Some essays are about specific places. It seemed unfortunate that there was no way to find an essay on that basis. Now you can.
There’s a lot of metadata associated with the essays, images, and other items you’ll find here: at the time of this writing, almost a megabyte expressed in RDF/XML.
One of the interesting exercises in maintaining this site is deciding which metadata to expose and how. On the one hand, I’d like to expose all of it, on the other, a little bit of log analysis suggests that not much of it is really used. Most of you get here by following links from somewhere else or from the home page. A few peek into the summary by date. A vanishingly small number ever bother to look at the topic or subject summaries.
So most of the metadata I build for myself. And today I was fiddling with WordNet and I wanted to find the picture of the Hoary Marmot that I know I took on Whistler Mountain. (Why? Because it turns out that Hoary Marmot is in WordNet 1.6, though not, alas, as it turns out, in WordNet 2.0.)
I found it pretty quickly by looking at the essays by date and scanning back to July which is when I vaguely remembered being there. But I know that I also keep track of the “coverage” (in the Dublin Core metadata sense) for essays that are related to a particular location.
It seemed unfortunate that I couldn’t lookup the essay that I was interested in by means of the most direct method that came to mind. So I built it.
There’s a new link in the upper-right hand corner: Coverage. I know most of you will never use it, but at least I can now.
Comments:
The most common user interface to a standard treeware book, I would hypothesize, is to read through the book linearly. More sophisticated approaches to reading a book flow from more sophisticated information needs, which is where tables of contents and indices start to be useful. My guess is that as users start to make more sophisticated use of the content available at this site, and as the content of the site becomes more elaborate, the metadata will become more and more valuable.
I'm still struggling to get used to the concept of the web structured with metadata, so I didn't even know your index (called "Subjects") existed, but now that I've seen it, I can definitely invision it being useful. I don't expect (or need) an index in a novel, but I use one extensively in a math reference; I haven't expected (or often, needed) useful metadata artifacts to aid me in browsing the web, but I look forward to utilizing them as they emerge.
As a RFE, it would be a nice user interface accessibility addition to provide a "jump to letter within the page" table at the top of the page. Do you want feedback like this posted within comments, or mailed directly to you?
Thanks for the RFE. Digging around in that code turned up some bugs which I've fixed along with providing the links into the content.
RFEs are probably better sent by email, but here is ok, too.