nrabinowitz / gapvis Goto Github PK

Right now, there's very little error handling if the API returns bad data (e.g. out of memory errors). At a minimum, I'd like to let the user know what's going on, and perhaps restart the request after a waiting period if the issue is a server error.

Eric has an API for this here: http://gap.alexandriaarchive.org/places/423025/books.json - but it would be better included as part of the place API (http://gap.alexandriaarchive.org/places/423025.json).

Most likely this would only show the top 3 related books.

I think Selenium is the best option here.

Backbone is a new version; check underscore as well

From Elton:

Can we show at a glance all the places in a text in different formats? i.e. not just by popularity, but also chronological and alphabetical? The latter would be most useful if I just wanted to look for a particular place...

We'd need controls managed by Backbone, causing D3 to resort (animated?) when clicked.

Right now, the site doesn't offer any indication to the user when new data is being loaded - pretty ugly with slow load times. A few spinners would go a long way.

Minimum, fix trailing commas etc. Might also need polyfills for Array methods, and a few other things.

From Eric:

the easiest way to get data from Open Context is to request a JSON representation of data linked to a target URI:

http://opencontext.org/sets/.json?targURI={url-encoded Pleiades URI}

Example:
http://opencontext.org/sets/.json?targURI=http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/520985

You can also have a JSON-P version as:
http://opencontext.org/sets/.json?callback=myFunction&targURI=http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/520985

See documentation here:
http://opencontext.org/about/services#query-targURI

This would be in addition to/instead of Flickr photos on the Place Details page, I think

When running the interface and clicking on a random book title, the browser console just outputs errors from Googel Maps (no API key), next to others involving undefined. Supposedly, this is just broken nowadays?

When there are more Flickr photos than will show on screen, we just ignore the extras. It would be nice to offer a carousel instead.

It would be nice to have a minimal messaging framework to show nonce messages to users, a la Gmail's top-of-screen "loading" messages. I think this would be pretty easy to accomplish by setting the messages on the State object and having a view that listened for changes and showed the messages for a brief time at the top of the screen before closing them and removing them from the state. Assuming I could ignore the rare occurrence of multiple concurrent messages, the API for other views would be as simple as:

state.set({ message: 'Some message' })

We might need an About page, in which case the home button would probably be ditched in favor of Home - About - Contact.

I know that in theory, you can use jQuery (maybe jQuery Mobile?) to listen to touch events on touch-enabled devices. I'd love to see this enabled, e.g.:

• Swipe left/right to navigate from page to page
• Swipe whole screen left/right to navigate from view to view (? might be tricky)
• Swipe to scroll Flickr images

Right now, the application just hangs if you try to go to an invalid book or place URL (e.g. http://gap.alexandriaarchive.org/gapvis/index.html#book/spam). In these cases, it would probably be best to redirect to the index (for invalid books) or the book summary (for invalid pages), unsetting the relevant state variable.

I think we've established gap.alexandriaarchive.org as the canonical site, so I should redirect the Github site there.

From Eric:

add a link to the visiualization saying something like source data and API hosted at alexandriaarchive.org

See http://gap.alexandriaarchive.org/gapvis/index.html#book/1/read/-1/570182 - boolean check for Next is failing.

Per Dennis McHenry's report - it sounds like the CSS overflow isn't working properly on the iPad.

Alternate page view showing scan