This release was mostly focused on bug fixes, but there are a few new enhancements of note:
- Find a base - your homepage no longer displays the list of commons bases on the left. Instead you can navigate to any base by auto-completing on the name of the base in the search box that replaces it. This appears here and on the explore page. We’ve done away with using the categories of commons (entertainment, sports, etc) because this implied a hierarchy that never actually existed within Freebase. Hopefully you’ll find this new interface is a good replacement.
- Manage the views on your homepage – the views you save to your homepage now appear with nifty little image thumbnails. Click on ‘All Views’ to get to a page where you can administer which of your saved views appear on your homepage by dragging views between the ‘featured views’ and ‘more views’ lists.
- Note: you may also notice that we’re phasing out ‘featured topic’ and ‘your recent edits’ from the user homepage. If you find these to be useful, please let us know — we’re open to suggestions!
- RDF support from topic pages – for background, see http://rdf.freebase.com/
See complete list of A4.01 enhancements
Some bug fixes of note
- Schema changes breaking views – changing the schema underneath a saved view was not being handled well in the UI, sometimes to the point where the base itself could no longer be viewed. These problems should now be cleared up.
- Base deletion – deleting a base wasn’t working properly in the last release. This has been fixed. Types can be deleted from the schema page for each type. Once there are no types associated with a base, it can be deleted from the ‘edit base’ settings area.
- Add data - there was some wonkiness around selecting a topic and creating views based on it. This has has been corrected. If this wasn’t working well for you, you might give it another go. We’re also planning to add an option to let the base administrator set a preference to display commons types on the base view of any topics in the base.
November 18th, 2008 at 9:28 am
I actually do find the recent edits useful – it reminds me where I left off.
And thanks to the thumbnails on my saved views, I now have gay porn pictures on my front page – thanks a lot! :)
On that note, I found the list of saved views to be more useful in list format (with the view more option). No real need to have pictures which take up more space, and then have to click through to a new page in order get the full list (which before was one click but no new page). my 2 cents
And did the CSS change on this blog? I can’t see what I highlight in this text comment box to delete (I think the text changes from black to dark blue). Not sure if that is you or me (had trouble using ctrl-x in a field in freebase, so not sure if my firefox is being wonky or not). I’d blame it on not enough coffee, but it is lunch time for me :(
November 18th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Thanks for the feedback.
We’ve been trying to simplify the user homepage — good data to hear that you find the recent edits section to be helpful — I take it the featured topic and ‘find it’ sections are less near-and-dear to your heart then?
Perhaps we can look at different logic for the saved views list… perhaps over some # of saved views we revert to a text-only list.