Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Where are all these APEX blogs?

I'm happy to announce my new project: www.apexblogs.info


The goal of the new site is to find all APEX related blog posts at one place. But that's not all, you can also rate the articles and if you don't have a blog yourself, but want to share your findings, idea's etc. the site will allow you to do that. You can write your own blog posts.

Next to releasing this site for the APEX community, I also wanted to show a more advanced site created in Oracle Application Express. It reads RSS-feeds and provide one, it uses jquery, javascript, css, materialized views and provides an easy to search functionality (based on interMedia).

You can also add your feedback or start discussions and view statistics of the APEX blogger community.

It's a first beta release, so I'm open to all your comments, feedback and ways to make it even better.

Hope you enjoy the site!

2 comments:

  1. Hi Dimitri,

    nice project.

    Some feedback after doing a quick test:

    1) The feedback option should give some feedback that the comment was put into a moderation queue. Now you don't know what happened to the entered feedback.

    2) When you do a rating, the rating isn't displayed after clicking, only after refreshing the page - user doesn't know if rating worked.

    3) The link on the blog posting should bring you to the original blog posting.

    4) There should be a list mode where you just see the blog titles for faster browsing

    5) Maybe you can incorporate the tags/categories of the blog postings in some way

    6) It's not possible to change a rating

    7) If you are not logged in, when clicking onto the rating you get a short visual feedback that it's doing something. Shouldn't do that.

    8) Creating a post produces a "Access denied by Page security check - Error Sorry you need to be an administrator to do that.", shouldn't the tab have the same privilege check if it isn't possible for a normal user?

    9) Entering a invalid date format into the date fields produces a "ORA-01858: a non-numeric character was found where a numeric was expected" - You should use the ApexLib framework ;-)

    Patrick

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  2. Hi Patrick,

    Thanks for the quick test. You already found a great deal of things to improve. That's why I called it beta ;-)

    1) Corrected.
    (At the last moment I moved some tables to a different schema. It showed still the old values in the report).

    2) I know that... I had to make a choice as I show the average rating. You can also rate only one time, even if you click 10 times on the same rating, but I don't give an error as you try to do that. I'll have a look how I can improve that.

    3) If you click on the title, it shows the post as a single post. If you click on the name it goes directly to the original blog

    4) Ok, nice suggestion. Will include that in my to-do for the final version

    5) I didn't do that as everybody is using different categories. The search is so advanced it should allow you to find it a lot easier than having a "bad" tags/categories system

    6) As I said, every person, after login can rate on the article only once. In version 2 I thought about showing you your rating and provide an order by your or average rating. But that isn't in the system yet. It wouldn't be to difficult so you could change your rating, but I was thinking, how many people will do that?

    7) Yes, John told me that too. I'm waiting on more feedback to put the next release on the web.

    8) Corrected.
    The goal is that everybody who's logged in can write a blog post. Before I had more Authorization schemes which I changed at the last moment, apparently I missed something here.

    9) True, I knew that... you should use the nice date picker. I thought you would say something about that ;-) I was the first to include your framework in DG Tournament, but I didn't use it (yet) in this application.

    Thanks again for your feedback!

    Really appreciated,
    Dimitri

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