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

[Brian Fernandes]

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.