How do we grow this site?
468You may have noticed that we've introduced prizes to get people more involved ... bribery is not beyond this crew to make this site successful.
But this is a serious question. MaplePrimes was born out of all of the best intentions and we want it to flourish. You've now had a taste of the spirit of the site. We have many choices we could make and many paths we could go down ... I'd like to get your thoughts.
Many of you have already posted good comments on improving the mechanics of the site (thank you!). I'm more interested in major content elements, incentives, ... anything that would draw people to visit and use the site.
FYI, some of the crazy ideas that we're thinking about include
- "Wiki" elements -- i.e. content that we develop on this site in a collaborative manner
- more extensive personal profile sections where you can show off your stuff
- an available MapleNet server so that you can serve up your application online for free
- user and content ratings
- a refereed online journal
Any thoughts you might have on these or any other big ideas would be very welcome ...
Cheers ... and thanks for dropping by.
T4.
- A procedure
2 hours 41 min ago - ellipse
4 hours 4 min ago - Also try the options scaling, gridrefine and crossingrefine
5 hours 21 min ago - Try implicitplot
6 hours 4 min ago - The patch
7 hours 40 min ago - thx!
8 hours 6 min ago - The source of the bug
8 hours 24 min ago - my concern is ...
9 hours 20 min ago - plotting with the "Standard interface"
9 hours 39 min ago - variant
9 hours 57 min ago
Search engines
I think the best way to increase web traffic is to make the mapleprimes site rank highly for common search engine queries involving Maple. A google search for "maple help" has 3 university's local Maple help sites ranking above the Maplesoft Student Center. The rest of the first page is all other local help sites. If we can get most obvious Maple help related queries to return Mapleprimes as the first hit, I think the site will gain a lot of traffic. Given that there does not appear to be much competition I think this would be easy enough to do.
It will, however, be difficult to do this without first making the beta site the offical site. If we want the search engines to rank mapleprimes by september, I'd suggest making this change as soon as possible.
I like the idea of having a wiki content, although I think that won't help as much until the community has grown. i.e. when it becomes clear the forums need an FAQ, implement the FAQ via wiki and let it develop from there.
I think a content rating system for a tips section (like on www.vim.org) would be a great idea. I'm not sure what you mean by user rating, but I think that having users rank other users is a bad idea. If we had comment rankings, then user rankings based on comment ranking might make sense.
Darin
--
Kernel Developer
Maplesoft
User ratings
The ratings wouldn't be user to user but an absolute scale. I.e. once you pass 100 posts, you achieve a bronze brain, 200 posts = silver, etc. There may also be a nomination process for additional status (e.g. resident Guru, Great Samaritan, etc.).
Thanks for the other comments.
T4.
Search queries
The site is already getting lots of hits from people clicking on search engine results. Here is a list of some of the queries people are using that give MaplePrimes high in the results:
maple faq
maple latex
font colours
maple html
paper enigma machine
math maple forum
maple tips
maple tip forums
mapleprimes
maple tips forum
message.text =
my function
new research in pure maths
max amount of ram
mathematical name of /
mathematics,enigma machine
matrix resize
maple for linux
maple export to eps pdf
maple forums
maple forum math
maple conference archives
maple compare numbers
maple excel link
maple define function
maple questions
maple preferences mac os x
maple tip
maple gui
maple function definition
maple maplesoft older versions
maple latex output
stack(kbytes)
technical professional
tcsh limit stack size
solitary waves
stack limit maple
splinex
what does f(x) mean when referring to a function
what does constant mean
window.open new window ways
what does invalid arguments mean
undefine variable
____
William Spaetzel
Applications Developer, Maplesoft
Nothing involving help?
None of those search terms involve the word "help". If I'm a someone having a problem with maple I'm going to look for maple help. Also, a search for just Maple brings up the maplesoft website #1, but mapleprimes is not on the first page. I searched for "Maple Tips", which is a term you listed, the mapleprimes site did not show up until about 17 or 18. That's not first page either.
What happens when the site is not longer Beta? How long does it take for the new pages to be ranked?
As well, now that MaplePrimes is a user community I think lots more links from the maplesoft.com site to MaplePrimes.com would help drive up visitors. The maplesoft.com "community" link does not lead people to mapleprimes. mapleprimes is listed on the drop down menu on the resources button, but it does not appear on the resources page.
Darin
--
Kernel Developer
Maplesoft
On Google rankings and vanity searches
On a completely trivial note, MaplePrimes did well in the Google ranking for at least one thing: my name. Yesterday it was actually ranked first; now it's coming in just after my personal webpage.
Maybe with enough time and rising prominence in the site, I will succeed in displacing my namesake nemesis from the top of the Google rankings.
link to your homepage?
Perhaps a wise thing to do is to add a link to your personal homepage from Maple Primes, once this website is popular enough, your PageRank measure will improve (see "Anatomy of a Search Engine" www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)...
Too late
Steve made the mistake of linking to Stephen P. Forrest, so any pagerank that Steve the moderator would have gained has also been given to the Steve the Prof.
____
William Spaetzel
Applications Developer, Maplesoft
Popular in the engines
It looks like MaplePrimes ranks very high in Google already. It seems like anything that gets posted here will get indexed and rank high in the appropriate searches. The User profile leads to some interesting searches.
Try Googling for "collecting glassware" or "african chiclids"
____
William Spaetzel
Applications Developer, Maplesoft
The title tag
If you want to make your homepage rank higher in searches for your name, put your name into the title of the main page of your homepage. When I was working on getting my homepage ranking higher for searches on my name, including my name in the title seemed to make a big difference.
Actually this is something that MaplePrimes might want to do. Adding "help" to the title of the main mapleprime page would probably improve mapleprimes ranking in searches for "maple help".
Darin
--
Kernel Developer
Maplesoft
I'll ask Tom 4 about it
That is a good idea.
Tom really wanted it to say "Blogs, forums, techniques, musings, answers ... all things Maple and math", but the number of people searching for Maple musings is probably pretty small.
____
William Spaetzel
Applications Developer, Maplesoft
Musings ...
Not that I would contradict the site's webmaster but I didn't "really want" that particular phrase ... I wanted a phrase that sort of laid out what the site is about ... as opposed to a kitchy marketing phrase like "Command the infinite wisdom of the universe" type thing ... I'm actually open to suggestions.
I'll be gone on a business trip for a week. Though I may be able to log on, contact might be infrequent so I'll let Will monitor this thread a bit ... and who knows maybe there's a better alternative.
T4.
crazy ideas
Thank you for this bold experiment with the new MaplePrimes web site!
I don't think any of these ideas are really crazy. In fact at the MathAction website we have been using your ideas 1, 2, 3, 4 and talking about how to do 5 for more than a year now. In my opinion applying the wiki concept to allow collaborative development of content is essential in all of these ideas. The way we have made Axiom and Reduce available at the MathAction site illustrates how adding free access to a MapleNet server here could greatly enhance the ability of contributors to discuss Maple in depth. A system such as this is also an excellent platform for issue tracking and support, to suppliment the more structured bug reporting that is traditionally part of beta testing.
I hope you don't mind this reference to other computer algebra systems. Since this is the web, another very important way to "grow" a site is to encourage links to your site from other places on the web where people with similar ideas like to hang-out. An open and colleagial attitude is certainly one way to do this.
I really like your approach so far and look forward to future enhancements of this site.
Cheers,
Bill Page.
I bought an Axiom hat!
Hi Bill,
Thanks for your endorsement of the site. And thanks for the link ... I think you are well within the guidelines of the site in mentioning another system. Actually, I was wondering what had happened to Axiom and now I know. The NAG folks had said that they were moving away from the Axiom fold but I was unsure where it landed.
BTW, I followed your Axiom Gear link and bought myself a cool Axiom trucker's cap (told you that bribery was not out of the question to encourage participation :-) ).
Hope to see you continue your activities on our site.
Cheers.
T4.
Link in the help menu
Adding a link to this site in the Help menu of Maple 10.1 would be helpful... As well as adding links to the Welcome and other pages on the corporate site.
online help browser
Adding a wiki seems an excellent idea. I'd also like an online journal. I enjoyed MapleTech (back in the day); an electronic version would be convenient.
While it might not be appropriate for MaplePrimes, I occasionally think that having online access to the Maple help browser would be useful. Not for a single user---who presumably has access to the existing help browswer---but as a way to answer a question without just writing "see ?SomePackage,Afunction".
Online Help
I too think online Help would be a good idea. Part of the reason why it hasn't happened is the amount of material. As worksheet documents, conversion to HTML is pretty straight forward but the final refinement needed to ensure quality is non-trivial ... will keep this thought alive with our developers.
T4.
Continue along this road
The current evolution that I see in this site is very promising for its growth. The rapid reaction of the site implementors to the good suggestions is refreshing. More community moderators (and fewer current Maple employees), at least in the medium term, would be a good direction to move in.
A Wiki portion to this site is a tremendous idea. Other Wikis have worked really well; outside the obvious examples, the Haskell Wiki has been a very successfull ``niche'' Wiki that has really helped that community come together.
I am particularly happy to see various Maplesoft employees, in particular some that are responsible for actually doing stuff in many parts of Maplesoft's product lines, providing responses now and then. I particularly like it when they clearly label themselves as such. I certainly hope that the MaplePrimes community will not abuse this gesture of goodwill on Maplesoft's part.
Short term site plans ...
We will be introducing non-maplesoft moderators shortly. Currently, the most active moderators are those who are actually building/fixing the site and for a little while longer, we'll need to keep this short distance until things stabilize sufficiently. In the mean time, the Maplesoft moderators will try to behave as much like independents as much as possible.
With respect to Wiki, I think the only real issue is the technology that maintains the wiki's and decision on what are we actually going to wiki. I suspect, we may be able to get something in place in a matter of a couple of weeks as opposed to way way off into the future.
T4.
How do we grow this site?
Many of these suggestions have been implemented. Frankly, I don't miss "Wiki". A refereed online journal would be a good addition.
What I am missing the most and what have made this site so interesting from the very beginning, are Maplesoft people blogs. Paul DeMarco's Maple Baseball, Tom Lee's Functioning Maple V R1 DOS demo (circ. 1991), Jan Bakus's Image Processing with Maple blog entries, all about a year old, are still among the best entries on this site, as well as various Jacques Carette's comments, and Joe Riel's (and, maybe, some of mine) posts.
I added something new to my blog, Matrix Algebra over Finite Fields, but that doesn't seem to make much a difference. More blog posts from Maplesoft people would make a difference - especially not technical posts, but some memories, history etc.
Hi. I must admit i did not
Hi.
I must admit i did not read all post in this thread, but here are my ideas:
I every maple helpfile, set a header including a link to this forum.
That means, if people, can not solve the problem they experience with maple via the help-file, they probably will se that there is a weblink to this forum, and hence will probably use it.
Another useful way would be to include a comment and link about this forum to the installationwizard of maple.
As many of you might are aware, Maple is being used often by students of technical universitys and similar educational faculties. I should know this since i myself is a student of such an university. Some of theese universitys supply there students with a maple-copy used while being educated for a symbolic price.
It might be a good idea to get the professors to advertise a bit for this site when theese products are being used in education.
I myself only found the page via the internet, not via my professors.
The professors would have the advantage that they did not need to help their students in Maple-technic problems but could instead concentrate on the math which the curss are often about.
//Sentinox
Online Journal
I would like a refereed online journal for members.
I browse this site frequently for the blogs, in addition to asking for help.
However, sometimes there are not any new front page postings for quite some time, and I can only go through the same few blogs so many times.
v/r,
recent posts
'recent posts' link at the lhs is quite useful - if there is a new blog (or forum) post - it is usually there (except if the category is not specified.)
__________
Alec Mihailovs
http://mihailovs.com/Alec/
online maple for exemplification
Hi *,
there are plenty of ideas, I would like to add my personal view, that I don't miss a wiki in general, but that I would really apprciate a 'sandbox' where one could exhibit code snipets which are then actually computed, perhasp it could also provide online acces to maple help pages (many questions of users could so be directly answered by a link to such helppages). How this could work, have a loo at the axiom web page
http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/FrontPage
ciao
BF.