Today, I took a quick look around the Ubuntu forums page for our Unit 1 Assignment 6 Ubuntu User Forum and Blog Post. Right away I tried to learn how to navigate, sort and display the page, and found it pretty simple. The lower left (a little hidden) “Display Options” is the key to doing this kind of thing. The visitor is given a number of controls with pop up menus revealing choices like Sort by number of views or number of replies. I went to the Absolute Beginner Talk forum. Decided it would be best to sort the posts by number of views, figuring there must be something fairly important about the issue for it to have generated the largest number of views. Number of views, hits, etc. of course is the basic principle behind a lot of social media , e.g., wisdom of crowds, pari-mutuel wagering and search engines.
The most frequently viewed thread is entitled “Free Beginners Guide" with 203,756 and 912 replies. Browsing through the replies I found the arrangement to be easy to view with funky little avatar icons on the left side of many replies. Apparently the “Free Beginners Guide” http://www.ubuntupocketguide.com/index_main.html
is the brainchild of Keir Thomas who wrote that stimulating treastise on everybody's short list of anniversary gifts: “Ubuntu Kung Fu.” The Ubuntu guide was I think posted by somebody who calls himself “Technoviking” a Ubuntu forum admin.
Judging from the comments people really love this beginners guide and are ecstatically grateful to Technoviking for posting it. Makes me wonder how they would feel if they won Powerball. By the way I noticed that lots of folks use mutant penguins or coffeebeans as avatars, maybe the motivation is obvious for this practice but as a debbie to all this I don't know. Anybody have an explanation?
At this point I had to download the Free Beginners Guide. The pdf is free as in free beer rather than freedom of speech but the print version is available from Amazon. Weird that a new copy is available from Amazon for between $12.97 and 14.99, while a used copy (five available when I looked) costs between $32.60 and $33.41. Not sure why that would be the case, maybe the yellow highlighted text in a used copy is more valuable than a pristine copy? I must admit it appears to be a terrific title and since my new slogan is Ubuntu or bust, I'll be reading as much as time allows.
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