ClarionHub on ClarionLive, Nov 2016!

Thanks @John_Hickey and Arnold (what, no account to @ mention?!) for the invitation to present ClarionHub on ClarionLive this week!

Register For The Webinar

Below are some ideas of what we can cover.

Vote Now!

At the beginning of the webinar I will post some links and we can either just get started or take some input on what people want to talk about. Just for fun I made the list a multiple option poll!!

  • What is ClarionHub?
  • What is on the site?
  • What are my expectations and hopes for ClarionHub?
  • How is the site setup and why?
  • Let’s make an account for Arnold!
  • How do I ClarionHub?
  • Other (please post a request!)
0 voters

If you are not already a member then please join. You can of course still enjoy the content and the webinar without being a member. We will also cover how to join during the webinar so feel free to wait until then and follow along!

What is ClarionHub?

Clarion developer community discussion for and about the Clarion Development Environment (IDE) by SoftVelocity and the Clarion Programming Language

…and because we are all about code, this is exactly what you will see in the html meta tag! :slight_smile:

<meta name="description" content="Clarion developer community discussion for and about the Clarion Development Environment (IDE) by SoftVelocity and the Clarion Programming Language.">

For more details, head over to the Welcome to the ClarionHub! page which is a pinned topic for all newcomers to the site:

ClarionHub is using the Discourse “open source discussion platform”. For more details and more feature bullet points that you can imagine, head over to their website.

From their FAQ Page:

Discourse is the 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. It works as:

  • a mailing list
  • a discussion forum
  • a long-form chat room

…but most of all, I think, ClarionHub is a community platform. The website and all the technical stuff is just the framework. The content and interactions is all down to you guys!

What is on the site?

A great place to start is the Categories page where we are attempting to break topics into useful categories.

Let’s head over there now and take a look and talk through a few of the more interesting categories! Categories - ClarionHub

… back? Ok, what else do we have!!

On the top right there you can access various other areas of the site:

Different views of the topic stream such as Latest, New, Unread etc.

Obviously some of these are only available if you are a logged in member.

Members can also curate their own set of Bookmarks if they wish.

Badges are of course GREAT!

The Users page is often fun to see what has been going on.

Perhaps it would be nice about now to poke around the site and quickly click on a few different elements to see how things work… profiles, topics, etc. Maybe a quick backstage look at the admin area?

What are my expectations and hopes for ClarionHub?

This has been covered in a few existing topics which we can discuss now as well if people are interested:

Dear old Clarion has served me well, the Clarion people are great and this is one way I think I can give back to the community. It is also a way for me to play around with some web tech as well!

I believe that we are also connecting with Clarion folks that would never go near the newsgroups if they even knew what they are. We are also priming the internet with some great content to gobble up all those web searches and direct people to the info that matters! If you cannot find what you need on the internet then the internet should be considered broken. So go and fix it! :slight_smile:

How is the site setup and why?

The site runs Discourse which has a specific set of requirements, both software and hardware which we follow pretty closely.

The topic What is the future of this site, will my data (topics/posts) disappear? covers a bit of detail about the site configuration. A more recent topic, Almost 300 users… some site stats for the last month! Edit: We made it to 300, woot!, has some awesome graphs and other info about analytics for the site.

The category meta contains a few topics cover downtimes and updates, feature notifications etc. If you are interested in the technical details of running the site that can be a category to follow more closely.

Hang on… follow a category… are you mad, what is this magic?

Of course this is also possible for topics too!

Let’s make an account for Arnold!

Come on Arnold… join the fun! :slight_smile:

https://clarionhub.com/signup

How do I ClarionHub?

Now we have Arnold signed up, how about we create a topic or post a reply?

User trust levels

Because Arnold is new the system won’t automatically trust him to do everything yet. This is a guard against spam bots and other internet pains and stops things like bots that just post links or try to create hundreds of topics. Since we know Arnold how about I go to admin and boost his clearance?

Markdown editor

How many folks have used markdown before?

OHHH… how about a poll then!

Post topics/replies/wiki

  • Make a topic
  • Post a reply
  • Edit a wiki topic (admins can mark a topic as a “wiki”)

Edit your profile

A good first step when starting your account is to customise your profile. This helps build community and lets people know who you are.
How about a picture… a short bio?

There is loads more on ClarionHub, any requests?

Perhaps it would be interesting to cover some of the details of how the site works too? “Single Page App”, background polling, live updating and refreshing of content, sideqik, mini profiler, cloud flare, let’s encrypt SSL, etc!

Oh, email reply integration might really interest some. You don’t actually have to open the browser to reply to topics!

Some suggestions coming in…

  • How about how to format a message
  • Edit a message
  • Review the history of a message
  • Search
  • @UserName
  • Clicking on your image - to see what’s new
  • Reading the scrollbar (dates etc)
  • For example, with a topic like https://github.com/richardbryceau/clarionforwindows What do I do once I follow that link in the topic? i.e. Github?!!
  • point out that the URLs can be shared in other venues, and how they are readable
  • Oneboxing

A practice of loading images!

BTW, the recording of the webinar is of course available from ClarionLive!

387 | November 18 2016 | Download Webinar 387