[webdev] Re: [aclug-L] [announce] webdev project

["Dale W Hodge" <dwh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: webdev-bounce@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:webdev-bounce@xxxxxxxxx]On Behalf
> Of Tom Hull

> I think that the single biggest chunk of work in the long run is content
> management, and the higher your standards the bigger chunk that becomes.
> The top two things on my website wish list are:
>
>  1) For problem X, give me the most direct route possible to a
> comprehensible
>     answer.
>
>  2) And give me some user feedback on that.
>

You and I agree on this.  But it's a *BIG* task, which is why it hasn't
happened to date.  Content is king.  Finding *good* content is tough.
Keeping things up-to-date is require a dedicated crew, IMHO.

> On web server, we should probably designate a subcommittee to
> research that and
> come up with recommendations. I think we want to colocate, we
> want root access,
> a clean slate for whatever software we want, as much bandwidth as
> possible, and
> physical access when necessary. Someone needs to sign up to
> figure that out.

I have a thought on the physical placement of the web server.  There's no
reason why we couldn't place different parts of our website on different
servers.  We wouldn't require as much bandwith, and we'd build in some
redundancy.  We could round-robin DNS for which one presented the homepage,
and links from there would go to the individual machines at aclug.org. I
don't know whether this can be done with our current software or not.

> > Community feedback rating system?
>
> Yeah. I also think one should be able to "peer up" ratings, so I can
> get a set of ratings from a select set of people (or excluding a set
> of people) that are more likely to be useful to me; or say in books,
> I can get a rating for C books from C experts, or another rating from
> C novices. This is a pretty rich area to explore. One example is
> Advogato's "trust metric" -- it has some problems because it assumes
> that everyone fits on the same scale.

That's the downside of ratings. What's one person's 8 is another's 3. Maybe
each reviewer should be required to have filled out a profile that lists
thier background.  That way if we see someone review something, we can look
at the profile and decide whether to trust their opinion.

> > Searchable documentation, if you please. In fact, the whole
> site should be
> > searchable.
>
> Sure. May even have several options: keyword search, text search. May
> also have wrappers for external search tools, like google.

We should also see if we can have the option of directed searches of a
specific portion of the site. Sometimes keyword searches hit a lot of junk
when an entire site is searched.

> > I'm not sure we want to get into the auction business.
>
> I wouldn't want to get involved with the money, and I'd be reluctant to
> let businesses sell through the auctions. OTOH, I have a Toshiba portable
> with a 286 and two 3.5" floppy disk drives (i.e., no hard drive) that
> hasn't been fired up in over a decade but which I'd like to auction off
> for highest bid (minimum $0.00).

I understand what you are wanting, but I don't think we want to become the
middle man when a dispute arises.  The laws are kind of funny about that,
and we could find ourselves in a pickle if someone wanted to press the
issue.


> > How about photos of group events.  A spot for guest editorials.
> A place for
> > Linux related cartoons or pictures.  Local copy of HOWTO's, so
> they could be
> > searchable on site.  Links to Major Distributions and to thier security
> > announcements & errata.
>
> The HOWTOs could be externally searched as well as externally stored.
> I've seen LUGs that mirrored them, but they're mostly university-sited,
> and it would be cheaper and probably faster not to. Having a local
> keyword mapping to a set of external HOWTOs would be nice and possibly
> better (if we could keep it maintained).

We could do off-site, but it doesn't take a lot of space (or effort) to
maintain them on-site. It just requires a periodic download of a tarball,
and adjusting of the index file.

> I'd like to have space for local columnists.

We may have covered this already, but something like the Eagle's Editoral
Opinion page might be nice.

--dwh

---
Dale W Hodge - dwh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Secretary - info@xxxxxxxxx
Air Capital Linux User's Group  (ACLUG)
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