomers page https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Category:Newcomers_N. Raul suggested that we might include the subtrees on the pages below the home page. Ed wondered if we could include the Category Tree on every page. Bob is concerned about the Category Tree pushing out the content on narrower screens. Raul suggested that it may be better to float the Category Tree to the right. And have the content of the wiki put into a div that could float away from the Category Tree but keep the content intact. Bob's next project for content is to recategorize the Newcomer's essays so that they are grouped in ways that are more accessible to Newcomers. Once the Essays for Newcomers is done then Bob will work on the Reference and the Community pages to prepare them for launch. Bob felt that the Category Tree might be even more useful for navigation when used on the Reference page.

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 23:00 (UTC) Next meeting is November 30, 2023.

Transcript

There we go.

And I just, we got an email from Brian Schott.

And Brian said, I just wanted to let you know that I think your work on the JWIKI has been terrific, all capitals.

Your tireless reporting updates is amazing and your videos to help it are really easy to understand.

Great work.

Your team is producing a really helpful WIKI.

Oh, good.

Yes.

I thought that's great.

Congratulations.

Well, I think congratulations to all of us because he does mention the team.

Otherwise I wouldn't have even read it to you.

I just would have kept it to myself.

But no, it is, I think that's, I think I replied to him and said, thank you so much for, you know, appreciating it.

And I mentioned the JViewer and the Playground is two things that I said are WIKI adjacent, but I think they're actually really very cool things as well.

And I was happy to be part of that development process as well.

Yeah.

I'm just trying to think if there's anything else pressing.

Well, I guess the question goes over to you, Ed.

What about, we've got the video up.

We've got some nice responses to it.

Do we have the video up?

I didn't know that.

Oh, yeah.

No, I, when you said, I think you told me to take it off private.

So I did.

I did.

Do you want me to go through the responses?

Oh, yeah.

Do you want me to go through those too?

Well, why not?

Sure.

Yeah, absolutely.

Let's see here.

So we have three comments.

The first one was, this looks great.

I like the one, I like that one can easily view the mailing list discussions.

Thanks.

And that was from somebody who I think is Milliarm.

I don't know.

Remy Clark, who is actually on the APL farm and I've talked to before, just said, this is great!

Exclamation mark.

And a Daniel Torres, who I don't know, said, wow, wow, wow!

Exclamation mark.

So that's good.

All right.

Well, I will get the link and put it into the email draft and go ahead and send it out to J programming tonight.

Then we'll just do this thing.

It already has 126 views.

Oh, wow.

And what I'll do, my tentative plan is to try, in order to avoid making this a big bang, is monthly to mail out an update with new features, bug fixes, whatever, just to remind people that it exists and give them another chance to try it out.

If they've never tried it or if they tried it and didn't like it for whatever reason, maybe it's better now.

But okay.

I will go ahead and launch this evening.

Yeah.

Rolling it out that way is a very good idea.

I like that a lot.

That'll help.

Yeah.

Just trying to think.

Yeah, you're going to start off by going through the forums, right?

Yeah, that's the plan.

Just the J programming forum.

Okay.

Yeah.

I think that'll get you'll get some I'm hoping you'll get some response from that.

I think, for example, with Remy responding, I've never seen him on the J forums.

So he's just picked it up.

Oh, but lurking is a, I mean, there are probably five lurkers for every participant or 10.

I mean, that's typical.

I guess so.

And the one time I did talk to him, I think he's in Tokyo.

One time I did talk to him, he was live streaming work he was doing.

And I can't remember whether he mentioned the forums or not.

He seemed to me to be pretty isolated.

But anyway, that was just that might have just been me projecting on it that I hadn't seen him before.

Certainly a very nice guy.

Well, good.

Yeah.

So Skip got back to me on his Quora posts, of which there are hundreds.

And there, I think as a beginner, it's a good resource.

And he was kind enough to send me a PDF document with links to all of the questions that he's answered.

It's a report that Quora produces.

Quora is very skittish about crawling, as I think I mentioned last week.

And I have spent a couple of hours trying to pry the links out of this PDF document.

They're embedded links.

They're not explicitly rendered, represented in the text of the document.

They're behind headlines.

They're behind questions.

And I have not been able to get these damn things out.

This is going to be a journey.

So I will look forward to that.

I did look at journal of-- sorry, go ahead.

Well, when you say that, what you're seeing is you're seeing the headline.

And then when you click on the headline, it takes you to the document?

That's the idea.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, if you've got an option of-- like, if you right click on a link, you can just download the link itself.

Bob, there are hundreds of them.

OK.

Hundreds.

Yeah, it's a challenge.

It's not something I feel comfortable doing manually.

It would take quite a long time.

The other problem is that Quora obfuscates its HTML.

So it is not at all obvious what you're looking at.

I found a service that has built Quora scrapers that are knowledgeable about the obfuscation and can return plain text.

But I would not want the job of doing that myself.

So as I say, it's going to be a journey.

I did look at Journal of J.

The articles are pretty large.

So there's the usual problem of how do I point to the place in the article where your search term occurs?

And I think I'm just going to admire the beauty of that problem.

I don't intend to fix it at this point.

I did change the app.

So on the app, every hour it will check for new versions of itself and of the data.

So if you leave it up for long periods, that's fine.

Eventually, you'll get a little notification in the form of the button label that tells you that something new is available.

I think I mentioned that there was a performance bug.

The frame rate had dropped.

I found that.

I'm actually very proud, although also I feel a little humiliated by how I found it.

I turned on logging.

Logging is on a millisecond clock.

And I just watched for where the big gap was.

Oh, there it is.

And it was pretty clear what the problem was.

Yeah, and that's about it, I guess.

So I think you changed the category list based on that being a bug.

Are you going to move it back?

You're going to leave it the way it is?

I think I'll leave it the way it is.

I don't see any problem with it.

I was very happy that I was able to put the page counts into that list.

I hadn't been able to imagine how to do that until I actually set out to do it.

I think it works out pretty well.

It's maybe not as good graphically as the original, but I think it's perfectly adequate.

So yeah, I think I'll leave it as is.

Well, I think the advantage that you have, as much as I did like your expanding view just for the novelty of it, and it's an effective solution, it's not standard.

So by going to standard, I think you probably make it easier for people to catch on to.

I think it's a win.

Yeah, I think you're probably right about that.

So yeah, so that's where I am, and I'll launch tonight.

Fun times.

And I've got on it, I've got your, like on the video itself, under the comments, I've got your email address.

Oh, good.

And the Wiki link.

Is there anything else I should be putting on the video?

No, that's great.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I mean, that was, since it's mentioned on the opening and closing, I thought that's probably good to have it there.

Absolutely.

People can click on it and head out and, you know.

Yeah, well done.

Thank you.

So the other question, I guess, have you had any responses from people who've been asking about it?

No.

Not a word.

Interesting.

Well, let's see.

What I'm thinking is I'm wondering whether we're missing a call to action then.

Yeah.

Well, which would make sense because we had nothing to call people to act upon up until now or an hour from now.

Yeah, that's true.

Because it wasn't available.

Yeah.

So I guess maybe.

Yeah, you add a call to action in front of the top of those links and say now available.

Yep.

I can do that for sure.

Yeah, I'll do that.

And the other thing I'm thinking is with the email that you send out to the forum, make sure you've got a call to action on that because that'll pre-warm them for if they click on the video to go see the video, they'll be ready to.

Oh, I think it's pretty clear.

It segues very rapidly into here, the installation instructions.

Okay.

I can actually send it to you if you like.

Let me do that right now.

And to Raul.

[ PAUSE ] >> Where did I send it?

>> Okay.

I'm checking for mail and -- [ PAUSE ] Yep.

There it is.

[ PAUSE ] >> Give yourself not enough credit, that opening sentence.

We helped, but we couldn't -- >> Well, it was -- >> -- put it together.

>> I know, but it was very much a team effort role, and I want to acknowledge that.

[ PAUSE ] >> Yeah, I think my name should be ahead of Raoul's.

[ LAUGHTER ] >> I'll keep that in mind.

>> No, no, no, no.

I'm kidding.

[ LAUGHTER ] I agree with Raoul.

You should give yourself more credit, but -- yeah.

Because, I mean, it's a lot -- I mean, I know you're doing this for your own sanity, but you've done a lot for everybody here.

>> Well, we'll see how it works out.

>> Yeah.

[ PAUSE ] >> I think the only thing I'd change is -- >> Yeah, go ahead.

>> -- just below JViewer wiki page, that video link.

>> Yeah.

>> But if you'd like to take the JViewer for a test driver -- >> Yes.

>> -- I don't think you should say "if you'd like to.

" >> Ah.

>> You say "to take" -- >> I would say "to take" the JViewer for a test driver.

Installation instructions below.

>> Oh, all right.

All right.

>> Yeah, don't give them that out.

[ LAUGHTER ] >> Just move them right into it, and then I think the rest of it looks really good.

Aside from the fact that I agree, I think you should give yourself more credit, but -- >> You know, it'll emerge, I'm sure.

>> Yeah, it will emerge, because I'll make sure it emerges, but -- >> Oh, thank you.

All right, I'll just say "installation instructions follow.

" >> Or I would just -- I would just take "if you'd like.

" Just start with "to take.

" >> JViewer for a test drive.

>> All right.

>> Because that way you're reinforcing as a test drive, so you're not putting a high bar there, but you're getting them to do it.

>> Okay, excellent.

Got it.

>> Yeah, other than that, I think it's very good.

And I guess they need to, and -- >> Well, you know, having said that, whenever you put something out, you'll find the places there's a problem.

>> Oh, yeah, absolutely.

No question about it.

>> Yeah.

>> I've got -- what I'll probably do, I normally take -- I normally wear my watch, my Apple watch at night, because I like it to track my sleep and tell me that I'm sleeping a lot.

That's my goal in life.

>> I do the same.

>> Right, exactly.

But the other -- the problem, of course, is that mail comes up.

So at 2 in the morning, you know, you look at your watch to see what time it is, you see that there's mail, and you start checking it.

So I'll probably put it on the side table on the charger tonight and try to ignore it, pretend that I don't know about it.

>> I think there's a way to -- you'd have to look at some of the background, but I think there's a way to actually stop notifications at any time.

>> I don't actually want to do it except for a few hours tonight.

After that, I'm more than happy to have it working as normal.

>> Yeah, I do remember there's a settings notifications thing, and it's just a little switch.

You can switch off and on.

>> Yeah, I -- >> By app.

>> The last operating system I feel like I really understood was Windows 95.

I mean, I had my arms around Windows 95.

And since then, I switched to a sort of gardening metaphor where I'm not in control.

I do what I can.

I weed here.

I plant there and so on.

But what happens is really more up to nature than it is up to me.

So I don't have a lot of faith in my ability to change settings on something like this, to be perfectly honest.

>> Isn't there a -- I've never used the Apple Watch myself, so I don't even know how to get to the settings app.

>> There is a Watch app that is explicitly for settings.

It's not actually part of the settings dialogue.

They had to come up with an entire new app for the Watch settings.

>> On the phone.

>> Yeah, but, you know, it's one of these things where there are probably a couple of places where you'd have to do it.

It's just I don't believe it somehow.

I'm going to take it off.

>> You're perfectly suited to our new AI overlords.

>> That's what they expect of us as well.

>> Yeah, exactly.

>> Yeah, chat bot overlords.

>> Yeah.

So I guess that's exciting and that's excellent.

Good for you and I look forward to seeing what happens with that.

>> Yeah, me too.

>> Yeah.

I don't think there's -- is there anything else you want to talk about in that area?

>> No, that was all that I had for this evening.

Yeah, this afternoon.

The thing I threw in was Eric mentioned because I'd asked him about promoting his, you know, having Jay on AWS, the server available to people.

And he doesn't want to do it yet.

He's in beta.

But he says once he gets this up and going, he wants to figure out how to incorporate it into the wiki.

And so I think -- >> I think he's absolutely right.

>> Yeah.

>> So from what -- well, I'm not an expert in these areas.

I was always thinking about using the Jay Playground that way.

But does it make more sense?

Would it be easier to do with AWS?

Yeah.

>> I think that -- I mean, the problem with the Jay Playground is it has a user interface component.

And you have to live with that if you're going to use it.

The nice thing about Eric's solution is that it's back end.

So you can supply your own user interface, even a very bare bones one if you want to.

So the image that I had always had in mind -- that I had in mind once I read Eric's email of a couple of weeks ago was something like the Jay Playground, although really more of a console that would emerge from the top of the screen and that would let you copy anything you wanted to into it and execute it.

And the idea would be you could still scroll the bottom half of the screen to see the entire page that you were on, but you could copy off it and paste it into the console and see what happened.

So what would have to happen for that to work -- I'm not sure what would happen for that to make that work, but the header would have to be willing to expand downwards, ideally smoothly, and create a terminal area, a console area that you could work in.

The idea of copying some text and going away to something like the Jay Playground on another tab, that's not as attractive.

Because now I've lost my context.

I would like to stay in the context where I was learning about this stuff and still be able to exercise it.

And that was as far as I'd gotten, except to say that I'm sure glad it's not my job to implement this.

So what you're thinking of is like it would be like a terminal window then, really.

Because I have a feeling what I -- I did get on there and I did play with it.

I think Eric's using the JHS interface.

Is any wrong?

Yes, it's pretty much almost stock JHS, his demo was at least.

There were a few things that didn't make sense, you know, where JHS needed to be tweaked a bit to support the model that he was providing.

But even that was probably more my misunderstanding of how it was going to be deployed than anything else.

I know where I had the limitations was when I tried to download add-ons.

That wasn't going to work.

I think add-ons would be pre-installed.

It's basically a Docker system is what my impression is, actually.

That may be true, but that's not how it's presented to us as consumers of it.

No, I mean, but it's like it has a -- he said it has a constant -- it has a fixed image as a basis and then has a layer over top of it that's files that the user can update.

Sure, but I could, using HTF, using REST, I could supply an expression, which it would execute and return results to me for, right?

I mean, that's the nature of the interface.

I don't remember whether the JHS queries were exposed to the browser environment.

It was like we had a -- maybe it was, maybe it was.

I don't know.

I'm inferring from what I saw that that is what was going on, but it could be something very different.

It probably was.

I know you can copy and paste from text into JHS.

That works fine.

The question is, is there a user interface that's welded onto JHS that you're stuck with, or can you just invoke a REST call, a GET or a POST, passing in a J expression and getting back a printed result?

That's the question.

Well, the JHS interface is all created.

Like, it's -- JHS is creating a menu system.

So you can change your menu system.

It's generating HTML that's showing up.

Okay, so it's not in fact behaving the way I imagined.

The question is, could it?

Yeah, I think it could, because at the bottom of it, it's got a J engine.

It's querying, right?

It sends this information and gets the answer back and displays it for you.

Well, but it sounds like what's displayed for you is everything that comes back.

In other words, it regenerates an HTML page on the fly, sends it down, and that's what's shown in the browser.

Yes, no, maybe.

Well, I'm not sure it's -- I don't think it's generating the whole page.

I think it's just generating the part that comes back is what's added to the log, and then that's displayed.

Okay, well, then it sounds like it's, if not what I'm imagining, pretty close to what I'm imagining, a general purpose backend J engine that you can send expressions to and get results from, and that has persistent state.

I think JHS is that front end to a J engine.

Right, and the question is, could you use something else?

Yeah.

Could you use a wiki page that you had created, for example, and not use the JHS front end?

I'm just trying to think of how the wiki would work with that.

Like the wiki doesn't seem to have -- Think of the simplest possible case.

You've got an input field right next to the search box at the top of the screen, and it lets you put arbitrary J in.

Yeah.

And you put the J in and you press enter, and whatever comes back, the browser shows you a pop-up with the results.

Yeah, but then we're talking about the backend of the wiki at that point, because on a wiki page, there's no actual way to put a text entry in.

Like that's what your search bars and stuff like that are for, right?

Yeah, that's -- okay, so I'm asking for something that the media wiki does not supply.

Not at that level, right?

I'm not saying it can't be done, but that might take some more work into the media wiki end of things to create something that allows you that input.

I don't doubt that it would create a lot of work on the media wiki side of things.

I think you're almost certainly right about that.

And it might be prohibitive.

Well, I don't know.

I mean, the reason I don't know is because obviously wikis use links to outside sources and stuff.

And so linking to something that's going to provide you an answer is not way out of bounds.

Sure, but adding input fields to the media wiki's user interface may be out of bounds.

Yeah, I don't know.

There's lots of extensions.

So it's just a question of, you know, I think that's the way I -- and Chris Burke would be the one to talk to, although, Raul, you probably have a sense of it as well.

But my guess is somebody's done a PHP extension that does that sort of thing and hopefully get one that's fairly robust.

Because not all extensions are maintained at the same level.

You get some that people, you know, they can tell they're old and they may not have kept up.

And then others are used all the time and have actually -- some of them have actually become part of the media wiki.

Right.

Yeah, I don't have any visibility into that ecosystem.

I couldn't comment.

No, and the limit I have from it was when I first started out, I was trying to get a sense of what it's doing and how it's doing it.

And that's what I saw was there was a lot of work with extensions.

I haven't dived behind the scenes to do that.

But that would be the trick.

And the only other way I can think of doing it is whether there'd be a way of doing a frame.

I know frames are kind of frowned upon these days.

You could have a frame that -- yeah, that would have the J part of it and then the rest of the frame would be the wiki.

Or I suppose -- well, I suppose the other way to do it is to write another J viewer type of thing.

You'd be locking yourself onto JQT, but you'd certainly have the ability to put in fields and you're just sending to a web page basically anyway, right?

Sending to a web page.

Well, the J environment on the AWS, it's just a web page is all it's displaying, right?

Well, it does -- I think it may generate a web page with each exchange.

You implied that it might not do that, that it just takes incremental information and adds it.

I think it's using Ajax.

I think it's using Ajax to do that.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I don't know.

That's beyond me.

I was just looking at media wiki extensions.

There are input text boxes to play with.

So that's not impossible.

But then the other problem, and it may be the more difficult one, is how to display results.

Yeah.

Anyway, I don't think we need to feel we have to solve this because at this point Eric's saying when he gets here, he's interested in doing this, but I'm just thinking a bit of pre-warming might be useful.

Yeah, no, I would communicate to him that you're interested in it, that we all are.

And it's the open question -- I think the only open question, I'm sure he can package up JHS, the engine, the query framework, all of it, in whatever way we need it to be packaged up.

The open question is really the malleability of the media wiki user interface architecture.

And we just probably need to be a little cleverer about how we do that.

Well, and like if you look at JHS in the demos, there are certainly ways to build frames that you can have -- part of your frame is the terminal window and then the other part is your script window and then underneath can be some of your definitions.

Right.

It's easy to do that way and essentially you're just looking at a website.

Well, that's what I keep coming back to is, is he just regenerating a web page with every exchange?

That's what I'm not clear on.

And if that's the case, that's not as useful to us.

We need him to strip that user interface component off and just give us access to the back end directly.

Right.

Do you see what I mean?

I do, but the terminal part, you can use it like a terminal.

Like you can put in all your stuff and get answers back and forth.

That's JHS.

It's working with the J engine at that point.

Whatever else is displayed doesn't matter.

With the J engine just passing expressions back and getting results from the J engine.

Exactly.

Okay, that's great.

He's got exactly what we want.

We just need visibility into that interface.

Yeah, and I guess what I'm thinking in a simple sense is if you had one of those other windows being the wiki, you're making it predominantly the terminal at that point.

So it's not the sort of thing like, I think you'd have to build some kind of a viewer.

Well, because it's web-based, so that would be pretty cool.

You could actually have the web base be the view of the wiki.

And then the terminal is always there, it just slides out of the way when you want it.

That would be the right way to think about it.

Yeah.

That requires that MediaWiki play nice with the vision, which is an open question.

It's just a web page.

All right.

I mean, you can definitely, if you put a different, the real question though would be whether you'd want all your people using the wiki to come through an AWS site, basically, because that's what they're doing, right?

Well, but they wouldn't by default.

It's not something that would happen to most people most of the time.

I see.

You'd have to use that J engine text input field.

Yeah.

That you'd have to hit AWS.

Yeah, and at that point, you'd probably get, I think the way you would do it, you'd get a new window.

So we take you from where you were in the wiki to AWS, so you can do all you want in the wiki and not affect AWS.

You click on a button, it takes you out.

And then when you're out, then you've got a working JHS there.

But that, I mean, you might as well use the J playground at that point, if you're going to take me away from my context.

Right, right.

And so that's the question, can you do it?

So really, it's just a, it's just, it's a traffic issue on AWS then.

How do you figure?

Well, if there was a way to make sure that anybody, your link to go to the J wiki now becomes a link to go to AWS with a running version of J.

That becomes your portal into.

One possibility.

The other possibility is we change the header of the J wiki, so it's cognizant of AWS and has an input field.

And then anybody who enters a J expression or whatever they want to in there, gets a little terminal window in some form, top half of the screen, left half of the screen, doesn't really matter.

That shows results.

Yep.

And they're still on that page.

Yep.

Have not taken them away.

Well, I was thinking when you when you open the AWS version, because you already know what page you're on, that would become a side page to you.

It would still be there.

Yeah, right.

However, yeah, the point is don't take me away from that page.

Yeah, use a little less space for it if you'd like, but don't take me away.

Well, and what I'm suggesting in a way might unfortunately feel like you're being taken away because you've got a new window with that same page on it.

Yeah, yeah, I don't know.

There's another possibly here too, which is kind of vaguely tangential to the conversation also possibly vaguely relevant to the chat.

Yeah, I'm looking at that now.

Thank you.

Currently the J playground is not packaged in a way which supports this.

But they got interest.

So, this may change.

Yeah, it strikes me that it would probably be easier to exploit, excuse me, leverage Eric's work than to leverage the J playground.

We can get just a back end J engine that we can send HTML.

Oh yeah, that's what I said, it's tangential.

But if you're talking about mixing J expressions with J playground, it doesn't necessarily have to be in the same context as the search engine is what I was thinking.

Okay.

I don't know if it's a search engine but it's a search UI search framework, I don't know, search something or another technical term.

Yeah, anyway, I think if we're able to be done, I think it'd be a really neat thing to do.

And I think it starts to come down to some of the stuff I've seen on BQN, Marshall Lockbaum's language where he's done a lot of work into making the presentation of the information documentation.

First, it's really well written.

And second, the display is really good, like he's got a nice dark background and colors and that kind of thing happening.

And I think he uses links but I do think he has that separation, I'll have to go back and check.

But I think he does have that separation where it will open up an instance of BQN for you to play around with.

You can go from the, essentially GitHub is where he's posted all his documentation.

And then it jumps back out.

I'm going to go to another tab, we might as well, I think it would make more sense to leverage JPlayground than JHS.

But if we can keep it in the same tab somehow, I think JHS is the way to go.

And that's on us really is to figure out how to do that with MediaWiki.

I think we need to give it some more thought and be clever about it.

I don't think, to your point, that we're going to solve it here.

No.

No, I think it's one of those things, you start thinking about it and then when you actually get into doing it, you find out so much more.

Yeah, exactly.

And you're going to be able to leverage, to use your term, certain things that are to your advantage, and then you'll be able to nullify things that might be working against you.

Yeah.

But you won't know what you're hitting until you get in there.

Yeah, until you try it.

Yeah.

It's true.

Anyway, I think we're all sort of on the same page is what we want is a minimal disruption, going from the information to seeing the results and to be able to play with it.

That's the goal, right?

Exactly.

I think that's a good way to put it.

The only thing I have left, and I guess I should share screen and go into this just to show you what I came up with for the, this is the homepage.

So I've taken out the, minimize this to get it out of the way.

I've taken out the developers thing, as you can see.

So you've got newcomers, JPlayground, reference and community.

I made these bigger.

I like that for sure.

And I've got down the side now, this is essentially the category tree.

So if anything's on there, it's clickable, it'll take you to that category.

I think you were wondering, Ed, whether I could have these further expanded, like open up that way.

Yes.

And I can, I think that's just a setting I need to probably talk to Chris about.

I think it's a setting that I don't have access to, but you can set whatever level you want things to open to.

I see.

So in that case.

I would strongly encourage opening up the whole thing.

Yeah.

So the difference would be, it's going to show up like that.

Right.

And push you off to the side here, but I don't really have a big problem with that.

And as other things get filled out, if say there's sub galleries that come or sub categories that come up off the gallery, then that would be able to be exposed as well.

So as it grows, the tentacles grow or the tree grows, it would automatically open it up for you.

Right.

And I think as we mentioned before, we'll have a link up here that includes a page map, which is essentially this tree category list.

And it would open up full page as well.

And it would be displayed, would it just would it be multiple columns or what, why do you need that I guess is my question if we can show the whole category map category tree expanded here.

Well, this is only going to show up on the homepage.

Oh, I see.

Of course.

So when I go to here, I'm not going to, did I click on it?

I didn't.

There we go.

When I go to the homepage.

Yeah, I'll be able to get back to the homepage.

And then the homepage would have that or, or well, I guess we could, if we didn't want to do a page map up here, we could just have a return to home up here.

But I was thinking I would probably have that up here on the, on the sidebar.

Sure, but I mean, yeah, I just have tree for newcomers to be on the newcomers page.

So you'd put the newcomers subtree on there.

Yeah, I could do that.

I can certainly do that because it's just creating a tree I just have to tell it which tree I want to create.

I have a question.

Can we put the tree on every page.

The full tree.

Yeah, we could but if we do that.

We're taking up real estate and I'm thinking if you were accessing off a phone or something it becomes a bit more of an issue.

Oh, that is true.

That is true.

And in fact I think what ends up happening is the.

This sidebar would push all of this down, but I can tell just by shrinking this.

Yeah.

So, it would be the first thing you see right.

Yeah.

All right, maybe that's not so good.

Okay, I withdraw the comment.

Well, I do like, I do like Raul's suggestion of putting the newcomers tree on the newcomers page.

Sure, sure, sure.

I might not put it on all of these pages.

But, but I could do it for sort of the next level down so for reference and community playground it doesn't make sense to do that really because it's a flat page anyway.

But, but I could certainly do it for newcomers and that would be, I think, pretty useful in which case it would just show this part of the tree.

That's what you would see.

So you'd have access to all those right off the page.

Now there's nothing there that you're not going to see here, but just a different way of doing it.

Like when I get to newcomers I will have those same categories.

I'm seeing them right here right.

Although they'll be in a different order I guess.

And I guess the other thing that will show up is scripts will show up then, which I've sort of taken out.

But I can't remember where they took it out of the category tree or not.

I could probably take it out of the category tree just disconnected.

The next thing I was going to show though, are there any more questions about that.

Not from me.

I have gone through the essays, and now have 60 essays that I think would be useful to newcomers.

So my next step is to build this part of the page up above and essentially, and I will recategorize them as well because within these that I think specifically fit the newcomers essays, there are kind of different types of essays.

There's essays such as this, which are really good at explaining everything.

But that would be very different than an essay such as this.

Actually this one isn't too bad.

But quite often when Roger does his, his essays are quite terse and involve more J code than the explanation.

I guess quicksort is another one from my just from my memory.

So that's pretty typical of a Roger style.

He'll give you information, he'll set out some code, and then that code's there for you.

So it's not an explanatory, it's not an expository essay.

It's almost a documentation essay.

So I think I'll separate things that way.

And then, to some extent, for topics to some of the essays are more math oriented others are.

Well, some of them are just good foundational ones.

I think like rank is a pretty good essay just to give you a sense of how rank works frame and sell all that stuff that you would want to have sort of a background on.

But that wouldn't be the same as what we just saw, you know, Roger had done for quicksort.

And so that's what I'm looking at populating this part of the page with.

And when that's done, I'm pretty much done with the newcomers, at least at this stage.

I've got enough information on that that I'm comfortable with anybody, you know, looking at the different things and having useful information, you know, available to them now it's jumping ahead just to the pages but that's okay it's got the information there.

I don't feel like I'm short changing newcomers or I'm going to throw them into something that is difficult for them to comprehend but I do think the essays might need a bit more front end work.

And then my next step is to go to reference, and then community and when those are done then switching over to the, to the homepage as our opening page.

And I'm hoping to have that community is mostly New York City J user group notes right.

Um, yeah, there's essentially right now I've got the different forums I've got journals.

It.

There's a lot in here that's.

In fact, I don't think I've got thinking forums.

So so that's just our forums and also chat bots and stuff.

User groups is here.

User groups is mainly New York City.

I think I have some other ones in here.

Well, probably this.

Yeah, there's some links to other user groups.

So, that would probably be sort of more like the header page looks like for user groups, and then underneath there would be, you'd put this, and I may end up creating a separate category for New York City J user groups, just because otherwise.

It's so dominates by its amount of information.

Yeah, you lose the other ones.

So that would be a case where it might make sense to have a click to take you to that next category and and give you full access to that.

But the community is a bit wider than user groups on its own.

You know, it's got forums blogs I haven't opened up that much but there are other blogs that I'm going to be putting in people are writing blogs about J.

It's got to be expanded a bit.

And it's also got the other array languages as a links to that.

I was thinking about the phone thing where the on a phone the, the tree dominates the page.

Yeah.

Would it make sense to put the tree on the right hand side so that didn't happen.

Float it right.

I can do that.

I mean I think it's basically left to right top to bottom is the is the basic structure of the systems.

Right, it'll, it'll drop down.

Yeah, I think it's probably just a matter of putting float right here or something.

I've got clear right float left so yeah if I have float right clear left that should do it right.

I don't know.

I don't know how easy it is now know if it needs the page itself be laid out slightly different, but, uh, well we're about to find out.

There you go.

All right.

And now if I make it narrow let's see if it, if it does.

Well, eventually it would squeeze it down but it.

The challenge would be this is wider than wonder if you would need to wrap the whole rest of the content in a, in a div and float it, or you can do something about to tell us say this is actually important content browser.

So we take this whole section here and make it into a div, so that when this floats right it comes down underneath it.

Yeah, possibly even putting, putting this after the content and arranging it so I don't know, I don't know, I'd have to play around with a bit to see how to range the page.

Yeah, no, it's a good point.

And I guess the other thing is I could change where this is doesn't have to be here.

I could put it here.

Let's see what happens when I do that.

Drops it down there.

Some ways that's not as visible.

Now it's visible, it also originally I think we were talking about it we were talking about it having done, having it down below right.

Right, but I really like having it in the margin.

But we can get it we can we can do that by putting it in the right margin and it sounds like we might be able to do something with that I'll play around with that anyway.

It might even be possible that dude in the left margin.

As long as it's below the content.

You know, so the browser, I think the browser might be using the, the, the actual document, you know, the source structure to figure out top and bottom in resolving in some, you know, it's ambiguous or when it's pressured or something.

I have completely lost my shares so I'm going to come back off that for now but yeah, um, yeah I can play around with that and see if I can get it down.

The other thing is, it would be nice if it was in a more horizontal format, but then again it doesn't really work for categories.

The vertical works better for the categories and the nice thing about vertical is, is each each one is a fixed with fixed distance vertically and it's a variable width horizontally and vertical resolves that without having to really pad things out.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Those are good ideas.

I appreciate that.

Give me something to work with.

And that actually might be really useful when it gets into reference because there's so much more information that I really do want that category tree probably down the side of reference and it might make even more sense to do sub trees of those different links to so that there's a bit more structure in that huge, you know, shell of information that is the wiki reference.

Anyway, that's about all I had.

Anything else for this wonderful Thanksgiving.

I'm good.

For now, I'm so good.

Thanks so much, Bob.

I get to thank both you for showing up on your holiday.

Take care.

I'll see you both next week.

Yeah, sounds good.

And keep me posted if there's anything.

I'll make that change to the to the video with a call to action at the top.

Great.

Saying it's now ready.

And so when you go, we'll see what, hopefully we get lots of response.

That would be great.

I hope so too.