“Pretty excited” turned out to be an understatement. People loved that they could use Sajara’s geographic search feature to locate historic photos of their neighborhoods. We began receiving wonderful comments and stories from PhillyHistory.org users.

We loved hearing the stories but unfortunately did not have an easy way for users to share their comments with the larger PhillyHistory community. We decided to remedy the problem by adding a new feature to Sajara – a public commenting panel.

New Sajara commenting panel in use on PhillyHistory.org

Enabled on a collection basis, commenting provides a way for the public to share information or opinions about an image with other users via a comment page on the detail view for each photo.  After creating an account with PhillyHistory.org, users can leave comments about the image, respond to comments left by other users, or report abusive comments.  A user’s comment is associated with their user name, and each user name is linked to a public profile for that user.  While a user’s comments are shown by default on their user page, the user can also choose to display their favorite photos, bookmarked searches, and personal information such as a biography or website.  In addition, a user can also sign up to receive other users’ future comments via an RSS feed.

Actually implementing the commenting system turned out to be somewhat complicated.  There are a few different ways to organize comments, including a flat list that shows comments in the order they were entered and a nested tree that shows all the relationships between comments and responses to comments.  Getting it right means understanding your audience.  Our approach with the Sajara software organizes comments into single-tier threads so that users can see simple conversations but not get lost sorting through which ones relate to others.

Sajara commenting feature in the Japanese Gardens of the World sample application of the Sajara software

Commenting systems require quite a lot of ongoing management as well.  Some comments will need reviewing for various reasons, which, on a high volume site, can be an overwhelming task.  Included in the Sajara commenting system are a set of tools that allow the site’s administrators to easily review and handle all the site’s comments.

The public commenting feature is currently available on PhillyHistory.org and Japanese Gardens of the World, the Sajara sample application, and is an optional feature for future Sajara implementations.

Big Map search window in the new version of Sajara

Oh! … and by the way, have you seen the new ‘Big Map’ search window we implemented in PhillyHistory.org (also a new option in Sajara)?  The map view search page features a nearly full screen map with thumbnails of the images displayed along the bottom of the screen.  Flags on the map correspond with each thumbnail, indicating where the photo was taken.  All the original search filters (address, keyword, topics, dates, and more) are still available at the top of the map under the ‘Search By’ menu.

Check both new features out and let us know what you think!