DanRasmussen - Personal Telco Project

Sections on this page: #about, #projects, #writtenbyme, #macros

About Me

Joined PTP in 2011. On the BoardOfAdvisors. Personal website: http://danrasmussen.org/ .

Expended lots of effort with the goal of getting the word out about the Personal Telco Project. First, lots of work on the PTP wiki. Then re-wrote the homepage so outsiders could understand what Personal Telco was about. I made Dashboard so that I, and others could more effectively keep the wiki up-to-date and relevant/interesting. I rewrote PTP's listing for Calagator and for a while took it on myself to submit PTP events to Calagator in an attempt to seek new volunteers. I tried to visit all of the Personal Telco nodes in Portland, and eventually did visit most of them. Here's a map of the results: http://pdxwifimap.com/ptp_audit_2012 . That project became http://pdxwifimap.com/, another attempt of mine to draw attention to the Personal Telco Project. It's also a learning project. PDX Wifi Map is based on OpenStreetMap and does things I haven't seen on any other wifi map.

Projects

(in no particular order)

SplashPageRedesign - PTP's splash pages need some help!
Make homepage awesome. On both mobile (still sucks - sidebar causes unpleasant scrolling experience, but at least text explains what PTP is about) and immobile (fairly satisfied with how it looks with Firefox on netbook screen, haven't tried any others yet).
- Introduction - Like PersonalTelco, but works well on small screens. Learned: Russell and Jason apparently fond of sidebar on homepage, DanRasmussen dislikes sidebar - see Dashboard section below). Replaced OldHomepage text with Introduction text on 25. April 2012 and trimmed down OldHomepage's sidebar. Visit PersonalTelco with a small-screen-having device to see why I hate the sidebar.
- Possible solutions:
  1. From WikiTipOfTheDay: "You can set other pages than the FrontPage as your personal start page, e.g. RecentChanges or your own homepage." NeedsUpdate Some way to make Dashboard personal start page?
  2. Bookmark Dashboard page with small-screen devices, volunteers use as startup page. Easiest short-term solution until/unless one of the following items happens:
  3. Somebody who enjoys HTML/CSS formatting ("NOT IT!") gets sidebar to load *after* main page text
  4. Detect small screen devices, send them to Dashboard if logged in or PersonalTelco page minus sidebar if not logged in? (Probably also a "NOT IT!" item)
  5. Your solution here
- IntroductionNextGen - DRAFT of next-gen homepage. Contains ideas for improvements to Introduction.
- Dashboard - PTP entry page for volunteers. Goal: show every homepage visitor what they need, and no more! See UsingDashboard for details.
  - 4 - Number of print pages required to print OldHomepage. Note how awkward this looks in printed form, and how much of the information is quickly dated, or does not make sense in non-hyperlink form.
  - 2 - Number of print pages required to print current homepage (Introduction).
  - 1 - Number of print pages required to print current homepage without sidebar - default as of May 1st, 2012!
  - 1.5 - Number of print pages required to print Dashboard. No real reason to print this page.
Add sponsor links to nodes (ongoing, but started 22. Feb 2012 and essentially finished 28. Feb 2012) - working through NodesByAge
Delete, or add to DeleteMe, appropriate pages from AbandonedPages and OrphanedPages - WARNING: both of these links could take a long time to load!
Create pages the wiki says ought to exist, where beneficial. See WantedPages, and be aware that it could take forever to load
Create a NetbookHotspot (a type of BackPackAp).
Using Android, find offline way to GPS navigate to nearest PTP node.

Pages I've Created

NeedsUpdate - list of pages containing useful, but partly outdated, information. Skills required: wiki editing, and maybe research or subject knowledge.
NeedsCoded - list of areas in which PTP could use a little coding work, or advanced wiki skills
HistoricalInterest - list of interesting historical information, and/or mostly/completely outdated stuff, superseded by CategoryHistorical
PersonalTelcoMetrics - list of interesting ways to measure the growth, utility, and benefits of the project
PersonalTelcoExports - useful documents for those who would emulate Personal Telco.
DanRasmussen/Questions - Personal Telco topics I'm interested in that don't appear to be documented in the written language
PhilosophyOnePage - Everything in CategoryPhilosophy, on one page for easy reading. Personal experiment.
Calagator - My attempt to get Portland's geek community interested in Personal Telco.
NeighborhoodNodes - Printable list of PTP nodes, pulled from the database, with some address standardization. I feel the naming of this page leaves something to be desired (in particular: it's a little long, and requires good spelling/typo-avoidance to type), but NodeList is taken, and Nodes (another badly-named node list page) is a page I feel I shouldn't edit. Random node news:
- http://pdxwifimap.com/portland-wifi-list Printable list of Personal Telco hotspots that links to a map.
SplashPage - explanation of how PTP's splash page works. Didn't create the page, but rewrote everything that was there...

Macro Test Bed

Macro: RecentChangesList / RecentChanges()

RecentChanges takes up a lot of space! Possible to limit output? See Dashboard for RecentChangesList.

Macro: RandomPage(integer) , RandomPage, PageCount

Several random pages, (out of 3566 total) :

Random page, twice: NodeSplashPages / WeeklyMeeting20230118

Macro: FullSearch() / FullSearchCached()

Pages where DanRasmussen appears in text. Is there some way to show most recent pages edited by DanRasmussen, vs. being in the page text? FullSearchCached is for searches that don't change much. I don't know how often the cache is refreshed, but would like to figure that out. "Clear Cache" is one of the Page Actions.

Macro: EditedSystemPages

...

Macro: TitleIndex, WordIndex, WantedPages, OrphanedPages

WordIndex: index of all words in page titles. WordIndex system page disabled on PTP wiki, but macro is embeddable in any page. WantedPages: list links to non-existent pages OrphanedPages: list pages no other page links to

<<TitleIndex>>: an index of all page titles. TitleIndex system page disabled on PTP wiki, but macro is embeddable in any page.

Macro: AbandonedPages

See AbandonedPages Quite a long list! Many PTP wiki pages haven't been edited forever - e.g. historical meeting notes. Wonder what the cut-off date is for this function...

Macro: SystemInfo

See SystemInformation

Macro: NewsResults(term1+term2+...)

Macro: Hits

All hits ever? Since when?

Simple <<Hits>>: 10281. Same as <<Hits(all=False,event_type=VIEWPAGE)>>: 10281...
Page revisions <<Hits(all=False,event_type=SAVEPAGE)>>: 32
Page revisions <<Hits(all=True,event_type=VIEWPAGE)>>: 17834846

Macro: RandomQuote

<<RandomQuote()>> uses FortuneCookies, unless you specify a page in the quotes. From FortuneCookies, by using <<RandomQuote()>>:

Hint: View the edit history on the RecentChanges page by clicking the icon (for information).

From NeedsUpdate, by using <<RandomQuote(NeedsUpdate)>>:

MozillaWikiSearch - it's now much easier than this

From NeedsCoded, by using <<RandomQuote(NeedsCoded)>>:

No quotes on NeedsCoded.

From WikiTipOfTheDay, by using <<RandomQuote(WikiTipOfTheDay)>>:

With "Subscribe" you can be informed about changes on the current page via Email.

Macro: PageCount

<<PageCount>>: 42706
<<PageCount(exists)>>: 3566

[CategoryHomepage]