A catalogue of Hong Kong's history

RE: Q1

I wonder if it is worthwile having additional forums rather than just the 'general' one. The historical stuff is mixed up with the practical advice and questions etc. It would be nice to have some sort of separation.

I sometimes find it a bit cumbersome to enter the sight and look for all new posts and find that there are 20 new 'photo added' messages. Is there a system setting that allows these similar messages to be consolidated? Or am I just being lazy :-)

Must say I agree with Philk on that one.

In an ideal world / site what I'd envisage is a 4 D map of HK, which has as its dimensions:

Commentary / Places like you have now, perhaps including trails

Time (like in the paper you have what happened now, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years ago) so say Stanley now would be the flea market - interesting for tourists, 60 years ago, the POW camp etc,

Photos/Video (historical and present) - either flat or using photosynth

History / novels - as in the newspaper clippings / references to Gweilo book etc.

of course I meant "site", not "sight"...

(Gweipo, is this the part of Phil's post you were agreeing with, or the forums part, or both?)

Good point, I've had the same feeling at times. Here's a quick & dirty fix first: go to the 'What's new' page, and you'll now see a list of the different types of information at the top of the page. If you don't need to wade through notifications of 'new photo added', ctrl-click on 'Image' and 'Image (external)', and then click the 'Apply' button.

That will hide photos from the list - if you do this when you are logged in, it should remember your settings for future visits.

I think we can do a better job with this later, but hopefully that makes it more usable for you now.

Gweipo, that's what I have in mind too - being able to virtually fly through a 3-D version of HK, but with a slider control that allows you to quickly slide backwards and forwards through time. eg you could position yourself at TST facing Hong Kong island, then slide the year to and fro to watch the changing skyline as buildings rise and fall. It is built from a combination of topographic maps for elevation, street maps for building layout, and photos for building heights and textures.

You can ask it to superimpose photos / video over the view you're looking at. Zoom in to people and places to see further information about them.

We'll need a better photosynth first, but I think it is the way the world is moving.

I'm also impressed with the automatic face-recognition on the Picasa website that I use for family photos. I can imagine a tweaked version of that recognising buildings, so that when a new photo is added, the system can automatically scan and recognise buildings (Places) and people in the photos, and create the links to their records automatically.

Another technology that will make a great difference is machine translation. Though we're lucky to have some bilingual readers, by publishing in English we're obviously missing out on a lot of expertise about Hong Kong's history. Can we automatically publish a translated version of the site in chinese, so we can reach out to more readers?

Lots of ideas, but right now we're still building the foundations.

I think the main benefit would be for newcomers. I guess I am a fairly recent newcomer to batgung, there is a wealth of information from only just a year or so ago that I have no idea about and am put off by the number of pages I would need to click through. Perhaps doing some separation would act as a filter and help make earlier posts more easier to find/access.

Actually, while I am on the subject about paging through information - Is there a way to increase the number of topics shown on each page? I much prefer to use my mouse scrollbutton to search through topic headings and posts rather  than continually pressing the 'next page' link. (see, told you I was lazy)

As it is, there is a wealth of information but it is not as easy (at least for me..) to search. The other day, I was trying to find a picture of "ARP Happy Valley" when Craig posted his sights and finds on Blue Pool Road. I typed in "ARP" in the place map and it subsequently gave me several portal numbers but no tag on "Happy Valley".  Another example,  having seen all the picture references to "Fred Evans",  I wanted to figure out who he was. What the Batgung site text search came back with were hundreds of links to his pictures. I attempted to page through them but in the end my patience ran out and I never got the answer.

On specifics, the changing landscape/landmarks morphing through time would be wonderful to see. I would also like to map/picture references to movies and books. What had been done on "The Golden Boy" is indeed impressive. Congratulations! We can apply the same methodology to, say, "Love is a many-splendored thing" - another 50's book/movie.. (phil may have already done this on his website)

the movie thing is already something I have spoken to MrB about, but I am unsure of the best way to do it, and at the moment I only have a handful of films that could be included. It would really need a local film expert to help fill out the majority of decent sights. There is certainly a plethora of old HK films (colour and B&W) that have shots of all sorts of places. It's just knowing which ones and finding them at the local video shop.

But as it stands I think the documentary value of movies is high, given the speed the place changes.

Noted - I'll add it to the to-do list.

We'd cut that down some time back, when the site was too busy for the server. I've put it back up from 5 to 10 topics, giving you 100% more scrolling per page!

Sophia, thanks for giving the examples, that's exactly what I'm interested to hear. There's a new search on the right of the page (under the 'random photo'. Please can you try that and see if it is better?

If I use it to search for 'Fred Evans', the first result is the first photo in the gallery, which has a clipping about him.

If I search for 'ARP happy valley', it shows me Craig's photo as #1. But I can then use the new 'advanced search' option on that page to limit the search to only show results of type 'Place'. Then the only result is a place which is one of the portals on that tunnel network.

So it seems promising.

(The original search uses Google, which I assumed would be good. But I've also noticed it returns a lot more results than I want. The new search is part of the software we use to run the site, so it knows a lot more about the structure of the information here, and the 'advanced search' looks powerful.)

To-do: When typing a tag, the current list only shows first 10 results of matching tags. Is it possible to make the list longer, or add a scroll bar? See Sophia's example.

I agree these are a good source of historical views of HK. I think eventually we'll want a specific new content type for movies. But to get started you can make a trial run using what we already have (forum posts, books and tags), to get a feel for what information and relationships should be recorded.

You've both suggested 'Love is a many splendoured thing', so why not take that as your pilot?

Just wondering whether this will be helpful. It might be as limited as say 'QEII coronation', or as broad as 'WWII'. Eventually it could be a new content type, but initially it can be handled with tags.

Mr B,

As of 7pm - advanced search works! Thank you.

Sophia, It'll be good to hear if it helps. If you still have trouble finding stuff, please post the examples up here again, and we'll see if there's anything that can be done.

I'll leave both the old and new search up for now, but will eventually switch over to the new one unless we discover any problems with it.

Vinnie, that's a good point. Every day I go through a similar set of actions: check a new comment (always at the bottom of the page), then go back to 'what's new' to see the next.

Not sure what's the best solution (thanks for your suggestions), but I'll add it to the 'To do' list.

In an effort to keep the RSI at bay, there's now a line of links to the most common destinations at the bottom of each page.

To be honest i think that your site has become 2 things, one is the present HK with tips for newcomers and oldies on living here, surviving and thriving here.  And then delving into the past. 

Visually in the future, I'd imagine the top of the page to be a MTR / london tube type map that you could dive into, and do all the wonderful things we've been discussing, but in the mean time you have 3 columns at the moment, would it make any sense to say put the past on the LHS with all its links, photos and keep the middle for what we're reading and put all the present day things on the RHS ...

I've checked the pages and cleaned up the errors except one (an image that was created without a photo, but that already has some useful comments). Thanks for pointing them out.

You're right about the two different themes of the site. We've talked about splitting it, but haven't thought of a way to do it that works well. Your suggestion is an interesting one, but I've already got other features in mind for what little space we have left in the columns.

In the short term, the first evidence of a past / present split will show up when we get round to re-structuring the forums as Phil suggests.

I've found I prefer using the new search box, and have stopped using the older google-powered search. So before I replace the old search with the new, would anyone miss it?

hey.

i have been hooked on this site since i found it last week. it is really really informative and it sucks alot of my time *gasps* (i am meant to be doing my evidence law assignment)

here are just some of my thoughts...........

i've observed that the website is rather unorganised (in all honesty, and no offence is intended here). i love reading up on the contents of this blog, especially the areas pertaining to history and places. however, i've noted that the site appears to use "google maps" rather extensively. 

i'd rather have a nicely listed out, dot pointed section with links to the main article.

i have also noted that some articles in the "places" section are not in the "history" section even though it is clearly history.

AND finally, IF YOU GUYS EVER INTEND TO DO A BOOK WITH ALL THE ARTICLES IN THE HISTORY SECTION, PLS TELL ME...I WILL PURCHASE IT!!!!-- might want to consider a pdf collection??