One of the reasons I upgraded to a newer version of the discussion forum software back in February was to add some features that may be helpful for people. Ideally, this site will be more useful than just a book, and instead will be a kind of community where we can learn about the context of the information we’re sharing, including something about who’s providing it. So, moving forward to catch up with many other interactive websites, the discussion forum now will provide things like avatars (pictures to represent a person, or what’s important to them), the location of the member, and a “profile”. People can fill in whatever they would like, but my thought is that this will be particularly helpful for people to leave details about themselves or their spouse, parent, etc., in terms of their diagnosis, treatments, etc. — whatever would be relevant for general background and for people like myself providing useful information. This can be modified over time to provide an ongoing history of scan results and treatments received. Or you can put in poetry or fan mail or whatever you’d like (more or less).
To provide a little more background, so that we can get to know each other a little better, go to the discussion forum and click on the “View my Profile” text:
(click to enlarge)
Then you reach the screen where you can edit your profile, and also can upload an avatar (100 x 100 pixels maximum):
On the edit page, you can fill in fields for location, occupation, interests, and medical profile. However, we’re just ironing out the kinks, and I just found that the text editor for the box where you enter the profile doesn’t seem to allow you to fill in the space properly (just a long single line — not good).
We should be able to get that fixed immediately, and I’ll revise the post to alert people that it’s all set for you to paste in your history or whatever else you’d like to share. I only bring this up now, warts and all, so that people will know what is going on when you see the changes in the discussion forum.
You can stay anonymous if you want to (we won’t take it personally), but I think it may be more “real” to interact with people who are more fleshed out than a username.
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Addendum: The text box is functioning properly now. Please let me know if you are encountering problems with it or other components of the site.
posted by Dr. West @ 7:15 pm link to this post
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May 8th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
You are so funny Dr. West — fan mail from some flounder?? (Sorry you’re probably not old enough to remember that one.)
This is great — thanks for the upgrade. I can’t believe the amount of time you and your techies give to this website. People are amazed when I describe what we have at our fingertips here. Profiles will be nice and make your life easier. Most of us can probably tell who each other is from other boards (even with different names), but it will be a great addition to this site. (Editing & preview functions would be a neat addition too — hint, hint.)
Thanks. (You’ve just received fan-mail!)
May 8th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Gee, I see some of the above mentioned functions in the Q & A section. Now if I could edit my above, I wouldn’t be so embarrassed…
May 8th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
I’ll continue to work on adding those features. I’m keeping my web design guys busy with ongoing improvements, fixes, and modifications, so I’ll add that to the “to do” list and see what’s possible.
-Dr. West
May 9th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
On the profiles–not only is the text not wrapping to fit the box, but you are only allowed a limited number of letters. This should be set to an unlimited (or large, like 1000 or so) characters.
Great job though. I like the additions.
May 9th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
We’re fixing. It’s not as trivial as I hoped it would be, but it’ll be a full text field that doesn’t limit how much you can put in.
June 9th, 2007 at 9:40 am
Hi. I just tried to fill out my Profile and I am limited to just one long line - I noted that you said it was fixed in your addendum to this posting; however, I can’t seem to get the text box working properly. Thanks for your help.
June 9th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Oh NO. We did have it fixed, and perhaps something reverted. I apologize for that and will try to get that restored. THANKS FOR TRYING!
June 10th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
A nice and useful feature would be to highlight a chosen search word in the body of various posts/articles.
June 10th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
The search function can do something like this, mentioning a sentence of the context of where the term appears in blog posts, forum threads, etc., but I’ll admit it’s a little ungainly. I had originally planned to use Google for search within and outside of OncTalk, but it takes time for Google and other search engines to recognize and then index the site. That left me with less established options that at this point don’t do everything I’d like flawlessly.
-Dr. West