[bouldercouncilhotline] Hotline: File naming convention

[cmosupport at bouldercolorado.gov]

Sender: Cowles, Macon

Since writing the post below, I learned from Zane Selvans that there is an International Standard, ISO 8601, that requires using the date format that I have been advocating. See 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601





The General Principles of the standard are laid out at the cited reference:




General principles[edit]

Date and time values are ordered from the most to the least significant: year, month (or week), day, hour, minute, second, and fraction of second. The lexicographical
 order of the representation thus corresponds to chronological order, except for date representations involving negative years. This allows dates to be naturally sorted by,
 for example, file systems.Each date and time value has a fixed number of digits that must be padded with leading
 zeros.Representations can be done in one of two formats – a basic format with a minimal number of separators or an extended format with separators added to enhance human readability.[1] The
 standard notes that "The basic format should be avoided in plain text."[4] The
 separator used between date values (year, month, week, and day) is the hyphen,
 while the colon is
 used as the separator between time values (hours, minutes, and seconds). For example, the 6th day of the 1st month of the year 2009 may be written as"2009-01-06" in the extended format or simply as "20090106"
 in the basic format without ambiguity.For reduced precision,[5] any
 number of values may be dropped from any of the date and time representations, but in the order from the least to the most significant. For example, "2004-05" is a valid ISO 8601 date, which indicates May (the fifth month) 2004. This format will never represent
 the 5th day of an unspecified month in 2004, nor will it represent a time-span extending from 2004 into 2005.If necessary for a particular application, the standard supports the addition of a decimal
 fraction to the smallest time value in the representation.





Difficulty finding things on the City Website
On a related issue, would it be helpful to schedule a training for people using the City website on how to find things? Perhaps so, if there is a structure or discipline to the way documents are categorized and indexed as they are stored on the website.
 I frequently have difficulty finding things that I know to exist: searching for past Council or Planning Board packet covering a particular topic for example. 


One of the structural problems seems to be that there is no apparent way to search within a subset of data--Council packets, for example. Or Planning Board packets. Or HRC Packets.


Another structural problem is that the links that are returned are not listed in date order: in fact, there is no way you can tell what the date is of the material in the link unless it happens to be in the heading of the document--which it rarely is.


Another problem  is that the "Score" for each article returned by a search is opaque. What does it mean? If I want to find the latest proposal for the Green Tag program, why does a search for "Green Tag" either with or without quotes, always returns a
 webpage for a Green Mountain Lodge Open House in 2011 [Score 3.25!!]}, while a page about the Green Tag program gets only a Score of 2?


Thanks very much for any helpful guidance that is available on website searches on the City site.


Macon Cowles
City Council Member




Post sent April 10, 2014


The City currently uses a convention for naming files that begins with the date in MMDDYYYY format.


This does not permit chronological sorting as it would if the convention rearranged the date in this order: YYYYMMDD. Chronological sorting is important to file maintenance of many people who track City documents. Some have suggested that we go to this
 format with the year first.


Has this suggestion for a new file naming convention been rejected?


Thanks very much.












Macon Cowles
Boulder City Council Member





1726 Mapleton Ave.








Boulder, Colorado 80304
CowlesM at bouldercolorado.gov
(303) 447-3062
(303) 638-6884