tag this post
In the spirit of the congratulatory postings proliferating of late, I figured that at least one more was in order for David Veksler, the webmaster who has played a major role behind the recent changes to the Ludwig von Mises Institutes website.
One of his latest additions to the main website is a sidebar widget labeled "Related" which as you might suspect contains links to other Mises daily articles, literature, media files, and store products which share topical relation; or at least that is what is aimed to be accomplished.
This is the part where we turn to all our site visitors and ask them to pitch in a hand to improve the accuracy of those resulting links, by utilizing the websites tagging function, located conveniently at the bottom of every daily article where the reader is provocatively invited to "Tag this document!" (as Walter Block might have them do to unowned 'public' property.)
All you need to do is think of one or a few words which best describe the content of the daily article, type them in, submit, and voila! What you have just accomplished is to create a relationship to other articles, books, or media which discuss those related topics. The more attributes those articles share, the more likely it is will be linked to, thus laying the groundwork to help new readers further explore and expand their education on any specific topic that what might have occurred otherwise.
For example, a visitor who enjoyed the recent articles discussing the Methodenstreit debates might be keen to discover that Ludwig von Mises wrote a number of books dealing with those very same topics.
Comments (6)
This is dangerously fun. Easy to get obsessed. I've been at this for hours and I have other work to do.
Please help everyone! the Daily Articles in particular need attention, especially early stuff. There are real gems in there.
Published: May 2, 2008 10:26 AM
Ok, so far as I can tell I hold the world human record for Mises.org tagging. I want that on my gravestone.
Published: May 2, 2008 11:30 AM
Note: the mises.org web site is horribly broken - AFAICT there isn't a single page on the site that actually checks out as valid HTML/XHTML.
E.g., the front page http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.mises.org alone detects 204 errors.
I've seen pages with unclosed <li> tags, tags with illegal capitalization ("Br", etc.).
If you're feeling brave, try renaming the pages with the extension "xml" instead of "html" and reading them with Firefox. (This makes Firefox treat them as real XHTML rather than HTML, and use a strict XML-compliant parser; it'll just show errors for invalid pages, rather than trying its best to show the page, like the HTML parser does)
Published: May 5, 2008 2:23 AM
I got it down to 11 errors from 200+:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mises.org%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
Published: May 5, 2008 4:38 PM
Good stuff! (You can probably get rid of most of the rest by making the page claim to be XHTML 1.0 transitional or even HTML 4.0 rather than XHTML strict. The biggest booboo is the use of unescaped ampersands in URIs. I'd really like to see valid XHTML everywhere, but I'm kind of anal about things at least matching the standards they claim to represent...i.e., not claiming to be "iso 8859-1" and actually being MS cp-1252 or whatever)
I really noticed it on this page: http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/introduction.asp (validator.w3.org reports 442 errors; HTML Tidy reports 677 warnings but works OK) - there's at least one missing </li> (after "Rothbard's Works"); and several tags named <Br> (as opposed to <br>). After running it through Tidy, Firefox still won't read it as XML, but at least it's somewhat treatable. But then I looked further and this appears to be a consistent problem throughout the site.
Published: May 6, 2008 5:17 AM
Mises.org now validates as valid XHTML
Published: May 20, 2008 11:45 AM