UX Suggestion

[chrisaldrich]

Towards the end of using this plugin as part of an online "notebook" or commonplace book, it would be nice to have finer control over the listings of the annotations.

As an example, look at: http://boffosocko.com/2016/06/18/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-quanta-magazine/ The original post was a "bookmark" to an article which was then annotated, solely by me. When embedding the annotations (in this case the shortcode included one author and one specific tag), it becomes overly redundant to repeatedly include that the annotations were by me, that they're from the same article, and including the picture multiple times. As this is likely a frequent use case for such a plug in, perhaps when the same annotator is repeated all the annotations could come under one heading and similarly if it's the same article, those could be concatenated along with just one photo as well.

Suggested output: TITLE OF PAGE1 | # PHOTO from PAGE1 Annotations by AUTHOR1:

• annotation 1 from PAGE1
• highlight 2 from PAGE1
• highlight 3 from PAGE1
• annotation to go with highlight 3 from PAGE1

TITLE OF PAGE2 | # PHOTO from PAGE2 Annotations by AUTHOR1:

• annotation 1 from PAGE2

Annotations by AUTHOR2:

• annotation 2 from PAGE2
• annotation 3 from PAGE2

This type of logic isn't too difficult given the current configuration though it may require some thought for the pending changes to add and/or functionality for multiple authors and multiple tags.

One particular hurdle may be cases where the order of annotations could potentially tell a "story" and even more so when there are multiple authors providing multiple annotations (for example when using this in a classroom setting versus a single-author notebook.)

Providing a visual indicator like # which includes a wrapped permalink URL for the particular article could allow the user to also quickly jump to that page and see the broader flow of annotations on a single page, especially in a classroom type setting where dozens of students may have made hundreds of annotations which may provide a slightly better contextual UI experience, while still allowing the (shortcoded) web page to include all of the annotations for historical purposes.

[chrisaldrich]

As a comparison, consider this "syndicated" (and modified) version of the post mentioned above on Medium: https://medium.com/boffo-socko/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-quanta-magazine-90151c23c377#.xxu7bzeg3

[kshaffer]

I get the idea here. Though, like you mention, it may conflict with other uses where you want the annotations to tell a story. (Or in a class case, where you'll have a lot of contributors, and some article overlaps.) I'll mull this over. It may be another option to add to the shortcode, and I don't want the shortcode to get too long and complex. As long as the default settings are the most straightforward, I can add features without most people needing to add a lot of options to their shortcode.

Thanks for the suggestions!