SLHandbook.com Enters Alpha

Hello all, I have published enough data to enter the Alpha stage at SLHandbook, http://slhandbook.com, and am hoping to get some feedback both here and at the site itself. I have installed vBulletin, the same Forum software here, and encourage users interested in the project to create Second Life avatar-naed accounts there to focus on issues for moving the site to Beta.

SLHandbook is meant to be a global information repository for all things Second Life, both as a tool for existing users and as a huge display to attract new ones. The end product will contain guides on topics written by SL users. Possible topics are "Guide to Role Playing", "Guide to Women's Fashions", "Guide to Sandboxes", but there is no limit. If you want to write a guide, no matter how small the topic, I'm all for it. These guides, like the rest of the site, will be categorized so show the breadth of user-created content in the SL world. Master topics such as "Welcome to Your Second Life" are also planned.

For now I am working on the underlying database design. I have posted 14 of 19 region reports that I solicited last week. The remaining will be posted with the initial on-line interface to move towards opening up data entry for all community members. There are currently 36 regions and nearly 200 parcels in the database. Some of these are only linked through the initial Gallery provided. I hope to get many of these galleries created to highlight the best and unique in builds and landscapes throughout SL.

In order to move to Beta I need help from anyone interested. I have to add the Product tables to support all of the wonderful items available. I have to flesh out the category and keyword sections. These need to be implemeted before adding any worthwhile browse or search features.

SLHandbook is a free and open site. It wll allow you to add your own descriptions, images and items, describe your own parcels and much more. While I will continue to hire surveyors to fill up as much data as possible I'd certainly love the actual parcel owners to get involved, as well as the content creators.

That's all for now, I'm a bit tired and need to get back to coding. Please check out the site and let me know what you think. And if you're interested in helping sign up in the Forums (the regular site logins will be implemented later this week) and add your comments. In the future any avatar registrations will also be linked to my upcoming SecondLifeHomePage (and SLHomePage) site which will allow all avatars to have their own webspace.

Sorry for being a double-poster, but I have added a second gallery to the site as well as a random snapshot chooser to the home page. Now whenever visiting SLHandbook you'll get a random new location you might wish to explore.

I hope to have the gallery submission code along with the estate, region and parcel forms ready by Thursday. Galleries will be different than photo albums to prevent overloading one region in the randomization cue, so each user can only submit one gallery image per region. They will be able to add as many photos to their album as they like and albums will be accessible from regions, parcels and avatar homepages.

I am buildng a category list for regions and parcels. Typical entries like commercial, residential, park, role-playing will be included. Still hoping for feedback on this.

With the underlying world objects ready I will move on to products.

An initial scan of the Second Life "grid" has been posted. This scan was made to populate the database Regions table to being the survey process without requiring the surveyors to add regions as they reported their findings. This scan covers grid markers from 900 to 1100, and region ratings are not set properly (all are by default "mature". There are bound to be more regions outside the scanning area and I will try to identify those over the coming days. In addition I only made a quick sweep to identify the "Mainland" from private islands and will attempt to mark the mistakes shortly. In the meantime green blocks are intended to represent Mainland Regions while gold blocks are intended to represent Private Regions. I don't know if this raw data (2,686 regions) is of interest to anyone but figured I'd post it for your viewing. Because of the sheer amount of data be prepared for a bit of a wait as the web page itself is nearly 1MB.

/me kneels before the code god.

VERY COOL DUDE!

Thanks Neurosis!

I have made a quick change to the Webmap API implementation in addition to adding more gallery entries. I will try to finish the gallery and snapshot features tonight and create the logins so those of you wanting to share your own images can get to it!

For the Webmaps you can now double-click anywhere and drop a marker which opens a window with two links: one to visit that region in the SLHandbook database, the other a teleport button to go to that location in world. Hope this makes it easier to explore locations relative to one another!

As I drive towards online automation I am manually inserting data for testing purposes hoping to get feedback either on the SL Forums or the SL Handbook Forums. To this end the following has been added/changed:

1. New Navigation Bar with added items on top of every page.
   
2. Regions page displays all regions that have has parcels added to the database either through surveys or gallery entries.
   
3. Parcel Directory implements one Category, Galleries, that will hopefully have sub-categories such as Painting, Photography, etc.
   

I believe I am on target to have region/parcel/gallery/snapshot functionality available for users, and of course user sign-up, by this Saturday.