News Post

Textbook Page Links, Enhanced Search, and other updates

Jake the Admin

August 4, 2021

It's summer vacation as I write this now, so I hope everyone's able to enjoy some time off and relax.

This is a feature I've been talking about for a while now, but you can now link an activity to a specific page in a textbook. For every textbook listed on the site, you can click on the page number to go to the listings for that specific page. Once you're there, there should be a drop-down menu with all of your activities in it. Select one and click the "Link" button and now people can see that your activity was built for that specific page.

The UI for this system still isn't great, and I think I might need to rebuild how the Textbook listings look to make this a little more intuitive, but as more people discover and use this system, I think it will be another useful way to find activities relevant to what you need to cover in class. I haven't set this limit in code yet, but I think I'm probably going to say that an activity should only apply to one specific textbook page. My intent with the system is to identify activities that very specifically apply to one section in a particular textbook. As with a lot of other features on the site, I'll have to see how everyone responds to it and adjust it as time goes on.

Next, Colin has done a ton of great work on the Tag Search system recently. You can now select tags and it will dynamically filter activities as you choose more tags and narrow down your search. I think I'm probably going to limit this to users that are logged in to keep the database from getting too bogged down, but if you have some idea of what you're looking for, this is a great way to find activities really quickly.

Another smaller update I did recently was to make separate pages for all of your comments and your favorite activities. If you go to your profile, you'll see a link that says "Your comments" in the controls section and a "Favorite activities" button if you've liked any activities. Other users can't view your comment listings, and they can't see your favorites either unless you go into your profile settings and make them visible. I think it's important that everyone has control over the information they choose to share online.

There's plenty of other things in different degrees of consideration, planning, and active development, so please let me know what you think of these features!

  1. Hilda November 29, 2021

    Great! This is so helpful. This website makes my ALT life easier. Thank you very much.

Sign in or create an account to leave a comment.