Knowledge Base Article of the Week #32: You can get there from here
Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 12:45 PM by: Jeremy LindenHey everyone! Have you ever tried to send someone a link to an article in the Knowledge Base, only to find that it didn’t quite work the way you expected? Have you ever wondered how we post Knowledge Base links on the blog? Today I will teach you the art of Knowledge Base link construction, so you can start creating and distributing your very own links to the Knowledge Base!
To get started, you’ll need the proper link template and your article’s topic number. When you’re done, your link should closely resemble this week’s article link:
http://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417&task=knowledge&questionID=5402
Just click that link and read this week’s article to learn the rest!
As always, if you’d like to comment on this article, or if you’d just like to chat with the Documentation team, we’d love to see you at our office hours today, Friday, at 2pm in Beaumont.
See you there!
Jeremy Linden
July 11th, 2008 at 1:11 PM
Hey Jeremy,
I have used SL for about three years now and love it! This interoperability is sooo important to expanding SL to the web, and maybe there are ways you could work with a Vivaty to do that? Looked at Lively and Vivaty, and Vivaty is much better looking overall.
Wasn’t sure how best to reach you guys, so thought I would just fire off an email via comments.
Cheers and thanks…
July 11th, 2008 at 2:23 PM
Are you joking?
Just have a permalink in the article itself. You already have the topic number on the page. Turn that into a link people can copy.
If the goal is to get people to share articles in the knowledgebase, go beyond the 10% of the folks that will patience to edit urls by hand, and aim for the greater % that can handle copying a link.
July 11th, 2008 at 2:25 PM
Hello Astroturfer! I’m not going to join AIM or Facebook just so I can look at Vivaty, and like Lively and IMVU and the rest of the chat rooms it’s Windows-only. Three thumbs down from this polymorph!
July 11th, 2008 at 2:49 PM
*wonders who Argent is talking to and what about* o_O
July 11th, 2008 at 3:22 PM
And then again I could just copy and paste the URL thats conviently located at the top of my screen right now to eliminate all that fancy foot work……..
July 11th, 2008 at 3:27 PM
Oh, nice. A workaround for http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-254
Jeremy, are you aware of http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-253 ?
July 11th, 2008 at 3:58 PM
Ron@4: Message #1 looks like astroturf to me.
July 11th, 2008 at 6:33 PM
#2 excellent points. Jeremey, Lindens as a whole needs to break out of the mindset of catering only for the klingon wearing 40 year old virgins in their parents basements and grasp the fact, the vast majority of users simply want to point and click and have things work. So start making things simple to use and navigate, pitch to the lowest common demominater. So please go back rethink this wonderful idea and develop it as point and click.
The KISS forumla needs to be tattooed on Lindens foreheards, I know its on their butts cos of all the kiss a*s comments that appear in here.
July 11th, 2008 at 7:17 PM
@2, 5, and 8
You’re absolutely right. We recognize that this is a pretty clunky way of getting a direct link, and we’ve been actively working to make the address bar work the way you think it should. Simplicity certainly is key.
In the meantime, a complex workaround is better than no workaround… We’ll keep you posted as soon as we implement a simpler solution!
July 11th, 2008 at 7:26 PM
I can’t get here from there…
July 11th, 2008 at 7:37 PM
Hi Jeremy,
http://secondlife.com/support/?questionID=5402 gets me to the same article (I got this URL format from a Linden’s answer to a jira issue, some time ago)
http://secondlife.com/support/?questionID=5402 seems a lot less clunky than http://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417&task=knowledge&questionID=5402
Is there any reason not to use the shorter format?
July 12th, 2008 at 2:56 AM
i will play second life
July 12th, 2008 at 6:25 AM
@9 Gellan Glenelg
Using that shorter format only works if you are already logged into the Second Life website. If you are not already logged in, you will be forced to enter your login information before you continue.
With the link format provided in this week’s article, you can view the linked article regardless of login status. The link itself is not as pretty, but it’s more foolproof for the recipient of the link
July 12th, 2008 at 6:46 AM
this is a nice indicator of your work to make sl better and better. i sometimes run into folks with a similar issue as I have seen in the knowledgebase, but only to hassle to get the link to them
this seems like a good move (lol, i have to see if i am techie enough to figure this out) but it sounds realy good!
thanks for all the work into making sl better and better, it shows, at least i see a diff
July 12th, 2008 at 10:32 AM
“To get started, you’ll need the proper link template and your article’s topic number”. What’s a “PROPER LINK TEMPLATE? I agree with Alf Lednev, I see this all of the time in Linden communications: the assumption that we are all IT managers with A+++ backgrounds who intuitively know what a “link template” is! To me it’s just authentic geek gibberish, I can’t even begin to “get started” until I find a glossary that defines what exactly that is! Pleas become more user friendly for :the rest of us” Talk to Torley, he’ll know what to do!
July 12th, 2008 at 12:03 PM
Tweed, if you actually click the link and read the article it will explain that. The “link template” means the sequence of parts you have to put into the URL to make it work.
July 13th, 2008 at 4:16 AM
Jeremy, how about setting up a little server inside LL that just does a redirect from an easy-to-use format to the right one? I suspect that you could set up a virtual host and rewrite in apache to convert from http://kb.secondlife.com/$id to the right thing in about half an hour, using your existing server. Give me a login and I’ll do it for you gratis.
July 15th, 2008 at 2:32 AM
Hello Astroturfer! I’m not going to join AIM or Facebook just so I can look at Vivaty