646 Manufacturers and Marques, 540 Typewriter Galleries. Not too bad at all! This 50 a week thing was a heady rush, but then about 3 days ago, it all fell silent. The Hunters stopped hunting, and the fields resounded with the chirping of crickets.
Inactivity makes me nervous, and when I’m nervous, I get creative. I’ve mentioned before the idea of Discussion Threads in the Typewriter Database, and I’ve implemented it on my development server and am putting the finishing touches on it now. Each Typewriter Gallery will have a discussion thread attached, accessible only to Typewriter Hunters, where you can offer advice, help the owner properly identify the machine and year, and generally comment on the machine. It’ll be sort of G+ish, and will include the ability to attach a photograph to a main comment to illustrate your comment.
This is what it looks like on my development server.
The above conversation is a hypothetical thread that might occur on THIS gallery, for instance, except hopefully actually informative.
Anyhow, back to the salt mines of all-night coding while the little lady if off to the Tropics. I might be able to finish this off on the dev server this weekend and roll it out sometime next week. Still working out the details of collaborative self-moderation in the ruleset for who gets to delete what. I’m shooting for a fairly open system of self-moderation for the activities that the Typewriter Hunter group can do with the site, with a big, shiny ban hammer that could be used if self-moderation doesn’t keep the atmosphere civil. With typewriter people, I don’t really expect that to be invoked much if ever, to be honest.
Please, Typewriter Hunters, upload more typewriters from your collection! I swear I will code until 5am again tonight if nobody feeds my need to see that Gallery count go up closer to 600! :D
Ah, this will be great. I’ve been feeling that there needed to be a way to contact and discuss a particular typewriter with a ‘hunter’, as we don’t just have advice that we could give them but we sometimes need to ask them about their typewriters.
Mind you, it couldn’t hurt to have a capacity that allows us to trade between ‘hunters’; selling our machines to each other rather than to potentially key-choppers.
I have ideas about a swap mart sort of feature. nothing that involves dealing with payment system APIs, but more along the lines of a flag you can set on the record (willing to trade) and a text box where you can describe the conditions under which you would trade, IE: “willing to sell for $300 or trade for a 1950’s Voss.”
Some issues which need to be pondered include how responses will be handled, since any discussion of a sale would necessarily include revealing contact information such as email addresses between the two parties. Maybe that’s not a big issue for some people, but I like to spend the time to engineer more elegant solutions to address the comfort of users who prefer not to hand out their email addresses to any yahoo that inquires about a machine. (:
E-mail addresses are already added to your database right? What about Direct Messaging between hunters? And maybe masking the original e-mail address so you can send messages to each other reacting from your own mail client? The Dutch equivalent of Ebay has that, I might be able to ask which software they use to do it.
Sounds like an excellent feature!
Great idea.
I was editing some of my photos to post when my PC took a dump and my server is presently acting weird. It may be storm/power quality related. In any case I will be continuing PC repairs today as with most of yesterday. Notebook PC, 2 workstations, one normal desktop a server and problems.
25 manual portable typewriters and they all consistently work!
Hm, if this is your threat, I might wait another couple of days before I upload my machines!
Ok, it’s rolled out and running. You can upload your machines now. (: