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Title
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Ivan Reese
08/30/2022, 4:03 AM🦡 Follow-up on https://linen.futureofcoding.org — who here has tried it out? Is anyone using it regularly? What do you think about it?
It seems like Kam (the dev) has been burning down the list of features I asked for, based on what we'd probably find most useful. But if it doesn't do something you want, let me know and perhaps it can be added.
I think this tool solves some significant problems with Slack, and with a not-bad UI to boot. But if we're not even using it, that's a problem too, hah.
a
Andrew F
08/30/2022, 5:41 AMI, uh, missed it entirely? It looks nice.
t
Tom Larkworthy
08/30/2022, 8:01 AMHmm, I have still be using slack to search, but I forgot about it too. I have bookmarked it and will make more effort to try it out in future
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Tony Worm
08/30/2022, 3:01 PMwhat is it supposed to be in the long run?
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Ivan Reese
08/30/2022, 3:34 PMA way for us to reduce some of the downsides of Slack as a host of our community discussions. Chiefly, old Slack messages aren't visible or searchable, but Linen allows us to search and (nicely) view that history. Secondarily, Linen exposes that full history to search engines. In other words, Linen makes our community a little more like a classic BB.
(Did that answer your question?)
t
Tony Worm
08/30/2022, 7:57 PMI think so. It doesn't replace slack, just archive and searchable? I might pass it along to others in that case
Is it available for others to use?
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Ivan Reese
08/30/2022, 8:05 PMYes, and yes
t
Tony Worm
08/30/2022, 9:35 PMIf you add support for GitHub issues & discussions, I'd probably be willing to pay for it (details ofc)
Their search is horrendous, it can't even do prefix matching (searching "foo" will not return matches for "foobar")
Wait, do they only support email "magic link" based login? no thanks...
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Ivan Reese
08/31/2022, 5:24 PM@Kam Leung if you're around, you might want to talk to @Tony Worm about these requests.
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Kam Leung
08/31/2022, 5:42 PMSorry about the search the team is me and one other person full time right now so we are using the standard full text search from Postgres. We’ll use a dedicated search service once we have more bandwidth.
The goal is to get Linen to be indexed by Google so they can handle the search. If you google site:slack-chats.kotlinlang.org for example they have around 20-30k results on Google.
Happy to chat about Github issue and discussion support. I’ll follow up over DM
As a side note we’ve pushed out a ton of updates. http://linen.futureofcoding.org/ since last few months. The UI has been changed quite a bit to match Slack’s UI. Since the site is more dynamic we render a static version for search engine so the SEO isn’t impacted.
We’ve changed up pagination to be more google search friendly along with a bunch of sitemap updates http://linen.futureofcoding.org/sitemap.xml @Ivan Reese if you have a chance you should upload the sitemap to https://search.google.com/search-console and this should help with search ranking and community discoverability.
On the higher end we’re seeing 20-30k pages of Linen in a community getting indexed by google. The more you share and link linen.futureofcoding.org the more likely Google will pick it up. So the more you share the links publicly the better.
t
Tom Larkworthy
09/01/2022, 9:33 AM@Kam Leung I want to quote something someone said in a thread, but the conversation is long so the top level link doesn;t seem targeted enough. Is there a better way to link to a section within a thread (or even better highlight a quote)
Context of why I wish to do this:
https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C03RR0W5DGC/p1662024380308209?thread_ts=1661846358.747919&cid=C03RR0W5DGC
Also I can't seem to find any docs for linen.dev, they might be behind a signin but I am not the site admin so I probably don't have a signin.
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Kam Leung
09/01/2022, 2:17 PMLet me check if we can do it quickly. It’s on the roadmap but something haven’t gotten to yet
Also if anyone is interested in chatting I am working on a “feed” feature that I want to get some feedback on. The problem I want to solve is to not be overwhelmed by the number of conversation in a slack community.
@Tom Larkworthy Just shipped the feature you should be able to deep link to a specific message now
https://linen.futureofcoding.org/t/2451004/also-if-anyone-is-interested-in-chatting-i-am-working-on-a-f#83837ddb-38fa-4d08-bef2-857d864a384f
It’s not ideal yet but wanted to ship something quicker. Probably some sort of highlighting on the ones that has the link
It works by hovering over the thread view on the side on the specific message