Are you ready for a new Forge?

Legacy ActionsDev
1

The ActionsForge is almost ready for the world, and if you haven’t taken the time to clean up your Actions’ listings there, please get in touch off-list. I sent out a private e-mail to each person on the Forge who has any Actions at all. If you don’t remember getting one, and you think you need to check your work, please also get in touch.

One feature I want to explain to you is the new Action-parsing code that I added to the upload process. When you upload an Action or a zipped directory containing Actions, the Forge will read the files and extract whatever version information you have entered there (in an tag in the Action itself). Naturally, this only works if your Actions are uploaded to the Forge. If you use a remote URL instead, you will still need to add those versions manually after you save the Action record. This system also cannot read the contents of encoded Actions. If you have Actions for Express, or encoded Actions for Pro, you are also going to have to manually enter the versions, same as the old Forge.

I’m very excited about the new site, and I hope you get a lot of traffic from it! I have a number of new features in mind for as soon as the dust settles. Since we are running the new site on the latest version of the Ruby on Rails framework, adding these features is often a trivial exercise, rather than the slog through miles of (aging badly) PHP that the old system represented. You may notice that some things are missing – notably the Wiki – and I do plan to bring that back very soon in a new guise.

Finally, if you haven’t got any changes to the site, at least please do some clicking around and see if you can break it. I have had a report that the first screen may appear blank at the first visit. This is related to the fact that we have two security systems running at the same time, and won’t be there in production. If you get to a screen and you can’t see anything, click your mouse cursor into the address field of your browser and press return/enter again.

Walter

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I very much like the update, Walter.

But if I could only add one thing to the ActionsForge WISHLIST it would be to force Action Authors to make time to include an EXAMPLE. :slight_smile: Seriously, it’s harder on the Action Author, I know, but from an end user’s standpoint, we often lack the time to download an Action to “try it out to see if it might possible work on my site.” A quick, at-a-glance, example, easily clickable from the individual Action pages would be a God-send.

Since ActionsForge really does target Actions USERS rather than AUTHORS, it makes logical sense that enhancing the USER experience is a critical point.

I had also hoped the new ActionsForge site would allow some kind of auto notification whenever a new version became available. But perhaps this would require significant support within Freeway. Even so, SoftPress reads these posts, so hopefully they will comply at some point. In other words, I want to open a Freeway document one day and then if there’s a new version Action on ActionsForge that is used in my document, I want a dialog box to appear that will give me one-click convenience to download that Action and install it for me.

Thanks.

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James,

the lack of time shouldn’t be an excuse, cause building web-projects is a job and requires time to sharpen your tools.

Sure - the inbuilt in Freeway thing for each action would be cool, but a simple direct link, somewhere in the actions dialogue box would be enough for the start.

Let me explain:

the Forge (TNG) has (and that’s the point) this notification “update available”. This is a major step, but only works, if you download an action from there (even once again if you’ve got them already).

Once done, it appears on “Actions you use”-list and whenever an update is available it will be marked.

So turn the Forge to your “bookmarked” additional tool - or quick reachable with the direct link.

Cheers

Thomas

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Perhaps I’ve missed it, and forgive me for needing the hand-holding, but under what circumstances does that “update available” appear?

If I download an Action from ActionsForge, then apply that Action to an item in my document, then save that document, then come back an work on that document a month later (after an update is made available on ActionsForge), will I be notified WITHIN FREEWAY of that new version Action? If so, then my dreams have come true. If not, then my dreaming will continue. :slight_smile:

–James W.

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No no no - never said “within Freeway”.

Your notification is on ActionsForge and looks something like this:

So as I said:

It’s still up to you to visit the forge to check “what’s new?” - and a direct link at the bottom of the Action-dialogue would help to reach the Forge much quicker.

Cheers

Thomas

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alt text
alt text1021×402 60 KB

Cheers

Thomas

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Thomas,

Thank you for your help.

Your first link (the long one) results in an error, but I see the JPG in your second link.

Okay. Got it. I still prefer notification WITHIN FREEWAY, so I will continue dreaming SoftPress will hear my words and take them to heart in the next version of Freeway. In the meantime…

In the past, prior to the ActionsForge update, I downloaded many different actions. And yet, when I visit, I only see two Actions in “Actions you use”:

Random Image
Protaculous 2

Must I re-download the other Actions again for this notification system to start working? Or is it simply that those other actions have faulty or missing tags, resulting in them not being displayed on ActionsForge when I visit?

Thanks,

James W.

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Must I re-download the other Actions again for this notification system to start working? Or is it simply that those other actions have faulty or missing

I think yes - you must re-download them, but only General Davis can clarify this for sure.

Cheers

Thomas

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At 03:42 -0400 11/7/14, Thomas Kimmich wrote:

James,

the lack of time shouldn’t be an excuse, cause building web-projects
is a job and requires time to sharpen your tools.

The problem that I see, and I understood James to mean, is that an
example would show if an action is designed to solve the situation in
hand or not.

You have something you would like to do in mind. You look for an
Action to help with it. You find one that, according to its name and
minimal description, would do the job. You install it. You spend time
exploring it - only to discover that it solves a different problem
entirely. Back to the search having wasted time. An example would
solve that.

I don’t do much web work, but the above is why I tend to re-write the
wheel I want rather than hunt for the one with the right profile.
There again, I am a coder - the first program I wrote was in Atlas
Autocode, the second was in raw hex.

David

–
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
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10

Any Action you download while you are logged in to ActionsForge will appear on the list. But I don’t require you to be logged in, so tracking the downloads is impossible without you taking that initial step. I may add a “wait a moment” to the download link for anonymous users, that might be a good way to get people to use this feature.

I also plan to add (optional) e-mail reminders when a newer version of an Action on your list is added to the Forge. As far as some sort of deep inspection when a document is opened, that’s something I could support, but cannot add, as it would require Softpress to take the first step.

Freeway could make (as a part of its normal startup with a document) a pass through the Actions used in the document, ask each one what its version-tracking URL is (so as to make this fair, some authors may not prefer to use the Forge, and want to have their own version tracking scheme, others may not want to bother) and see if each Action’s version is the same as the official “latest” version. However, this sort of thing could have disastrous implications for startup or document focus times, as each URL would take some time to query and potentially time out. If this process ran every X hours and cached the results in a plist somewhere, that would probably mitigate most of that problem.

If Softpress want to do something about this in the next version of Freeway, I am happy to support it. Meanwhile, I am trying to build what I can, and strike a balance between ease of use for developers (to fulfill the primary mission of being the definitive collection of Actions) and ease of discovery for end-users.

Walter

On Jul 11, 2014, at 4:35 AM, Thomas Kimmich wrote:

Must I re-download the other Actions again for this notification system to start working? Or is it simply that those other actions have faulty or missing

I think yes - you must re-download them, but only General Davis can clarify this for sure.

Cheers

Thomas

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11

On 11 Jul 2014, 9:53 am, David Ledger wrote:

At 03:42 -0400 11/7/14, Thomas Kimmich wrote:

James,

the lack of time shouldn’t be an excuse, cause building web-projects
is a job and requires time to sharpen your tools.

The problem that I see, and I understood James to mean, is that an
example would show if an action is designed to solve the situation in
hand or not.

Agreed, David - even up to 101.5% - and never said anything against.

only got one small issue:

“… should be forced to” and “a lack of time”

An author already spent his free non-profit time for the community - so best to suck out more? I even know of an action-author who keeps (tons of) coolest actions off the community - and I do not wonder why.

Cheers

Thomas

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Thomas, I may come off as sounding ungrateful, but such is the furthest thing from the truth. All to often the “beggars can’t be choosy” motto makes us feel like “beggars can’t offer good advice.” I brake from that insofar as I feel beggars can offer advice and hope some will heed it. It’s not like I have a gun to anyone’s head. Logic dictates that EXAMPLES would be helpful and spur interest (and more downloads). It’ says simple as that.

SoftPress, if your listening, please read Mr. Davis’ last post. Freeway integration with ActionsForge would be a BIG step forward!

Thanks!

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