Meklet Changelog: When a Blind Man Cries Update

Creeping Featuritis. Something that can happen quickly in a project. You have an idea for a software and build a first working prototype. Then all of a sudden something unintentional happens. Your brain starts spinning and you have hundreds of ideas you want to incorporate. Maybe even ideas come from your friends and acquaintances or the people you show your software to. At this point you leave your actual path and implement super much stuff that is not really necessary. Worse, that prevents your software from growing. That's what happened to Meklet. i started adding a lot of links and new categories because my brain told me: "you want to index everything, so you have to find all the links from the web and copy them into your source code."

That's a pretty stupid idea, because first of all you don't do that alone and also not by hand. That's why there's software that does it for you later. So I fell into the feature creep trap. How do I get out of it?

First I have to find a target group to focus on. I chose archivists, librarians and social workers at the beginning of the project. These are the ones I want to go back to. Archivists search a lot and have to spend part of their work finding information. Librarians too. Social workers in a certain part as well. Specifically, we have chosen to target these professionals (and a few others) in a particular cultural area. England and U.K. respectively.

What has struck me in recent weeks is how far along individual interest groups, authorities, institutes or working groups are in the field of digitization. No matter if it is archives, libraries, museums, schools or universities. Not only the design is super, but also the technology behind a website. Unfortunately, I don't know that from Germany. Therefore, this version of Meklet Search, will first specialize in xvz.uk domains. I also have the feeling that people from the British Isles are more open to new ideas and not as rigid as their European neighbors. There is also more risk taking, which can be a good advantage for a software project. This makes it easier for us to approach the right people in the future and get them excited about our project.

We won't be using the old searches for now, but we're not throwing them away. I'll keep an eye on them for later, when the project gets bigger and we can implement them back into the system. This time the name patron for the update is the song: When a Blind Man Cries by Deep Purple in the 1997 Remix version from the album Very Best of Deep Purple - Made In Japan. The track is playing almost daily on my MacBook Air.

Robert

Some categories (e.g. Work or University) already had some links, so these were included in the new search. The remaining links were extracted from Wikipedia lists, checked and inserted. Even if this would have been possible now, it was still done by hand in this version. It was to ensure the quality of the search strings. To the individual categories and why I have decided for these, I will discuss this in individual points again in more detail.
The first entries I made were archive, library and university. Since I actually wanted to study archival science, it was obvious to combine my field of study with my project. This would have allowed me to develop a target group within the university that would provide me with feedback and ideas. Unfortunately, nothing came of it for private reasons. Nevertheless, I did not give up the project. Little by little I added some categories with related topics like museums, institutes and work. After I removed the feature creep, I only focused on culture, science, work and education. This still left me with enough categories to reasonably develop the Meklet project.
But I had also decided against certain categories, for example, because they would have simply produced far too many links at the beginning. Sport in England is so present that it would have had to be divided into so many subcategories, which would then have become far too large again. So I preferred to put that in the back. But that doesn't mean it's out of my field of vision. It's important to find a focus first and to deliver really good results in a certain category, because that will bring a user base that we urgently need to move Meklet forward.
In the last weeks I had tried different places in Germany where you can program (until I finally have internet at home). Unfortunately there is almost no internet in german administration buildings or e.g. libraries. Who needs internet/WLAN in a library? In 2022? Anyway, I had also tried some civic centers but didn't like it there. The problem with a project is that it eventually mutates into a lone wolf creep project and I don't want that. So I need a place where I can program in peace, but also get the chance to talk to people. So far, my first port of call is a Starbucks in the City Mall. Even though I really don't like malls, this is the alternative so far. After a month, I've added up the investment costs for coffee and snacks. On average I come to 120€. That's a lot, but I'm so much to pay at the moment. Now if Starbucks would offer a subscription through their app, of say 49,99€ a month I would find that even much better. That would be the maximum price I would pay. Why? Because then I would have Internet, office and coffee in one flat rate. Yes, a public WLAN hotspot is insecure, but I only use VPN and tunnel everything anyway. Starbucks should think about expanding its concept from consumer space only to consumer, digital worker (data nomand) mashup space. That is, of course, unless there is a global pandemic that wipes out half the planet.
The problem with long lists is that they are usually long. So today I made all the entries for the universities and there are quite a few. It would be quite annoying if I would display all of them when a person opens the category. So I solved that now in the CSS, that this is adapted to the length of the MOnitor. But when the category is expanded you can search for an entry within the list with a keyboard shortcut (e.g. Apple keyboard shortcut). This is difficult for users, because most of them don't know this in advance, but I don't have a better solution at the moment. Especially when I have hundreds of entries I really don't want to display them as a text wall of death. In the current state I would eventually have to start producing tutorial videos for Meklet, although I really want to avoid that. Software and applications should always be as intuitive as possible without me as a developer having to explain much. This little DEtail is quite complicated in its problem definition. As I just found out by accident, you can also scroll through the list with the tab key. At the moment (on my MacBook Air (13-inch (1440 × 900), Mid 2013) monitor) the first 13-14 entries within a category are displayed.
The almost invisible link color has been bothering me for days. I changed it and borrowed the color from the Apple Developer website.
Ok, this has turned out pretty interesting. So far I have the Irmgard CSS for my meklet search. From this I created a fork called Fritz. This I had used for my blog articles. But now I created a FAQ and for this I built a new CSS from both previous CSS, which contains specific properties of both. So that I don't get through each other, I declared this as a new fork and named it after my other grandfather Janis, who came from Latvia. So as of today there are now officially three CSS.
I have created a simple FAQ file so that you can get a rough overview of what the Meklet project is. This FAQ will certainly be expanded later but so far I have only listed the most important five w questions. If you have a special question, you can send it to my mail address and I will see if it can be added to the FAQ.
I have renamed the category Council to County Council. In the U.K. there are different types of councils and this can include not only counties but also cities. For someone who was not born in U.K. this is a bit confusing at the beginning, but you will understand it after a few weeks, when you get more involved with the topic of government in U.K..
I changed the titles of the blog articles and changelog entries to avoid wrong results in search engines. Blog articles are now called "Meklet: Blog" and changelog entries "Meklet Changelog". I have several ideas for blog articles now and don't want to suppress the attention of the changelog pages with this. Besides, it's better to do something like this right at the beginning of a project. To make it easier to find all the single UNter pages, I created an archive page, where I will link all the sub pages. This archive page I link then on the current Meklet Search page. So I have also sorted the subfolders a little better.
I have added a new feature to my site so that people can share my changelog entries, blog articles etc.. Since I'm not at all interested in having my articles posted in closed communities I decided to use email. I find email is still the non plus ultra channel when sharing information with my friends. It comes in raw text, I don't have to open the browser first or load html. This is great especially with not so fast internet lines. Also in the long run I won't be able to prevent my content from being linked in a social network, but I don't want to prefer that myself. Email is integrated on almost every computer or smartphone or comes with a rented internet connection. Besides, then I don't see who shares my articles here and it is also possible for users to share this content encrypted if they encrypt their mails with e.g. GnuPG. This is more work for me, but I think it's a big advantage for everyone and makes the work worthwhile again.
I turned on autocorrect for the text boxes, but this is only relevant for Safari browsers because other web browsers don't use this feature. I personally find it quite good and will try this out as a test.
I read a paragraph and took the idea. As of this version, users can quickly and easily provide feedback on the search.
I created an RSS feed for the blog articles and the changelog entries. I like RSS. It can betransported quickly and easily on the net, and because it can be created quite fast as a script file. Actually, I wanted to copy my old "create a RSS feed" Bash script from an external hard drive, but then decided against it. since I don't publish blog articles or changelog entries so often (at most once a month), I can still copy everything by hand at the moment. It's not that mouch effort then. In addition, I don't want to flood my RSS feed readers with spam. When I put the RSS feed online, I built the MekletRSS Shortcut for it.