New Wiki 'Resource Reviews' - Comments/Suggestions

Several forum members have strongly suggested 'user comments' be included on Logos.com, similar to Amazon. It's great for potential buyers, as well as would bring customer traffic to Logos.com (and Logos4).

We don't have such an animal yet, so we've put together a Wiki section that has a page for each reviewed resource, along with space for significant forum comments and also wiki-comments. We view this as a 'temporary' fix; not the final solution.

Steve was gracious enough to provide a suggested format, along with startup help on putting this together. Thank you Steve!

Here's the entry page:
http://wiki.logos.com/Resource_Review
And a sample resource page:
http://wiki.logos.com/Resource$3a_JPS_Torah_Commentary

I haven't added this to the Wiki frontpage yet. I wanted to see your comments first.

I selected the resources you see on the entry page, in order to get a broad idea of what might be useful. They're not my favorites, etc.

Your comments are welcome.

Additionally this is a wiki. That means you can easily go in and add YOUR comments (bottom of page). You're especially welcome to ADD resources (since my library isn't boundless). A good start would be any of you that have the big general commentaries (mine are not in Logos).

My goal was to try to help potential buyers see and compare the resources. So I tried to be even-handed. I did class some resources conservative vs liberal, mainly because that seems to be valued by many.

ADDING YOUR COMMENTS IN THE WIKI (if you're new to Wiki like me)
- On a resource page, click on 'Edit' in the upper-right of the page
- At the bottom of the wiki text, you'll find a section for resource comments.
- Format:
!!!! Your name (the exclamations indicate small-bolded-text)
Your comments
- After you add your comments, click on 'Preview' below the script area to see if you like it. Scroll down the browser page to see the preview

- Click on 'Save' when you're happy with the results.

ADDING A RESOURCE PAGE (some specs; hopefully you've added wiki pages before)
- Each resource has a screen-capture of the 'info' page for the resource in Logos4. Some are long, so a couple of screen shots might be needed and then paste them together (or a screen special 'clipper')
- In general a single example page is sufficient. Some resources have different types of information which may require more.
- Typical image width is about 1000 pixels; PNG format allows clear viewing later
- It's easiest to copy the script from an existing page, paste into a new Created page, and then change the associated information.
- On uploaded images, remember not to include special characters. It's feasible but confuses the wiki when the user clicks on the image to expand it.

- After you've created the resource page, copy its heading to the opening Resource Review page, and add a line under the appropriate section. Make sure the headings of the resource page match the equivalent line on the opening page. Else it won't find it.

And if you have any problems, come back here and we'll help you out. Wiki is an 'everybody' type of world. Get involved! Tell others about your favorite resources.

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Comments

Rosie Perera

Thank you, Denise and Steve! This is awesome!

steve clark

Steve was gracious enough to provide a suggested format, along with startup help on putting this together.

Denise, you have done an excellent job!! You have over played my involvement, you have done all the heavy lifting and a wonderful job at it.

Thank you for your diligence and excellent work!

Graham Criddle

This is really excellent - many thanks.

Graham

TCBlack

Marvelous work Denise! Wow [y]

Kevin Becker

Denise, this is a lot of work, thanks! I'll be certain to stick it in my back pocket to recommend to people asking about particular resources.

Milford Charles Murray

Peace, Denise!

You are truly appreciated!

*smile*

Rosie Perera

It's great that Denise has gotten this started, but we all need to contribute to it for it to become a truly useful resource. Let's roll!

Rosie Perera

Hi Denise (and others doing reviews),

I've just added my first review to the page you started (Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament). I really appreciate the work you did in getting this started, and the templates to start from.

One thing I learned by experimentation that might be of use to others:

The existing templates all use the following syntax for including the images:

[[{{$ http://wiki.logos.com/media/RESComNTUseOT1.png?maxwidth=600 }} >> http://wiki.logos.com/media/RESComNTUseOT1.png]]

At first I thought that was overkill, since I'm used to using this syntax (copied directly from the confirmation page when you upload the image):

{{$ media:RESComNTUseOT1.png}}

The images are clickable that way. But in order to be able to click to see the full-sized image (and be able to read the text), it seems we really do need to use that longer syntax above.

Second, I like the naming convention that people seem to have started using with the images, and hope we can keep that up:

RESxxxyyyyyy#.png

RES for resource, xxx is the abbreviation of the resource type (Com for commentary, Enc for encyclopedia, etc.; corresponding to the sections on the page), yyyyyy is an abbreviation of this resource name, and # is the image number (0, 1, 2...) for this resource.

Finally, we ought to come up with a way to ensure that people who edit these pages afterward to add more review comments know to leave the "Enter next name here / enter comments here" text intact and insert their new text above that, rather than actually editing that template text. Any ideas for a way to reword that which would make it clearer? "Enter next name above here" or "Copy/paste this text and ..." or something along those lines? I don't want to make it too complicated. But if we can do this now we might save ourselves some headache down the road. There are few enough pages so far that we could change the existing ones to the new text (I'd volunteer to do that).

DMB

Wow, thanks, Rosie. I'd been wondering about that commentary for quite a while. Lot of discussion but I wanted to see it. I hope others have some more books I want to know about!

Actually the name convention came about after I spent several days not being able to get the images to work. It turned out, if you put an underscore, etc in the name, it'll work for the primary view, but there's no character translation for the 'go get it' routine (the larger view). Steve dryly commented that he used simple names. So I learned.

On the suggestion about the bottom message, I agree but I wonder if folks can remember. I had planned to kind of scan the various resource pages that have changed and make sure all is well. Just trying to keep things simple.

Keep Smiling improved the front page with a contents section also more links at the bottom. Thank you Keep Smiling!

Keep Smiling 4 Jesus :)

I hope others have some more books I want to know about!

Wonder if 3 review additions are interesting ? UBS New Testament Handbook Series , UBS Old Testament Handbook Series , and Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament (also included float right on each review page for Wiki navigation, a lesson learned from Steve Clark).

Likewise wondering what other resources have interest to be reviewed ? (e.g. "Old Testament Quotations and Allusions in the New Testament" that appears in Passage Guide - parallel resources section)

Keep Smiling improved the front page with a contents section also more links at the bottom. Thank you Keep Smiling!

Part of Thanks goes to Ron Corbett, who suggested a good Base Package forum review. Personally found and added couple more package comparison threads. Also looked in General forum for resource discussions; found some appropriate discussions to link.

Keep Smiling [:)]

Rosie Perera

Likewise wondering what other resources have interest to be reviewed ?

We could peruse the forums for people requesting others' opinions on various books, wanting sample pages that are missing from Logos website, etc.

SteveF

You are truly appreciated!

I just wish to add my thanks for these Resource "book reports."

[From one who has benefitted from these sites going back to when there were the old "newsgroups"]

This is definitely something that would have been difficult [impossible?] under the old (but often) beloved system.

Very well done!!! I look forward to reading more of these.

Thanks again.

Matt Hamrick

Wow.. great ideas abound from Logos users. Thanks Denise for this wonderful Idea. Now watch it grow and I read some Logos books in college that I am required to review so when I write those Logos resources I'll just put the review in wiki. Thanks again to everyone for your part in launching this project.

Rosie Perera

Denise, I noticed the HALOT review page has the About screenshot from the wrong book. I'd fix it but I didn't want to stomp on anything you might still be editing in that page, since you just edited it yesterday, so I'll leave it for you.

Also, I'm going to ask David Ladiges (the web developer) if he could fix the links to the entry page and the sample resource page in your first post on this thread (so future visitors to this thread can click right through to get there), unless you'd prefer to do that yourself.

The next resources I think need reviews are BDB and more of the encyclopedias and commentary sets. I'll try to start chipping away at some of those, though I'm up to my eyeballs in work right now.

DMB

Oh no! I produced all my screen images and then all the scripts, changing the file names. I missed that one in the script. Thanks. Also if anyone sees errors, please feel free to fix (or let me know).

If David can fix it, that'd be great. I tried several times and it didn't work. I'm guessing there's some unprintable characters at the start or end. Which, by the way, is also headachy. If you don't use a straight text editor, text attributes can get copied into the script without knowing it. That took me a day to figure out.

BDB and more commentaries sounds great. I'll be out of pocket for a week or so but while gone will make more pics/scripts. I want to finish up the semantic tools and how they compare, etc. Also DSS in the OT and Ras Shamra/OT so that we'd have four separate resources for OT comparison (Talmud, NT, DSS, Ugarit/Canaanite). Personally I think there's so many exciting Logos resources, I don't think we'll bump into each other.

Keep Smiling, thank you for the UBS Handbook group. That's another one I wanted to see. I have it in Olivetree but wanted to make sure it was the same or larger resource before buying it.

Rosie Perera

If David can fix it, that'd be great. I tried several times and it didn't work. I'm guessing there's some unprintable characters at the start or end. Which, by the way, is also headachy. If you don't use a straight text editor, text attributes can get copied into the script without knowing it. That took me a day to figure out.

There's some forum bug where links don't always get created properly. Sometimes you can fix it by going in and editing the HTML directly. But usually the only way to fix it is to completely delete the link and manually paste it in again from some place where it was plain text (e.g., the URL bar of a browser). Pasting in from somewhere where it was a link before brings in funky formatting and stuff.