Creating Content

There are five primary types of content within The Synaptic Leap:

Project Pages, created as "child pages" for research community projects using the book module
Personal Blog pages, used for pre-project style brain storming communications
Discussion forum, used to ask questions or post feedback to the community
Poll, when you're looking for multiple choice style community input on a particular topic
Images, typically created so that they can be embedded within other pieces of content

The content publishing applications are your online collaboration tools within The Synaptic Leap. With a few basic concepts down, you'll be ready to start collaborating with your fellow scientists.

The following will describe the common form fields across all content types and how you can use these fields to direct where your content should be published within the TSL site. Content specific fields and instructions will be described in the respective user guide sections.

Title

The title is exactly what it sounds like, the tile of your content. When filling in your title, think about what pages you plan to publish your content on. How should you best describe your content for others to scan the entire web page and quickly know what your piece of content is about.

For example, if the content is going to be published to the Resources Needed page, then you might not want to use the title "Resources Needed" instead, describe more specifically what's needed e.g. 2 computational biologists needed for malaria effort.

Community

The Community field is used to publish content to the appropriate communities within The Synaptic Leap. For example, any content with a community of malaria research will be published on the malaria research community posts page. A post can be published to multiple communities by holding the ctl-key while selecting the appropriate communities.

Sometimes you may not want a post to go to any community posts page. For example, you may create an image which for the sole purpose of referencing it within another piece of content. In cases such as this, it is best to keep the community selection as <none>.

Subject

"Subject" represents general subject categories for a piece of content. Later, we may chose to provide navigation for Community/Subject specific topics e.g. a navigation page for General Open Research and Community Status.

At this juncture, the only Subject driving content publication placement is the "Resources needed" subject. Any piece of content, regardless of the community selected, given a subject of "Resources needed" will be published on our Resources Needed page.

Body

Book/project pages and blogs have a body. This is where you will write your content that will be published as a web page. If you use Windows Explorer or Firefox as your browser, you will have a fairly robust editor available to you. It will give you basic word processing formatting options such as heading styles, bold, italic, underline, bullets... More web-specific formatting tools include links, images and html.

Additionally, each piece of content also allows for related content via:

Comments, created as a threaded response to another piece of content
Attachments, files uploaded as additional information to the source content

NOTE: more links and content to be added on this subject later. In the mean time, I hope this post is helpful.

Recommended Browsers for The Synaptic Leap

Recommendation

If you're using a mac, we recommend using Firefox (1.5.0.1+).

If you're using a PC, we recommend either Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Firefox (1.5.0.1+).

Using one of these browsers will allow you to easily create compelling posts on The Synaptic Leap using an editor that is quite similar to a word processor.

More Background and a Little Off Subject Rant

Neither Apple's Safari nor older versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) can support our editor, TinyMCE. And unfortunately Microsoft doesn't provide IE 6 for macs. Therefore if you're a mac user, Firefox is your best bet.

Of course, you could turn the tables and say that the editor doesn't have code to support those browsers. Certainly that's fair to say of older versions of IE. After all, IE version 5.0 and before were likely available before TinyMCE.

Safari on the other hand, well as much as I love my mac, and I do love my mac, I think Apple ought to dump it. Web application developers struggle to make things work for Safari, Apple just hasn't kept up with all the de-facto web standards. Given the small user base for Safari, it's frequently not worth it for application developers to write code for Sarari specific work arounds.

Apple came out with Safari before Firefox was a presence. Since then, Firefox has gained serious momentum. It's free and it's a damn good browser. The open source developers are doing a good job of keeping it secure and up to date with the latest web developments. In fact, they drove quite a few of them. Due to its strengths, it already has more than twice the market share as Safari does.

Given this change in the marketplace, Apple needs to adjust their browser strategy. I think Apple ought to take half their developers working on Safari and redploy them on Firefox. Then their next "upgrade" for Safari should be to automatically replace it with Firefox. The other half of the programmers should be redeployed on iLife - keeping it leading edge and easy to use. This is their differentiator and I think they should increase their investment and widen their lead in this software space. Trust me, as great as iLife is there's still room for improvement.

And if the Mozilla partnership works out for them for the browser, I think Apple should do the same thing with their Mail. Apple could take 1/2 their mail developers and move them to Thunderbird. Imagine if Thunderbird integrated well with Apple's address book, iTunes, iPhoto... Ahhh, a real mail client on my mac. That would be nice.

Ok enough ranting. I guess the software product manager in me can't help but jump on this soap box.

The Synaptic Leap User Statistics

In case you're interested, the following are a few of our user statistics (according to Awstats) for The Synaptic Leap for May 2006.

Unique Visitors 683
3.14 visits / visitor
3.71 pages / visit
Approximately 20% of our visitors are on the site for more than 30 minutes.
More than 90% come from a direct URL address or a bookmark. This is a big deal.
Less than 4% of people find us from a search results page, with Google of course taking the lion's share.
We have visitors coming from more than 24 countries, most are from the U.S. with Australia making a good show too.
60% of our users are on Windows; 15% are on Macs; nearly 7 % are on Linux; the rest??
We have a near tie for Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers with 38.8% and 38.7% respective usage. 2.8% of our visitors are using Safari. The rest is others and unknown.