Check out the Place Pages Beta!

[Jo Yardley]

/me adds a few linden dollars to all the bar taps Lindens have in 1920s Berlin.

I'm glad the landmark for skybox thingy didn't work now because otherwise a lot of work would have been lost, for now I just sit and wait till that gets fixed and thus most of my pages were left as they were.

Still some were reset so that is annoying and even more so for those of us who did a lot more work on their pages than I did.

So yes, a well meant D'oh.

[daltonprock]

Heh, half of my pages were locations I haven't had time to set up anyways so no worries. Ohh well, hope they get the issue fixed soon.

[TatianaDokuchic Varriale]

4 hours ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

ooopsy...

 

FFS - I've had a long career in IT and the BASIC rule is that you set up your backup procedure and then you TEST your backup procedure before you make any changes because sh*t happens and LOSS OF DATA = LOSS OF CONFIDENCE.

I've lost weeks of effort getting my Place Pages just the way I wanted them and people wearing Shrek Ears really don't seem that cute to me right now.

Don't know when/if I'll have the confidence to go back and do it all again.  Too bad because I was one of the Place Pages biggest supporters up until now.

Edited May 11, 2017 by TatianaDokuchic Varriale
typos

[Rockridge Constantine]

I believe this project has been an on-going beta as indicated in the initial post.  I had not made the effort to update my region pages and now I am glad for that.  So sad that some of you lost the work you did.  I am also surprised LL did not have a backup to at least roll back to a certain point in time.  Now we wait to see what the latest updates will bring so stay tuned...

[SkyeRyder Varriale]

Frankly, It's completely irresponsible for an IT person to say "oops!" then expect everything to be okay. That's complete incompetence and whoever was responsible should be severely disciplined or fired. Quite a few of us have spent HOURS setting up our pages on a template that already left a lot to be desired in it's lack of flexibility and poor layout. Add to that the total lack of responsibility taken when a company wastes our time and money is just a tad too much. I've been in SL for ten years and SL has repeatedly refused to take responsibility for issues that occur. It's always the consumer's fault or an "oops!". Not a good way to do business in my opinion. 

Edited May 10, 2017 by SkyeRyder Varriale

[Grumpity Linden]

While we try to inject some levity into our postmortems, we don’t actually take the problems lightly and we are very much aware of the effort that people had put into working on their place pages.  Please believe us that we took this situation seriously and have put in place numerous safeguards going forward.  Unfortunately, none of these things will help bring back the content that you, and many Lindens as well, had spent time customizing and getting just right.  It especially burns to cause this pain to our early adopters - we only hope that you will be able to restore your confidence in Place Pages - we know you can see their potential for showcasing your world!

[Grumpity Linden]

It’s been a few days since the unfortunate events… we’d like to let you know what we’ve been up to.  As we mentioned before, we’ve introduced several precautions to keep this from happening again. Ever. 

We’ve also done a few feature releases, and are continuing to work on making Place Pages a valuable showcase of some of the amazing things inside Second Life.  We just released an “Items for Sale” feature, which includes search and a way to TP in directly to the item on your parcel: check out Bella Moda for an example! 

We continue to tweak the search feature to improve discoverability for all Place Pages (there’s more work there to be done, and the previously indexed pages are still showing up).  We’ve added a “Last Edited By” indicator in the Admin Panel for all group owned parcels, which makes tracking of changes a lot easier.  Fixed some bugs, too. 

We have even more improvements in the works:  landing page improvements, more discoverable pages,  search results cleanup, bulk management, polish/clean up work around the markdown feature, and page performance tweaks.  We’re considering all your feature requests and are planning on rolling some out pretty soon as well! Keep an eye out for updates, and please keep the pages coming!

[Jo Yardley]

I'll be repeating a few suggestions, simply because I'm now rebuilding the page and thinking of them again and I'm old and forgot all the things I said before

I would still like to be able to set the exact coordinates to where visitors land.
It is set to 23 meters high and although it does seem to follow the teleport routing, it sends me to that exact spot when I click it while others go to the teleport point.
That might be because I can bypass the routing but maybe that means that people who click the page when already in the sim also get send to that point, which in my sim... is the sewers.
Also, assuming that some of the people who use the page to find us may be new to SL or maybe just because for whatever other reason, we may want to teleport them to another spot entirely in stead of the router point.
In short, it would be swell if we could put a landing point at the page and then let that override any routing you have or have not set in the parcel.
Some regions can't have TP routing set but don't want visitors to land in the middle of the sim.

I'd also really like to have the opportunity to remove all text and overlays from the 'hero' image.
Place the name of the sim and SL logo below it.
That way we could make a hero image with the name of the place, go nutty with a sexy font

And please allow embedding Vimeo as well as youtube.
And can we also have a video in our Region page?
I think you can see a youtube on our page but it may not work due to youtube restrictions

Also is/will there be an option to modify the url?

Parcel info is totally uninteresting to 99.9% of all visitors of that page, perhaps move it to the botttom of the page or replace it with a spot where we can share links to Facebook, websites, flickr, etc.

Also please more than 3 pictures in the slideshow, 5 or 10, I need more to give visitors an idea of an entire city
And for regions you really need at least one for every parcel, can you imagine having a shopping region and telling all your shopkeepers you have to pick just 3 of them to show on the page?
Or having a Time Travel sim with 6 time zones and one time machine and wanting to at least show one picture per time zone?
I already see 5 dots even though we can only upload 3 pictures, does that mean it will be 5 soon?
Or maybe that was a glitch.

Small suggestion.
Please don't make the entire page reload when you click update while editing it.
It is so much easier to just click update and stay in the edit window.
You can just refresh the page in another tab and see how the changes work and then return to the edit window and keep working in stead of clicking froward and back.
But that may just be a personal preference.
I prefer switching between tabs in stead of going back and forward on the same page.

Also, replacing the pictures in edit is a bit wonky.
You need to delete them but no new browse button appears, so you have to delete them all and then refresh and then upload them all again.

And yes, please please please, events calendar/schedule for page and region.
Having one spot that shows visitors when the next event is and where in the region would be a dream come true.

Also I love the idea of showing all parcels on the region page, but it would be cool if you could sort of organize them.
For instance use paragraphs or lists.
So you could have the social hang outs grouped together, the rentals, shops, etc.
Visitors can then easily find the kind of destination in your region they are looking for and then check out that page without having to scroll through all the parcel pages on your region page.

Anyway, here is the page to our region with the link to our page at the bottom;

https://places.secondlife.com/regions/3484/1920s-berlin-project

(bit of a long url, I'd love it to be www.secondlife.com/1920sberlin or something!)

And here is the page to Time Portal;

https://places.secondlife.com/regions/3482/time-portal

[Kadah Coba]

At least they figured out early on that the backup wouldn't work versus years from now.

[DelfinJonay]

I really like the Place Pages thing, especially useful when you run a shop. But I have a problem with the "Visit this location" buttons on both my Place Pages, they lead to different coordinates than the landing point.

The landing point for Fort Fetish Headquarters is http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Warbunton/37/167/41      but the place page link sends you to http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Warbunton/38/176/23 which is under the ground, right inside a wall.

The landing point for the Wet Boys Swim Club  (page is still under construction) is set to http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Warbunton/35/132/36 . When you click the page link you end up right in middle of the swimming pool, at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Warbunton/38/144/23.

Not a good welcome for potential customers. I am pretty sure that's not my mistake, as the Z coordinate 23 would be about 10 meters under the terrain and I'm sure I've never been there. Any suggestion how to fix that?

[Jo Yardley]

There is no way for us to fix that, it is something the Lindens need to do so I'm afraid we'll just have to wait

[Marianne McCann]

7 minutes ago, Jo Yardley said:

There is no way for us to fix that, it is something the Lindens need to do so I'm afraid we'll just have to wait

Ya, this is, for me, at showstopper level. You can't have a page promoting a place, then have a SLURL that doesn't actually *send* people to that place. It's a fundamental issue.

[Jo Yardley]

Same here, all my sims, shops, places are in skyboxes, which means I simply can't use the pages yet.

[DelfinJonay]

Thanks for the feedback, Jo and Marianne. Too bad though, Beta generally means that the fundamental functions are given and there may be some slight malfunctions, but after reading all this thread I'd say Place Pages aren't ready to be Beta

[Grumpity Linden]

On 5/28/2017 at 11:01 AM, Marianne McCann said:

Ya, this is, for me, at showstopper level. You can't have a page promoting a place, then have a SLURL that doesn't actually *send* people to that place. It's a fundamental issue.

Marianne, Jo, and DelfinJonay, did you test with an alt?  Visitors should be routed to the Landing point if one is set.  Only those with permissions to override it, will (which doesn't negate the rest of your request for setting a different location than the landing point or the center - but does make it less urgent). 

[DelfinJonay]

Just tested with an alt, Grumpity. He can't even see the page, it says "

Ooops!

We can't seem to find the page you're looking for.

"

[Jo Yardley]

58 minutes ago, Grumpity Linden said:

Marianne, Jo, and DelfinJonay, did you test with an alt?  Visitors should be routed to the Landing point if one is set.  Only those with permissions to override it, will (which doesn't negate the rest of your request for setting a different location than the landing point or the center - but does make it less urgent). 

Yes it works for everybody else it seems.
So as long as you want to set direct landing routing on for each single parcel you'll be ok.

[Jo Yardley]

So, started on the pages, again, and thought of another idea/request.
Please add the tagline to the region parcel list.

See here, this is my Time Portal region place page;

https://places.secondlife.com/regions/3482/time-portal

I LOVE that I can show a bunch of parcels and thus tell visitors of this page about all the things they can visit.
Scroll down and you see all the parcels in this region, quite a few as this is a shopping sim.

You may now understand what my point is.
There you see the first two parcels (the only ones I've made so far) and all you get is a picture and the title.
So one is called Newchurch and the other is The Ten Bells.

That doesn't tell you much unless you're a history freak.

And I want people to visit the region page and then pick a place to go to.

So, what if you add the place pages tag line to the region page list of parcels?

If that was the case you'd see;

Newchurch
Early 20th century furniture shop

And;

The Ten Bells
Notorious pub in Victorian London

You can now right away get an idea of what all these places in this region have to offer.

As mentioned earlier, it would be even cooler if we'd also be able to sort them in catagories, but thats a different story

 

[daltonprock]

2 minutes ago, Jo Yardley said:

So, started on the pages, again, and thought of another idea/request.
Please add the tagline to the region parcel list.

See here, this is my Time Portal region place page;

https://places.secondlife.com/regions/3482/time-portal

I LOVE that I can show a bunch of parcels and thus tell visitors of this page about all the things they can visit.
Scroll down and you see all the parcels in this region, quite a few as this is a shopping sim.

You may now understand what my point is.
There you see the first two parcels (the only ones I've made so far) and all you get is a picture and the title.
So one is called Newchurch and the other is The Ten Bells.

That doesn't tell you much unless you're a history freak.

And I want people to visit the region page and then pick a place to go to.

So, what if you add the place pages tag line to the region page list of parcels?

If that was the case you'd see;

Newchurch
Early 20th century furniture shop

And;

The Ten Bells
Notorious pub in Victorian London

You can now right away get an idea of what all these places in this region have to offer.

As mentioned earlier, it would be even cooler if we'd also be able to sort them in catagories, but thats a different story

 

Good idea Jo, I'd suggest making an issue on this. I'd vote for you honestly, but good idea.

[Jo Yardley]

Oh and another thing...

I have no idea how this works, it may be my browser or something, but when I try to share a place page url on social media, it doesn't add a nice picture.

Twitter can't find a picture at all and just shares the url;

 

Facebook somehow decides to use the SL logo;

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1920sberlinproject/permalink/10158846278240118/

It would be very cool and much more attractive if social media automatically picked your "hero" image to add when sharing, like when you share a Flickr link or links to websites, etc.

[Grumpity Linden]

On 5/31/2017 at 6:17 PM, Jo Yardley said:

 

Facebook somehow decides to use the SL logo;

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1920sberlinproject/permalink/10158846278240118/

It would be very cool and much more attractive if social media automatically picked your "hero" image to add when sharing, like when you share a Flickr link or links to websites, etc.

So odd, because we haven't been able to reproduce this on facebook - the middle image in the gallery gets chosen (across accounts and different pages we are getting the same result):

we do see the same as you on twitter.  Jo, would you file a jira please, so we can get your browser specs and all that and look for a repro. 

[Jo Yardley]

I get the logo on both firefox and chrome, see screenshot.

Anyway, that is one nice picture isn't it?

I'll Jira this.

 

 

[Jo Yardley]

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-100773

[Jo Yardley]

Found another peculiarity.

This place page keeps the old name as its url.

https://places.secondlife.com/parcels/3440/shop-coming

As you can see the url is shop-coming, well now there is a shop, so that makes the name a little unfortunate.

How can I change this?

[Jo Yardley]

On  a completely different note... a new idea...

Can we have some insight into traffic perhaps pretty please?

I don't need much but perhaps a visitor counter or a Like button and so on?

Would be quite cool to be able to see how many people actually visit your page, how many 'like' it and perhaps even an oversight in traffic over the weeks/months/years.

Good way to see if making them all was worth the effort