I don’t think I ever used 12" floppy disks. But I did use punch cards in the 70s…
If only I could speak as many languages as I have programmed in…
4 Likes
I find it more difficult to find a sutta with the new setup.
2 Likes
May I ask what exactly you find difficult? We hope to roll out a new version next week or so where you can also do a search on sutta-number.
For me, it is In comparison to Access to insight.
1 Like
Judgmental people compare them, saying: ‘This one has just the same qualities as the other, so why is one worse and one better?’ This will be for their lasting harm and suffering. - AN6.44
Sorry … just kidding … couldn’t resist. 
But seriously, I think you will find that you get used to it. Access to Insight is a much more limited site and does not have all the Early Buddhist Texts (it does not have the Chinese, Sanskrit, etc) nor do they have translations in so many languages or parallels between texts. So this site is much more difficult in how it is set up. It is difficult to come up with a design that actually displays all that information.
2 Likes
Actually, I have less suffering. As I take the best of both worlds. When I want to search something I go to Access to Insight. If I need advance study and comparisons I come to
ie: I am non-attched!
SC.
I thought it is to do with the search engine they use. (if there a thing as such)
1 Like
Fair enough.
They have to search through a whole lot less stuff (only English and pali) and no other translations, dictionaries, other root texts, etc. It is very hard to second guess what a user really wants when making a search, but Blake has made several new changes to the search for the next upgrade so hopefully it will become better.
1 Like
Can’t user limit the search? Perhaps I am not familiar enough to search in SC.
For example, I want to search Anguimala Sutta. I search it is faster in AI.
1 Like
I suspect that familiarity will dispell many of the difficulties. There is never going to be a perfect way of displaying information, and, as has been said, there is a lot of information on the site!
I suspect what many of us find difficult is that on ATI it was easy to skim through, say the MN:
https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/index.html
looking for “that sutta about X … I know it’s in the MN somewhere…”.
On the old SC site you could sort of do that:
https://legacy.suttacentral.net/mn
but the titles were only in Pali, so that was a bit tricky for some of us.
On the new site:
SuttaCentral
there is lots of information to browse. More than on the ATI MN but it’s not so easy to scroll through, and the “just in time” page loading makes it hard to search for text in the page.
I suspect that many of us would have liked the option to have “Tables of contents” something like the legacy site, but with English (or default language) titles along with the Pali. That’s what we are used to with our paper books.
I’m not advocating for implementing that particular scheme, I’m just trying to articulate how some users may view these organsiational issues, as having a clear idea of how users are trying to use the site is probably helpful in guiding possible future developments.
3 Likes
Can’t you just search for that? You can do a search in the search field, or you can go via the menu.
Notice there is also the indexes of subject, similes, names and terminology, which direct you to the various suttas.
Personally I would like a link to those indexes in the top right menu rather than only accessible via the home-page, but that’s still a point of discussion.
2 Likes
I agree.
This would be helpful to me as well.
After over a decade designing user interfaces I thought I could make a few, hopefully simple suggestions. Please do with them as you see fit. I really appreciate all the work going into SC. <3
I always try to design from the perspective of the most tech-illiterate user. I don’t accept the argument that people should get used to a design. Interfaces should be familiar and intuitive. Interfaces shouldn’t need a 4 year computer science degree to feel intuitive.
Hierarchy of the homepage
Menus:
I understand the draw is the main navigation. Yet in modern times the horizontal navigation has taken favour in design and so having both the drawn and the horizontal nav is quite confusing. Furthermore, the majority of the items that are in the h-nav are also in the … dropdown from the top right.
Layout:
The ‘visual space’ used by the draw, the masthead, the intro text and the big yellow thing with the quote are all equal (13 inch screen and iphone 5). This gives the user no clues as to where to look first. Additionally, there is double branding. Both on the draw and the masthead. Could the branding on the draw be contextual? It’s probably needed on phones as it covers the masthead. Or it could say ‘menu or similar’.
For me, the quote is also where the ‘fold’ occurs. Meaning that ‘what’s here’ and ‘where to begin’ are lost. Survey says: people don’t scroll unless there’s a list or a table of info (ie the suttaplex). I’d try and get the Where to Begin inside the fold for smallish screens.
My suggestion is that you don’t need both the tagline and the ’ The wisdom of the Buddha has been preserved in a vast ocean of…’ one after the other. This could be moved down.
Also reading best practice guidelines for material design it seems advised to use cards sparingly. I don’t believe the quote card needs to scream quite as much. They seem really overused on the homepage and ‘screamy’. The recommendation seems to be to use tiles instead.
Why green? I know you need a high contrast color for buttons and one which is a bit further away on the colour wheel but the green stands out like a sore thumb. How about a nicer forest green?
Further down the homepage… if you do scroll. The lovely explaination of the 3 baskets has Discourses, monastic law, and abhidhamma. Yet next to it in the draw it uses the Påli terms (sutta, vinaya, abhidhamma). I’m of the opinion that these should match and that follow the trend that we will see ‘long’ ‘middle’ etc. I think the draw should match ‘discourses’ ‘monastic law’ etc.
The Draw
The legacy site made languages a lot clearer and I think this is important in the draw (at least). The tiny little bubbles with PLI are obscure and I’ve more than once clicked on the Dirghagama instead of the Dighanikaya.
LONG/MIDDLE/LINKED… should be clickable, to advance to the next menu depth. Otherwise people will miss that fact that Dhighanikaya is clickable. Missing this fact meant I had to guess which vagga a sutta was in (I only knew it’s title).
The sutta cards
I’ve already mentioned this elsewhere but I really think that the ‘more’ for language selection should say ‘languages’ and it should be clear that ‘mahasanghita’ and ‘maes’ are the authors. I’m thinking about this from the perspective of my computer illiterate Sri Lankan and Burmese friends. They will probably land on the site in English and get this far and be totally lost that they have to use the … in the top RH corner to change to their language. How do they know to do this? It was hard enough to teach them on the old SC where it actually has the dropdown show their language in their characters, saying the name of their language.
I offer this with the greatest of respect. And probably to your relief I will be returning to the land of no internet in a week 
2 Likes