[pmwiki-users] Floating 'edit' button idea

Karl Schilke schilkek at onid.orst.edu
Fri Feb 27 12:29:57 CST 2009


I've been thinking about this for a while, and it seems like it would  
be relatively easy to work out with some Javascript or similar.

I use PmWiki as a personal scientific research blog, and for jotting  
down ideas for research projects, chemical syntheses, etc. Very often,  
I'm in the middle of a page that is several screens long and realize  
that I want to make a change. For instance, I suddenly realize that  
changing solvents from benzene to DMSO will increase the rate of a  
reaction.

The normal response to this is to scroll-bar all the way to the top of  
the page, hit 'Edit', scroll-bar back down through the text until I  
find the change I wanted to make, make the change -- if I can still  
remember what it was! -- and hit save again. This works, but is  
cumbersome and surprisingly often I find *another* thing I want to  
change and forget to make the original edit.

What I'd like to have is a floating 'Edit' button that would stay at a  
given point on the screen (say, the bottom right). Hitting this button  
would bring up the 'action=edit' screen. Ideally, the source file  
would be opened with the cursor positioned somewhere close to the text  
I was viewing when I hit the floating edit button. I remember seeing  
this sort of thing done for the "Was this information helpful?"  
surveys at Adobe.com a few years ago.

I realize that this is either practically trivial or an incredible  
PITA, but I think it would provide a very useful bit of functionality  
to PmWiki.

Thanks!

     -Karl Schilke, Oregon State University

-- 
"Every complex problem has a solution that is simple, direct,
plausible and wrong." -H.L. Mencken



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