Posted by Ric
Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:55:00 GMT
We released a couple of new features over the weekend:
Item templates
When you’re creating or editing an item in Swirrl, it’s often the case that you’d like to give it some of the same attributes as other items in the same category. When you’re editing an item, we now show you the attributes that have been set on other visible items in the same category, so that you can fill them in if you want to.
You don’t need to set values for all these attributes – it’s just intended as a guide, to avoid you having to keep referring back to the other items in the category to remember what attributes to set. Any attributes that are left blank when you save will just remain unset.
For example, if you have a category for ‘expenses’, for each individual expense you might normally set the date, amount spent, VAT, description, what form the receipt is in, and who is claiming the expense. Now, after the first expense item has been created, you wont need to remember this list: when users who can see your original item edit another expense, these attributes will be presented to them.
Attribute tables
We’ve added a new way to view lists of items in Swirrl (i.e. search results, items tagged with a particular keyword, or items in a category etc.)
By default the results displayed in the way you’re used to: as a list of item names.
However, if you prefer, you can now choose to see a table of the attributes of the items by clicking the link ‘show attributes’. This helps you see, at a glance, more details about each item without having to view them all one by one.
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Posted by Ric
Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:35:00 GMT
A few days ago I posted an article about the semantic web on the ThinkAboutTech blog, which I thought readers of SwirrlSpeak might find interesting:
Semantics are important. They always have been and they always will be, because they are fundamental to the process of communication. What’s been changing recently is the means that we use to record and communicate information, especially with the advent of the internet…
(read the rest of the article)
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Posted by Bill
Tue, 26 May 2009 17:43:00 GMT
As regular readers of SwirrlSpeak will have noticed, we’ve long been convinced of the benefits of the semantic web and linked data – and indeed those technologies underly the design of Swirrl.
I’ve just started a new blog where I’ll be exploring these topics in more depth: http://www.webofdatablog.com. Please take a look!
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Posted by Ric
Sun, 17 May 2009 10:49:00 GMT
At Swirrl, we’re big fans of Stewart Mader’s excellent blog on wiki practices and adoption, Future Changes. So, it was an honour that he accepted a contribution from us about finding information at work.
If a question about general knowledge comes up in conversation, it’s easy to immediately look it up on the web on your laptop or phone. If you’re watching a film and you can’t place where else you’ve seen one of the actors, you can instantly look it up on IMDB. You can even use services like Shazam to identify songs. Finding things out at work should also be this easy, but it normally isn’t. Although the information you want probably exists somewhere in your organization, it’s often scattered across multiple systems or you might not have access to the specific shared drive where it lives….
Read the whole article here.
We’ll be contributing more material to Stewart’s blog over the coming months.
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Posted by Bill
Thu, 14 May 2009 12:52:00 GMT
We released a couple more new features yesterday. One feature that people have been asking us for for is the ability to customise the appearance of Swirrl to match your own company style (or “branding” for short). So now you can upload your own logo and choose from a list of colour schemes. We’ve been taking advantage of that for our own internal Swirrl account – a change is as good as a rest and we’re using the rather attractive blue colour scheme at the moment, rather than the default grey and orange.
Another small improvement is to give each individual user the chance to configure the default access permissions assigned to any new items they create in Swirrl. You can still adjust these permissions item by item, but this means that if you are in the marketing group, say, then for example you could set up Swirrl so that everything you create is visible to everyone in the company but editable only by marketing group members. Hopefully this will save some of our users some time by making permission management easier.
There are a few other minor things – have a poke around the system and see what you think. These include allowing administrators to see the real names and emails of the users of the account (as well as their screen-names). That makes it easier to match up the email addresses of the people you invited to the screen-names of the actual users – useful in cases where people use nicknames rather than real names to identify themselves. And we’ve made it easy for normal users (ie. not administrators) to see a list of the groups they are in.
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