Talk:Office Hours

Thanks for starting this, Eddy! I'm going to be revising and adding info to this shortly. --Torley Linden 18:22, 3 April 2007 (PDT)

Ideas for getting the word out about Office Hours?

First off, a precursor that I prefer using Talk/Discussion pages in reverse-chronological order (newest at the top), so that's why my question is here.

I just linked the Official Linden Blog's "Linden Village" stuff directly to the Office Hours page and am open to practical suggestions re: increasing awareness of Office Hours. In other words, where else should we (Linden Lab) be advertising them that we're not already? Any drop-dead easy places I should be advocating they be listed/linked to? Thanx. --Torley Linden 16:55, 11 December 2007 (PST)

New Suggestion: Lindens displayed in day order?

Just wondering if this page or maybe a new page should be set up on the wiki to show a day order linden office hours e.g. Lindens who have their office hours on monday then below that show lindens who have it on tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday and saturday and sunday? --Daniel Voyager 09:55, 15th July 2008 (PST)

Like this? (I'm not sure if it's up to date tho... needs more maintenance then the other, I guess) --Zai Lynch 10:41, 15 July 2008 (PDT)

Hmm, yes like that. However it would be great to have a Teen Office Hours/By day wiki page. With it not all mixed in the the main grid office hours/By day page. Also to LINK the pages together with the main office hours page, that would be good too. --Daniel Voyager 11:44am SLT, 15th July 2008 (PST)

Well, you're basically free to create new pages in case you're missing something. So I compiled a quick list over here. Would need someone who takes care that it remains up-to-date tho ;-)

--Zai Lynch 11:58, 15 July 2008 (PDT)

I can help keep track since I have all the office hour templates in my watch list. --JetZep Zabelin 18:08, 17 July 2008 (PDT)

I agree to redesign this page, linking to by-day subpages (MG+TG), so to avoid out-of-sync issues.

Since the feature has been requested over a month ago without any opposition, implementation will proceed immediately :-P

-SignpostMarv Martin 10:33, 23 July 2008 (PDT)

I'm checking right now if main page and MG-by-day page are in-sync --oobscure 10:36, 23 July 2008 (PDT)

ok, after some updating all MG entries from Office_Hours are also in Office_Hours/By_Day

Could more office hours be held in the afternoon/evening?

It's great that Lindens are having office hours, but most of these hours are during the day on weekdays while people are at work and such. Could we get more office hours that are in the afternoon and evening? This would work out better for most people who do want to talk to Lindens but also have day jobs. Oz Spade 00:01, 1 May 2007 (PDT)

Could you list the focus area of the Linden holding the talk, ie what do they do?

--Drew Dwi 07:37, 1 May 2007 (PDT)

reworking the Office Hours page to a table

At todays Open Source office hour it was mentioned, that this list here is only sorted by the hosts' names, not dates. If this page was reworked to a table (see SLDev_Resident_Names for an example) viewers of the page could easily sort by any column they'd like. Is this worth doing? It would require rewriting all the included bits, too, I guess, which might break their functionality when included at other places :-/

Boroondas Gupte 15:09, 13 September 2007 (PDT)

You could rewrite the functionality without breaking their current operation by using variables :-P

SignpostMarv Martin 20:02, 13 September 2007 (PDT)

Could you give an example (or link to an existing one)?

/me still has to learn a lot about MediaWiki.

Boroondas Gupte 03:52, 14 September 2007 (PDT)

Gimme a bit, I'll put together a demo

SignpostMarv Martin 04:39, 16 September 2007 (PDT)

ta-da

Only the base Office Hours template was altered, none of the Resident/Linden templates needed to be altered (with the exception of some Lindens who were using it wrong :-P)

SignpostMarv Martin 05:29, 16 September 2007 (PDT)

wow :-D

Boroondas Gupte 11:29, 16 September 2007 (PDT)

As a further example of the flexibility of the new modifications, compare SL5B#Office_Hours with SL5B/Office_Hours.

You'll note that SL5B/Office_Hours is included in the main SL5B article, but due to the rendering mode variable, different wiki code is used to present the office hours.

SignpostMarv Martin 15:24, 17 September 2007 (PDT)

Google Calendar

There's this "somewhat out-of-date" google calendar which is helpful. Do you know who is maintaining that calendar? I can help update this, as I am maintaining my own google calendar (public) and have the current user office hour pages in my watch list. --JetZep Zabelin 18:38, 5 October 2007 (PDT)

Here is a link to my publicly available calender of the Linden's office hours http://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=c2g7djaua9j4he8c6d0iu7n7k8%40group.calendar.google.com. --JetZep Zabelin 17:33, 18 November 2007 (PST)

Thanx JetZep! Pathfinder Linden is the creator of the original Linden Office Hours calendar. I think we need a more collectively-update-able one... ah what the hey, I put your GCal on the main page. Thanx! --Torley Linden 09:38, 11 December 2007 (PST)

Strife is investigating a bug in Template:HCalendar event. Once this bug is fixed, it will render both google calendars obsolete, so I'd prefer if the that no GCals be linked on the front page.

The reason it will make the use of a separate GCal obsolete is that the wiki article can be used as an iCal feed (via some XSLT magic).

SignpostMarv Martin 12:00, 11 December 2007 (PST)

I am? Could you point me to where I committed to this, I'm pulling a blank. I'm not doubting you I just don't remember this. -- Strife Onizuka 12:16, 11 December 2007 (PST)

SignpostMarv, this is exactly what I was hoping we could do. Can you remember, Strife? =D --JetZep Zabelin 14:40, 11 December 2007 (PST)

Thanks Torley, I know it helps people find an office hour that works for them especially if they already use Gcal. I have to update the calendar manually and so I agree it would be even better if Template:HCalendar event was working (Whats wrong with it anyway?) --JetZep Zabelin 14:38, 11 December 2007 (PST)

I'm not famliar with the background of Template:HCalendar event *goes to learn more* but at first blush, it sounds like a better approach in the future. Let's go for it if it makes finding Office Hours effectively easier for newer & more experienced Resis alike! --Torley Linden 16:51, 11 December 2007 (PST)

Strife: User talk:Strife Onizuka#assistance on a wiki template

Torley: the hCalender event template (and any sub-templates) use a microformat called hCalendar

• hCalendar is a 1:1 representation of the iCal data format, in HTML.
• Articles containing hCalendar data can be converted into a iCal feed
• Technorati operates an hCalendar to iCal conversion service
  • Compare an example page marked up with hCalendar with the corresponding technorati conversion

SignpostMarv Martin 17:25, 11 December 2007 (PST)

Kuraiko spent some time on it and came up with User:Kuraiko_Yoshikawa/sandbox/. Would it solve the problem?

--Zai Lynch^{(talk|contribs)} 01:04, 20 May 2008 (PDT)

I've been keeping my calendar up to date as best as I can which is pretty easy since there's hardly any changes, but it would be nice if it this automated calendar was working. =) --JetZep Zabelin 11:56, 15 July 2008 (PDT)

I haven't been able to keep this up to date, so I'm sorry I think I should remove the links. If we could get a google calender updated automatically through Template:HCalendar event, that would be best. --JetZep Zabelin 16:52, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Seems the calendar still need sometime to be automated, How about let some people edit your office hour calendar? Google calendar has share function. You can set the permission from "Share this calendar" tab. "Make change to events" or "Make changes AND manage sharing" would be work. Try adding me for test: "Nock.Forager at gmail.com". -- Nock Forager 02:24, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

That's a good idea. However, I didnt see this message until now. Looks like Zai is working on the calfeed. If it helps to have access to my google calender, just let me know, I'm willing to share access with established volunteers. --JetZep Zabelin 15:56, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

As far as i understood it so far, the date and time of these Office Hours would need to be converted into a special format to be automatically imported into a google calendar. This seems to be a big problem with the regular wiki template syntax. I heard that this wouldn't be so much of a problem if there would be the possibility to use PHP. With Extension:Widget, there is now some sort of PHP available (smarty PHP). Now I'm wondering: Can this somehow be used to turn the OHs into a Google calendar? Once that happened, we could use the Google Calendar widget to show them here again.
Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 15:55, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

The problem is a usability one with the template, mainly. Forcing Lindens to log in every week to update the office hours with the fully-qualified dates would be an impossible task, so I've been trying to figure out how to get the template to play nice with shorthand dates. Which results in FAIL because with shorthand dates, MediaWiki won't pick up the timezone specified, resulting in the event having the wrong time- 6pm GMT instead of 6pm PD/ST, for example.

SignpostMarv Martin 02:08, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I've now eliminated one problem, but there's another problem- finding a geek-fu means of displaying the right time.

SignpostMarv Martin 02:30, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Short-hand dates means something like: every monday at 2 PM SLT?

Isn't it possible to just set an offset of some hours? I'm doing that at the CountDown template.

Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 02:04, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Hrm ?

SignpostMarv Martin 03:52, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Bugs are mostly fixxorz now, worst-case scenario, the Linden has to edit the template after their last office hours during each month.

SignpostMarv Martin 04:23, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Note that the above worst-case scenario has long-since been circumvented ^_^

SignpostMarv Martin 13:43, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

New Style & Features

It's suggested that the Office Hours page will get an overhaul on March 1st 2009. Benefit of the new page is, that it features a webcal feed and can be integrated in Google calendars (and such) for automatic updates. Also a twitter bot is already twittering.
It can be seen at Office Hours/By Day2 as well as Office_Hours/MG2, Office Hours/TG2 and others.
It requires a new procedure to set up office hours which is described at Template:Office Hours/Documentation. All current office hours are already transfered to the new format. In case you got reasonable objections against this procedure, please name your concerns now so they can be discussed before the deploy.
Greetz, Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 12:43, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Since no objections were raised, the shift to the new format took place today. Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 18:02, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

gCal Bug

The gCal import seems to have a problem... For example, Meta Linden and Pathfinder Linden are missing, when you import via the provided URL. However, this seems to be a problem that occurs either on Technocrati's or Googles side, rather than on ours, since 30boxes.com is importing the feed correctly... Ideas?
Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 01:42, 8 March 2009 (UTC)