It’s been nearly a year since I started OncTalk, and over that time I’ve worked to contribute new material on a very regular basis. While that’s generally a good thing, one downside is that it can get harder to find the information you’re looking for when there’s a lot to sift through. In the beginning, I concentrated on describing what would widely be considered as the best practices for many lung cancer settings, but after adding that content, many of the posts in the past few months have focused more on specific topics and emerging information that may not be a central component of what people need to know.
We’re planning some revisions and improvements for OncTalk, in which I’m planning to have a separate web page for the highlight list, the key material that would be the highest yield starting point. In the meantime, though, I’ve added a new set of category listings on the Subject Archives page, in which the Core Concepts lists a series of lung cancer settings under that, and each has a manageable set of posts that are most central. No longer do people need to sift through dozens of posts in a broad cetagory, only some of which especially valuable to someone try to learn the important stuff without reading a tome’s worth of esoterica.
The other ironic issue is that some of these more important concepts were included in my earliest posts, as I was just learning the software. For instance, my post on avastin improving survival when combined with standard chemotherapy for advanced NSCLC was one of my very first, and it’s pretty spartan, without the figures I would usually include. So this more limited central set of highlight posts is one that I’ll be most committed to maintain and refine over time. I’ll keep going over them to ensure that these are the highest priority to be kept timely and accurate and useful for people. And I’ll try to keep them to a manageable number in each setting, so people don’t need to face an overwhelming collection that has become a testament to my verbosity.
If people have other ways they can thinkof to organize this information, let me know. In the meantime, I’ll try to maintain the commitment to adding new material without making it impossible to focus on the key messages.
posted by Dr. West @ 9:51 pm link to this post
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September 28th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Just want you to know I appreciate all that you do. This site has been very helpful and informative in guiding us through this disease. Thanks again.
September 29th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
I like that you are doing this “core concepts” thing. I often refer people to the site, but, as you said, it is hard to find the basic information that newer people need. Along that line, I find the search engine close to useless. Sometimes I search and it returns hits that, when I follow them, return an empty page. Perhpas you could put a link to a “home page” for the core concepts articles on the actual home page. That would make it very easy for first-time viewers to find the basic info.
September 29th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Oops–I must have missed the sentence in the article where you say you are making a “home page” for the core concepts. Sorry.
September 29th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
The search function is also something that I hope we can do more to improve. It hasn’t been a focus, but now that there’s a lot of content and it’s getting hard to use it, we need to concentrate on making it more user-friendly.
-Dr. West
September 30th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
This is getting really picky, considering the wealth of information on onctalk.com and Dr. West’s dedication to promptly answering every question asked, both of which continue to amaze me and many others — but: There seems to be an invisible wall between the two content-rich sections of the site available to members.
Using the left column as a reference, we have Recent Posts and Recent Comments, actually just two separate lists both referring to the same section. The first list (Recent Posts) links to Dr. West’s initial detailed post on a particular subject, with a complete list of these posts organized by subject and by date at the top of the column under Subject Archives and Monthly Archives. The second list (Recent Comments) links to member comments on these same posts as well as Dr. West’s own additional remarks prompted by member comments. On each linked page the member comments and additional remarks are displayed directly under Dr. West’s initial detailed post, very handy.
However, the Search box available on each of those pages appears to search only the posts in the Forums section of the site, which is completely separate or walled off from the Posts and Comments section. Also, in the Posts and Comments section there doesn’t appear to be any way to check the Profile of the member making the comment in order to get some background on the member and links to other posts by that same member. If the member’s username is typed into the Search box, his/her profile does appear, but it provides links only to that member’s posts in the separate Forums section.
Moving on, the Forums section itself and the left column list of Recent Forum Activity seem to be quite useful as they stand. Once in the Forums section, about the only confusing thing I’ve noticed is that there are two separate links for viewing and changing my own profile. The one in the white space directly after “Welcome, recce101″ is the one I want. But in the blue banner at the top of the screen there’s also a Change Your Profile link which takes me to an unfamilar WordPress page with mostly blanks on the Profile tab, and I haven’t tried to fill in that profile.
This may be much too complicated to do, but I wonder if there’s any way to integrate the Posts and Comments section into the existing Forums section, so the Search function will cover both sections and all member profiles are available in both.
Many thanks and Aloha,
Ned
September 30th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Ned,
I don’t think that’s picky at all. A lot of small thinks bother me about the user-friendliness (or, specifically, some shortcomings) of the experience. I’m told that the upcoming significant revision of the forums, and modest revisions of the blog/post side, will substantially improve the connectivity of the two sides and make several features much easier (or at least possible).
And as I mentioned above, the search function needs and will get a significant overhaul. I appreciate all of the specific things you mention, and I’d encourage other people to provide their recommendations of things that they can thing of that could make the site better. I’m glad people are happy with the content, but I KNOW it there are some kinks, including several things I haven’t noticed or thought of.
Don’t hold back, friends…we can’t make it better if people don’t provide their wish list.
-Dr. West