ui – Parerga und Paralipomena

DJFacet 0.9.7: MPTT hierarchical facets now supported!

mikele — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:25:02 +0000

DJFacet is a pluggable module for the Django web application framework that allows you to navigate the data in your webapp using an approach based on ‘facets’. I’ve already written about DJFacet in the past; now the good news is that I’ve released a major update to the software, as now there is complete support for hierarchical facets too.

Wikipedia describes faceted search as

“a technique for accessing a collection of information represented using a faceted classification, allowing users to explore by filtering available information. A faceted classification system allows the assignment of multiple classifications to an object, enabling the classifications to be ordered in multiple ways, rather than in a single, pre-determined, taxonomic order”.

Although faceted search systems aim at providing search interfaces that go beyond the model of a single, rigid, top-down catalogue for an information space, taxonomical classifications remain always one of the most useful ways to organise a dataset, as they implicitly provide support for ‘zoom in’ and ‘zoom out’ search operations. A good compromise then is to allow the simultaneous selection of search filters coming from different taxonomical schemas – or mixing them with non-taxonomical ones.

Version 0.9.7 of Djfacet, among several other things, includes full support for displaying and navigating through hierarchical facets as long as they are expressed in the DB via django-MPTT. A demo is available here (just browse into the ‘religion’ facet to see what I mean).

There are still a few things to sort out before reaching version 1.0 (including updating the online docs), but it’s getting closer – stay tuned!

Links:

Source code on Bitbucket: bitbucket.org/magicrebirth/djfacet

Documentation: michelepasin.org/support/djfacet/docs/

Demo installation: demos.michelepasin.org/djfacet/

Project page: www.michelepasin.org/artifacts/software/djfacet/

Gmail labels sorting order

mikele — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 10:36:30 +0000

Gmail’s labels are great for they let you organize your constantly growing mailbox in a non-final way. That is, using the ‘tagging’ concept, you can assign the same tag to multiple items, or different tags to the same items, add/remove tags etc etc. All of this is well known and documented. One thing though still surprises me. Why the heck can’t we set the labels’ order arbitrarily? (now they are automatically sorted alphabetically).

I have dozens of labels, and know the too-many-emails problem has just moved one level up: too many labels, don’t remember why I’ve created them and what their intended use was. As a result, I end up losing a lot of time just figuring out where things are in my mailbox…

So being able to sort them arbitrarily could be handy here… I did a bit of research online and it looks like this is not possible. Mmmm funny init? Insurmountable technical difficulty? Trivial interaction-design mistake? Who knows. So it looks like as the only workaround to manage gmail labels is to prefix them using alphabetical characters. As simple as that.

By the way, the ‘alphabetical’ ordering used by gmail is not what you might be used to, but the one below:

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NoDictionaries.com :: innovative way to read latin classics

mikele — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 23:02:37 +0000

NoDictionaries is a web app that makes it very easy to look up the meaning of words while reading a latin text. It uses a freely available latin dictionary (Whitaker’s Words) and what it does is essentially to enrich each line of a latin text with the explanations of the words appearing in it.

Nothing too difficult, you might think. True – but the clean and simple graphical layout, coupled with a quick and responsive interface, seemed to me the real winner here.

The site, built as a master project by a student of Tufts uni (that’s where the Perseus project lives, I believe..), features a pretty big number of latin texts. So if you want to brush up your latin, you definitely won’t get bored here.

Very nice work – inspiring and straight to the point! A more extensive review of this app can be found here (note: the review is particularly good for latinists).

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