Jo Yardley

I don't want to be like everyone else. I'm fine with living in a house that people who are giants can't walk into. I don't feel like a human in a dolls house. It works fine, it hasn't been an issue in Berlin for almost a decade, it is one of the things people, once they actually get used to it, love about the sim. It is cozy, crowded and uncomfortable to be in a busy little basement bar, as it should be! It just works. By the way things in berlin are not smaller than usual, they are just right, they are just bigger than usual in other places.

So, how is this going? Any progress? When I look at the page for my Time Portal sim I still see a lot of room for improvement; https://places.secondlife.com/regions/3482/time-portal I'd like to see the calendar regardless of there being any events planned so people can see there's nothing on this month. I'd also like to be able to set events right here in stead of having to go the events schedule thingy which by the way should also allow smaller parcels to set up events because in a realistic scaled city sim, some clubs, bars, etc. can be just a few square meters! Also more additional images please, if you have a shopping sim you sometimes want to show more than just 3 shops, I have a time travel sim, I'd like to show at least 6 time zones. Region information is totally uninteresting to 99% of visitors of the page, put it at the bottom and put more interesting things in its place such as links to our websites, social media, events calendar, etc. The places need one or two lines each for us to describe them, just the name of the parcel isn't enough. Etc, a few of these things have been mentioned before. Would be nice if we could get someone involved with this to tell us if theres any work still being done on this and if we can expect any changes.

Any news on when we can improve any updates/improvements?

You get ads on the search page when you get the results, I think that is the only time. This is of course rather annoying and something I can't understand. We are on a LL website looking for a SL sim, I don't get why LL would bother visitors with ads here, it gives new visitors such a bad but also confusing first experience. Look at this search result. I look for Berlin and ads about hotels in Berlin even before the results. What if someone clicks those, ends up on some Berlin hotel website, thinks the whole SL website is some sort of spam scam and decides to give up and do something else? If for some reason this ad revenue is essential for LL, at least put it at the bottom of the page, not the top! Search results first! And perhaps we can make the pictures for each place page a little bigger so you can actually see whats on them?

I've been trying the calendar feature. I love the idea of people seeing all upcoming events when they visit a page, this will make the page also interesting for regulars and locals, not just as a tool to lure new people to the sim. So I'd like for it to be more prominent. I don't think most, or even any of the page visitors care about the parcel information that is now the first thing you see on the page, as far as I'm concerned this can be moved all the way down, after everything else. The calendar might be a good thing to place in that spot. I think that besides a description of what is happening in the sim, the events are the most important part so it needs to be right up there. Also perhaps make dates when events happen red on the calendar? Here is one of my pages, you can see 2 event at the bottom; https://places.secondlife.com/parcels/3422/the-1920s-berlin-project-weimar-republic-role-play-sim One thing I don't like is having to go to the community events page to set each event up. I would much rather just do that right there on my place page. And, PLEASE add the option to do repeated events! I have DAILY events in my sim, do I really have to copy paste these 365 times into the SL community events section? That is not going to happen. I realise that until community events can be set on the place page itself, this is more a case of a seperate jira so ; https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-134240 Another big thing that would make this all even better would be to add ALL events in a region to the Region place page. Here is my region page; https://places.secondlife.com/regions/3484/1920s-berlin-project It only has one place because I don't want people to directly teleport into one of the many other places But this region page would become a lot more useful if it showed ALL the events in ALL the places/parcels in that region. Because then people would check out the region page and see that today we have a movie at the cinema, then dinner at the restaurant, happy hour at the bar, school for kids, rp event by the police station, etc, etc. In short, calendar deserves more attention on parcel and region pages.

You can join the inworld group or follow the TP facebook page or Twitter account; https://twitter.com/timeportalsl https://www.facebook.com/timeportalsl

Thank you all for the kind words! We have one more zone left to open, the Roman era one. But then we'll keep adding temporary exhibits in skyboxes and so on, new exhibitions, etc. So it wont be a place we build and then forget about. Yep, no dress code here although we do sometimes have dresscode parties & events. Just make sure you wear SOMETHING as it is a G-rated sim and I'm a massive prude.

Time Portal is sim about time travel. In its center there is a time machine and via several huge time portals you can visit several historical eras. Such as 1930s new York, Victorian London, 1950s USA, 18th century France, Tudor London and soon Rome will be added as well. There are shops, cinemas, theatres, clubs, etc. We do NOT have a dress code so everyone is welcome, dress as you want (the sim is g-rated), roleplay what you want, etc. You could decide to go full historical, like the small community starting up in our Tudor London neighbourhood, or be a time traveller and have your Tardis in your attic. There are rooms and hotel rooms available to live in and regular events. The time machine awaits; http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Time Portal/127/127/1930

I noticed the calendar button now shows up when editing, maybe it always has but I only just noticed it. Look forward to being able to use this, it could be the place pages most useful thingy. I hope it will allow us to easily add events, add regular events without adding each one separately (this would give you something even facebook doesn't have) and that it will give you a nice clear page that shows all the events in the region in one spot. So that anyone visiting the, for instance, Time Portal Place page can see all the events happening in the region that month right away and in which parcel they are happening.

Thank you, I'll probably leave that on so shopkeepers can tweak their own pages. Although I'd probably prefer to have the option to set that per place page.

Spend ALL night working on place pages... so here is another thing I noticed. It turns out that some people get all the parcels in MY region in their list of editable plots, my plots were all editable to him. I'm not too keen on that as you may imagine. So how do we give (or remove) the powers of people to edit the places in my region? Is this a group permission thing? As landowner, I want to be the one who decides who gets to edit which page. It would be absolutely FANTASTIC if I could give tenants the option to change their own parcel page, but I don't want them to have that power with other parcels.

Another day another topic So now that our 1920s Berlin place page is sort of done ( https://places.secondlife.com/parcels/3422/the-1920s-berlin-project-weimar-republic-role-play-sim ) I decided to try and test the search engine. I searched for 1920s Berlin. Nothing. Well nothing except a whole bunch of spam! And not just totally unrelated advertisements, but advertisements that look like links and they might confuse visitors who are new and looking for a place to go and come to the conclusion that the place page search engine only is there to give them links to advertisements. AND the spam comes before the little message saying 'no results'! See image below. But besides the advertisements that really shouldn't be there, it is quite odd that this search does not help me find my 1920s Berlin place page. Even when searching for just Berlin, nothing shows up. I have both 1920s & Berlin in the description of my place page. I search while being logged in. When I search for 1920s I finally get a hit. But none of these are related to the actual 1920s Berlin sim. There is both a parcel place page and a region place page for 1920s Berlin. Also, most of the suggestions that do pop up when I search for 1920s bring me to pages that won't load. For instance, when I search for 1920s, one of the results is for sonatta morales her shop; https://places.secondlife.com/parcels/46874/8-sonatta-morales-8-1920s-1930s-1940s-1950s That link does not work. Here is the actual page; https://places.secondlife.com/parcels/3438/8-sonatta-morales-8-1920s-1930s-1940s-1950s So then I search just for sonatta Morales. Two hits. https://places.secondlife.com/parcels/46874/8-sonatta-morales-8-1920s-1930s-1940s-1950s Page not found. https://places.secondlife.com/regions/46933/time-portal Page also not found. Finally, I also think the search results aren't very appealing. Would be nice to have a slightly larger image and a clear title with description in stead of what the result looks like now.

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

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?

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

I get the logo on both firefox and chrome, see screenshot. Anyway, that is one nice picture isn't it? I'll Jira this.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

/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.

Yes a nice clear list of events on a parcel place page AND region place page (that shows all events in all parcels in that region) is a must. Having just one page that shows you what event happens where in your region when is a dream. One extra request, allow us to put repeating events in that calendar, we have events in our sim that happen every single day and putting that on the calendar manually would be hellish.

Great, I hope the teleport thing gets fixed first so people can also get redirected to skyboxes and I can start using my pages