Focus Fusion Society Forum

Fusion News Feeds

2010-09-10T18:03:44+00:00

There are many excellent fusion websites out there. These Fusion Program Notes, for example.

Things needed for a fusion info website:
Compiling the notes (feeds, microformat issues)
Analyzing the news for our audience,
putting things in context,
translating for a lay audience
Summarizing
drawing out highlights
Publishing said content processing.

What’s the workflow? What tools are needed? How can the website be improved as a platform for this use?

How scalable is this? Note, you’d want to begin with DPF news, from LPPX and from other DPF’s around the world, and feed in Aneutronic news. The process would be similar for any other layer of fusion news thereafter. NIF news, ITER news. ICC news…

We could set it up as departments, and a department would only get going if an editor for that department steps up. Or if others who are broadcasting have set it up for easy feed into our and other websites.

Thoughts?

“What is Focus Fusion Box” fix - jQuery

2010-09-07T17:58:16+00:00

Does anyone want to take a crack at turning the “What is Focus Fusion” panel into an animated jQuery box? Something the user has to click on for the next image.

Attached is a partial of the panel. Here’s the piece itself , and here it is, no longer on the home page.

Can some web genius out there turn that it into a more compact, elegant box.

Make it so when you click the forward button, it goes from:
Intro > Aneutronic > pB11 > DPF > how green? > The challenge

Something embeddable so we can stick it into any page on the website as needed, or export it to other websites, as long as they have jQuery.

Well, I guess if we want to export it, they need flash.

RSS feed

2010-08-23T20:35:36+00:00

Mike writes:

a quick question for you: is it possible to sign up for an RSS feed or some similar protocol for the FFS forums? I have trouble keeping up with all the new discussion threads, so an e-mail that pops into my inbox would be extremely helpful.

As far as I know, you can get the RSS feed by scrolling to the bottom of the screen and clicking on either the orange or blue RSS or Atom feed buttons and following the directions. This will keep you posted of new threads that pop up.

For keeping track of older threads, if you’ve posted to that thread, you’re automatically enrolled to be notified of updates. If you don’t want to be notified, you have to uncheck the “notify me via email when someone posts” button below the posting window.

If you want to subscribe to a single thread that you find interesting, but don’t want to post you can always click the “Subscribe to this thread” link in the top right corner, beneath the “New Topic” button (see picture below).

For the RSS feed - I’ve noticed that when there is a new post in a thread, the RSS feed only shows you the first post. This is annoying because it doesn’t show you the most recent message. Rather, it will alert you that something new has been posted in that thread.

I don’t know how to keep a thread out of your RSS feed. We’ll have to look into this.

Are there any other RSS feed issues we should check out? Let me know.

Header Logo Image Not Showing In IE

2010-03-27T15:46:52+00:00

I had this problem with my site recently. It turned out to be how IE pads out images in my case. Maybe chopping a few pels off both dimensions will do the trick.

Tip for posting links in this forum

2010-03-07T01:03:58+00:00

I see that many people here are posting weblinks, but these are not clickable and have to be copy-pasted.

There is however a handy feature to make a link directly clickable:

this is a clickable link to focusfusion.org

How to?

Simply click the <a> button under the title edit box.
An edit box opens. Enter the actual web URL, (I typed “focusfusion.org”)
A second edit box asks for a description, (I typed “this is a clickable link to focusfusion.org”)
Agreed, for html analphabets this cryptic <a> button does not look like something that means “insert weblink here”
Rezwan, can the text on those buttons be changed to something more “human-readable”?

To show how the code looks like in your message editor, I put spaces in the [url… , this breaks the parser

[u r l=http://focusfusion.org]this is a clickable link[/u r l]

Another way is to simply type it in. (without spaces in the [url…)

To make bold text, use the <b> button, the <i> for italic text and the ~~<del> is for strikeout text~~

Pictures and Avatars

2010-03-04T17:39:15+00:00

Rezwan - 25 November 2009 04:35 AM
Alex, one more post and you’ll be a “valued friend”. I broke it down at:

Newbie 0-10 posts
New friend 11-30
Valued friend 31-100
Old timer - more than 100.

I can live with that.
Will it begin displaying my picture when i get to ‘New friend’ status?

Logo Design

2010-01-22T19:24:08+00:00

I just got off the phone with Eric. He asked, with much restraint and politeness, how the quarterly newsletter was coming along.

I’m working on it! Really.

Yet I seem to be blocked. And I realize, part of the block is the dearth of a logo. When Eric sends out his LPP newsletters, they have that lovely LPP logo.

The Focus Fusion Society doesn’t have its logo yet.

This has been a partial barrier to the website design. After all, the site should kind of fall around the organization’s logo, in terms of coloring and font and such.

So - I’m going to go with a simple text title for now. But I want all you fine logo designers out there to submit some logos and let’s choose something - pull together our professional look.

Note:
The newsletter only goes out to financially contributing members of the Focus Fusion Society - become one now!
Contribute because you want to support, us, though. The posts appear on the website by the next day. It’s not a big elitist discrepancy. Just an organizational issue that benefits paid donors. Takes a little formatting to add the articles to the site. No biggie.

OK! Logos, people! Submit away!

Personas - What are people looking for on this site?

2009-12-24T01:52:05+00:00

I didn’t want to jump in before because there is real work being done here but you suggested…

Rezwan - 23 December 2009 07:02 AM
...we have to start with creating “persona"s - what is the typical person looking for on our site. That will be another topic thread!

A topic that the whole community could get involved in.

When I did this sort of thing (pre-politics) I would start with a stakeholders map. There will be many different “typical person(s)” with very different needs.

For example those scientists doing similar research you have already identified as a separate group.

Who else has a stake in this. Potential license holders for the commercial product? Investors of course - large and small. Skeptics (“fusion is a pipe dream - prove me wrong” types). Competitors. Media. Who else?

They will all want some common features but will also want a path unique to them. (They may not get it of course - that’s part of the decision making process)

Looking forward to the thread on this.

Happy: Christmas/Posadas Navidenas/Yule/Litha/Ashura/Zarathosht Diso

Glossary

2009-12-05T16:19:49+00:00

OK, Folks, we need to set up a glossary for this site.

How you can help:

1. Find links to other glossaries out there. While constructing our own, we should provide links to info already available.

2. Ponder why we need our own glossary with so many great glossaries out there already. We may just stop here and leave links to these other glossaries. Or we may go further:

3. Realize we want to comment on the words or otherwise interact with them, and so need them on our own site.

4. Decide what fields to include in our glossary. “fields” such as “term”, “description”, “image” and so forth.

Anyway, step one would be nice. I can just put links up there for now. Help!

Home Page Essentials

2009-12-04T18:12:30+00:00

Folks, we need to re do the home page. What should be on it? What is essential?

Currently, it is blog style layout. Not working for anyone.