[sword-devel] Adding Dictionary / Glossary lookups to History

[Brian Fernandes]

I just blogged about some FireBible development, related to an earlier 
question I had posted here way back in March. Thought I'd link to it 
here for some feedback before the next FireBible release.

http://thegoan.com/blog/firebible-history-and-bookmark-support/

I've currently moved on to adding commentary support to FireBible 0.9, 
hope I'm able to get it in.

Brian.

P.S. I hope this appears as a response to my earlier post, for some 
reason I never get my own posts to the mailing list in my inbox, even 
though I have explicitly asked for "my own posts" to be sent to me as well.


Brian Fernandes wrote:
> The next version of FireBible will expose your reading history, see 
> http://thegoan.com/dump/fb-history.png for a quick preview.
>
> As FireBible is URI based, all the information required is already 
> being stored by Firefox in your regular browsing history, all I have 
> added now are a few queries which expose only sword related history in 
> a manner which hopes to be useful.
>
> For anyone interested, a simple bookmark with the location set to 
> "place:terms=bible://&OR&terms=sword://&sort=8&maxResults=20" will 
> give you the list you see in the screenshot. This is Firefox 3+ only, 
> I will be dropping support for Firefox 2 with this release as there is 
> too much work to maintain backward compatibility and it has a very few 
> users (5% on my website).
>
> Any comments on the history structure or suggestions on what lists 
> might be of better use are most welcome.
>
> Now for my question:
>
> Consider the "Last 40" list. This is a list of the last 40 sword 
> documents you have visited. Now, if I include dictionary or glossary 
> lookups in this list, I have a feeling it will soon take over the 
> entire list, pushing out other content like a Bible /  General books; 
> on the assumption that you may study around 10 chapters a day, but you 
> could easily look up at least 50 words in a dictionary on that same 
> day. Nist other lists like "Today" and "Yesterday" are not limited to 
> a fixed number of results and adding dictionary lookups to such lists 
> will make them large and more difficult to navigate through.
>
> Options I have thought of so far:
> a) Make this a preference; allow the user to choose whether he wants 
> Dictionary entries in the History or not.
>
> b) Add a new History list with the last 40 dictionary lookups. Remove 
> dictionary entries from all other lists.
>
> c) Add a new History list with the last 40 dictionary lookups. Do 
> *not* remove dictionary entries from unlimited lists like "Today", 
> "Yesterday" , "Two days ago", etc.
>
> I'm not really happy with any of these solutions. Anyone have 
> suggestions/alt ideas/comments? Am I wasting time on a problem nobody 
> really cares about - so what if the lists are full of dictionary 
> entries? Or are dictionary lookups not important enough to add to 
> history at all?
>
> In Him,
> Brian.
>