add documentation about non-supported image URL formats
Good documentation, but more details about what kinds of URL image files are not supported would be helpful. A colleague of mine was confused why some image URLs, which looked fine in a regular browser, did not appear when uploaded via Excel file to ViewShare. For example:
1) A Google Books "image"
http://books.google.com/ebooks/reader?id=mDALAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&pg=GBS.PA222
and
2) A Wikimedia Commons page (wrapped around an image file)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Continental_Hotel,_Philadelphia,_by_Cremer,_James,_1821-1893.jpg
I explained the problem with the first one, and repointed the browser to the underlying image for the second one. But more documentation would have helped here.
JackDougherty
shared this idea
-
Admintrow
(Admin, Viewshare)
commented
Jack, per your comment on twitter. I am thinking about adding this to the documentation on images.
Note: seeing a image file extension in a URL does not necessarily mean that that URL is an image URL. This has primarily been an issue for users hosting content in a wiki. For example, this url is for a page about an image http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Continental_Hotel,_Philadelphia,_by_Cremer,_James,_1821-1893.jpg if you right click on the image on that page and open the image itself you will see that the actual image URL is http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Continental_Hotel%2C_Philadelphia%2C_by_Cremer%2C_James%2C_1821-1893.jpg
-
Admintrow
(Admin, Viewshare)
commented
Thanks Jack, it strikes me that the documentation for the different data types is lacking a bit. I drafted this up just now, if I included this on the user guide do you think it would clarify the situation?
Text: All fields default to the text type. Data set as text will simply display the contents of the field as text.
URL: This will wrap a HTML link around the data provided. For this to work, the field should contain a full URL. For example, http://viewshare.orgImage: Setting a field to the image type will wrap an HTML image tag around it. For this to work, you need the url for the image itself. This will not work with URLs to pages that have images on them. In general, this means you are going to want to have images that end in an image file format extension (things like .jpg, .png, etc.).
Date/Time: Showing data on a timeline requires the dates be formatted in ISO 8601 format for date times. For example, 2008-04-01T00:00:00+0000 will be plotted on a timeline at April 1, 2008.
Location: Plotting data on a map requires a decimal value for a point of latitude and longitude. For example, 37.386,-122.084 will map to Mountain View, California.
Number: This will treat the values of a data set as linear numerical data. It is used for creating histograms and number range facets. It will work with decimal numbers (1, 2, 3, 10000, 0.0001, etc) it will not work with textual expressions of numerical information (ten, five billion, thousands, etc.)
