"How should I format the ticketstub site?" asked Mathowie?

June 3, 2000 11:51 PM

How should the site be arranged and navigated? Personally, I want to see ticket stub stories of all kinds, and not have it bound to just rock concert show reviews. But that begs the question, should the first page you see have a list of entries by last posted? by category? (thinking generally here, like movies, concerts, etc), or list by author?

Since it's all in a database, the list can be any or all of them, depending on what the user wants to see, but I'm still wondering what the default arrangement should be.

What do you think?
posted by mathowie (staff) to Ticketstub Project at 11:51 PM (6 comments total)

I forgot to add - whatever listing arrangement becomes the default, I want to have a single random story as a teaser to one you might not have seen. It will probably show the ticket image, and then the first few lines from the person's story as a lead in...
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:56 PM on June 3, 2000

I think as a basis, category might be good... you'd have to, I imagine, start with whatever you can come up with, plus a Misc. category, then create new categories as patterns emerge in Misc for things you hadn't thought of (but then you're talking about some editorial selection of category placement, rather than "pick a category for your ticket stub", is that good or bad?). I can't imagine a lot of people would come in needing to find a particular stub for a particular event, or whatnot, so people would be more into leisurely browsing, and if that's the case I think good categorization is key.

Getting an instant look at maybe the last, Iunno, half-dozen new ones on the front page might be cool, just for people who visit often, but in my own opinion, just because something's new doesn't mean I automatically care---maybe I'm in the minority there, I don't know.

Which is not to say other criteria are unimportant: I can see wanting to, say, see if anyone's posted anything for the day I was born, or if anyone else posted stubs from the hell-freezes-over Bauhaus tour of a couple years ago (but Monday night, not Sunday, because Monday was announced first and that's when all the cool kids went), or what people posted for the Omni stadium in Atlanta that was torn down a while back. Etc.

Now I'm just rambling so I will stop :)
posted by Sapphireblue at 7:58 PM on June 4, 2000

I like sylloge's idea. I also think that there should be an "advanced navigation" page which divvies up the entries in increasingly bizarre ways. Listed by author, listed by category, listed by rating (if you implement moderation), listed by the number of times the word "slake" is used, listed by number of references to the cultural significance of Bob Dylan (ok, this one might be hard to automate), listed by number of times the phrase "selfish two-timing ex" is used, whatever.
posted by lbergstr at 10:06 PM on June 4, 2000

Damn! great ideas everyone. Stewart, I didn't even think of ratings, but that's definitely going to be added. I couldn't imagine how a visitor would ever find a great story 6 months after it was written without ratings of some sort. Oh - and it will be single votes by members only for sure. Not too hard to program that at all.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:02 PM on June 4, 2000

What about related/similar lookups... perhaps adding the function to be able to do a related lookup with one click. Perhaps based on the event, the location, or even the person? Or more?
posted by Dean_Paxton at 10:02 PM on June 15, 2000