One-Sentence Statements Sought - Each Describing One Problem With The Website

[Pat]

A problem with putting things on Google Maps is that Google keeps changing its mapping application, and a lot of work can go to waste as the maps have to be reformatted to work with the new standards/features.  I believe Porcupine has had experience with this and her coffeehouse map.  

[Pool Boy]

The task is fairly herculean to do such a map - Google's already done it mostly, the markers, the links to the restaurants, and especially the links to the DR.com threads are what need to be done and constantly managed. This effort would be no small feat - even if you limited it to just DC itself.

I'd be up for being assigned a section and maintaining it. But, for it to be truly useful and meaningful, the whole town needs to be covered and maintained. And, to be honest, to help people in the way most people use the internet these days (from their mobile devices) you would need to at the very least dumb down the GUI so someone could easily see if a place was 1 star versus 5, and cheap or expensive. But getting the links and so on done would be a good start.

This being said, you would probably need 5 to 10 people willing to sign up (at least) to volunteer for this effort for it to be successful.

[DonRocks]

Perhaps the dining thread order should be DC, Baltimore, then Philly/NYC or NYC/Philly?

YES!

Sooner or later we're going to get to one of these questions that has an answer you really might not want to see, and it's because of two things: this request, which not one person has responded to my having asked for over 2 1/2 years - people really needed to know what was going on with me, because then they would have understood - and the harsh reality that we're going to have to eventually present ourselves to the public as a for-profit business, and I don't mean amateurish little Google ads. That's been in the works all-along, but because of item #1, it has necessarily been on hold; at some point in the future, it will be time to begin.

Okay, well, I wasn't kidding in my quoted post: "Sooner or later we're going to get to one of these questions that has an answer you really might not want to see ...."

So it is with lovehockey's suggestion, and Al Dente's exuburant agreement.

Those four forums: NYC, Philly, Baltimore, and DC are humorously called "Hamtrak," and there was some fairly intensive discussion about the ordering of them, when it first happened. Conceptually, it's simple to picture since it follows a simple North -> South flow, but when this website goes national (and inside my head, it's "when" and not "if"), there are going to be larger problems than this with the inclusion of such cities as Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Portland, New Orleans, etc. It's not hard to picture the difficulties involved in organizing these, and it won't be me who does it - this will take investment money, and an employee (whom we currently do not have) who knows what (s)he is doing - someone who does this for a living, and who spends their professional livelihood ergonomically designing websites for ease of use. This is all going to happen, and, I will add, all ties right back into this request I made almost three years ago, and which remains untended to, to this very day. I do not need a professional writer to tackle this assignment; just a young, eager-beaver blogger who wants to make a name for him or herself by writing a rather blockbuster story about me that relatively few people know about. When you read the story, everything will fall into place, I promise, and you'll understand everything; before that happens, you may well think of me as a scatterbrain, a dingbat, or worse still, an amateur who has no vision or plans for his business. None of these are true, I promise you. *I have wanted people to know what has been going on with me for many years now*, I'm not going to tell you some lame sob story, and I want someone else to write it for me, with me being the *subject*, not the *author*. And once again, it isn't about Karen.

How does this all fit in with DC being the 4th forum on the website? It does, because one day, donrockwell.com, or some variant of donrockwell.com, is going to be a national presence, and New York is most likely going to be a higher-traffic area than Washington, DC. What I did was something of a tongue-in-cheek, insider joke: I made the flow of the forums follow the tracks of Amtrak, and simply called it Hamtrak. Someone once jokingly asked, "So, if we get a Richmond forum, will that go below Washington, DC?" And the answer is: Yes! North-to-South. That's all it is, and I promise you it's just a temporary solution. We're going to need a professionally designed landing page; not this CraigsList-looking kludge of forums staring the blinking, emotionless reader in the eye, subsequently scaring the poor person off. I'm well aware that we're going to need a much nicer-looking landing page, as well as a much easier way to facilitate pictures and videos. The internet will be to the next generation of young Americans what TV was to my generation: It will be the be-all, and end-all, and TV as we know it is going to "just one more thing" that happens over the internet. Just as print journalism is dead, so is broadcast journalism - it's just that the death is going to take a bit longer - maybe 20 years instead of 10. After all, no trees are being killed to broadcast a TV show; it's ridiculous that newspapers still even exist, but they won't for much longer. I'm no "futurist," but I'm very good at observation, and this is what I'm observing.

Two requests:

1) Let's keep this conversation going, and I'll answer your questions as well as I can (but you need to know, in advance, that I simply am not going to know most of the answers, because decisions will be made by a person who hasn't ever heard of "donrockwell.com" at this point).

2) Please assume that every single thing I've said is with your interest in mind. When I was in my 20s, I formed my own consulting company and began making a relatively good living. A girl with whom I was dear friends commented that, "You're going to succeed, because you care about doing the best possible job you can do, first and foremost, and you look at money as a *byproduct* of your efforts; not as a primary motivator." So it was then, and so it is today. I have nothing against money, but I think it really *can be* - not the "root" of all evil," but certainly one of the branches and leaves. Money changes people, it turns them into evil demons, and it makes people do things that they wouldn't normally do. But money doesn't do that to me. I told that girl, when I was in my 20s, that I would never, ever become a slave to money. I never have, and I never will, because I never want to be a shitty person.

[NolaCaine]

"I've reached the boiling point". I love this tag line.  How do we know what the levels of fishiness mean?  How many posts does one need to make to reach the next level. I hated being a ventworm. 

[NolaCaine]

Wait a minute. I thought for sure I had a little "I've reached the boiling point" over my name last time I posted but now I"m a vent worm again. Can I be a crab. A shrimp?  A rocklobster?  Brrrring? anything but a ventworm?

[DonRocks]

Wait a minute. I thought for sure I had a little "I've reached the boiling point" over my name last time I posted but now I"m a vent worm again. Can I be a crab. A shrimp?  A rocklobster?  Brrrring? anything but a ventworm?

I believe that was your 212th post.

[NolaCaine]

I believe that was your 212th post.

Oh So Clever you are Don.

But you didn't answer the question: What are the benchmarks?  I am over venwormyness and  need to change my  status even if that means telling a tread my every, single, dining experience, daily; and details on how my garden grows.

[DonRocks]

Oh So Clever you are Don.

But you didn't answer the question: What are the benchmarks?  I am over venwormyness and  need to change my  status even if that means telling a tread my every, single, dining experience, daily; and details on how my garden grows.

Sigh, if you must ... I'll arrange for you to override the defaults. If anyone else wants to do this, you can send me a PM, but don't be dissing ventworms.

[silentbob]

I wish it were possible to open a thread and automatically jump to the first unread post -- if the blue dot on the far left is intended to do that, it doesn't seem to be working for me (either on Safari or Firefox).

For whatever reason, this works for me now.  Comment withdrawn!

[schulju]

The Hamtrak thing has been killing me for years!!!

[DonRocks]

The Hamtrak thing has been killing me for years!!!

Think "North-to-South train line," and be glad we don't have a Metro Park or New Carrollton forum.

The lack of funding and participation in non-DC threads, as well as non-food threads, has been killing me for longer!!!

But I hear you, and I haven't forgotten (nor will I forget) our raison d'ètre This is also why I've been making an effort to write DC-based restaurant reviews of late (I know this week has been slow in terms of me posting, but there's a reason for it).

I'm pretty sure some people bookmark the Washington, DC Restaurants and Dining Forum as their entry point, and the reason I think this is that it has been absolutely *stunning* to me how many people I've exchanged PMs with who didn't even know we had a Fine Arts And Their Variants Forum - and I mean, they didn't even know it existed! You cannot imagine how much that sucks for me.

[Bart]

Since this thread has evolved into a "Help" thread, I'll this: Is there (still) a way to embed photo into a thread? I only know how to attach photos that you have to click on to see.

See this post from The Hersch to see what I'm talking about.

[DonRocks]

Since this thread has evolved into a "Help" thread, I'll this: Is there (still) a way to embed photo into a thread? I only know how to attach photos that you have to click on to see.

See this post from The Hersch to see what I'm talking about.

Yes, use the following html (I changed "img" to "imq" and "http" to "htpp" so it wouldn't resolve, but if I hadn't, his photo would appear):

[imq=htpp://i1222.photobucket.com/albums/dd482/thehersch/IMG_46271024x768_zpsa45eb5bb.jpg]

[Bart]

Thanks! But you're about 5 minutes too late for the post I was thinking of!

Can you do that trick if I'm uploading photos directly from my computer to the site? (not using a third party like photobucket)

[DonRocks]

Thanks! But you're about 5 minutes too late for the post I was thinking of!

Can you do that trick if I'm uploading photos directly from my computer to the site? (not using a third party like photobucket)

I don't think so - that's only used for existing photos on the web.

[Tujague]

Three lengthy posts in succession swallowed into the unrecoverable zone, all because of one bad keystroke. I'm done.

[Pat]

Three lengthy posts in succession swallowed into the unrecoverable zone, all because of one bad keystroke. I'm done.

There was nothing saved when you went back in to the box to start typing again?  That part usually works, even though you might lose a little text.

[DonRocks]

Three lengthy posts in succession swallowed into the unrecoverable zone, all because of one bad keystroke. I'm done.

Only because you don't know about the auto-recover feature. Reply to a post, and take note of the bottom-left of the typing area. Every *couple of minutes*, a snapshot is taken (it says "Last auto saved: 8:10:38 PM), and you can instantly recover your typing. I've said this multiple times in the past. In the time it has taken me to type this, I have gotten the auto-save message, which is why I went back and typed 8:10:38 PM.

If you haven't gone back and re-edited the thread, you can recover your most-recent typing - even a year from now. Go to the thread, ...

In fact, I just clicked OUT of this thread, came back in, and replied to your post. I got this message in the bottom-left corner:

View Auto Saved Content (A minute ago)

And I clicked on it. Sure enough, everything I had typed came right back up when I clicked on the "Restore" option. If you haven't typed over your most-recent attempt, it's *still* there.

Give it a shot, and if you're worried you'll lose it, write me first, and I'll walk you through it. I guarantee you can recover your work.

The key, if you somehow get thrown out of an edit session, is NOT to go back and start typing again from scratch. Use the Auto-Saved Content feature to recover your work! Once you start typing again, it's gone.

[Tujague]

Don, I know about the Auto-Saved Content feature; I've used it before. I looked for it. IT WASN'T THERE--any of those times I lost my work.

Is there any way to create a warning signal, so that one can avoid unintended deletions--sort of like on Facebook, which asks if you want to leave the page you're on? I wouldn't complain so loudly, but that auto-saved feature did not appear anywhere, so I assume there must be some sort of keystroke I made that eliminated it somehow.

[DonRocks]

Don, I know about the Auto-Saved Content feature; I've used it before. I looked for it. IT WASN'T THERE--any of those times I lost my work.

Was it a brand new thread, or a new reply to an existing one? Check your PMs.