Date: Wed, 5 May 1999 11:30:04 +0100 From: nclayton@lehman.com To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: doc/<lang>/books/*, doc/<lang>/articles/*, and docs.freebsd.org Message-ID: <19990505113004.Z14492@lehman.com> In-Reply-To: <19990505112135.B3157@caamora.com.au>; from jonathan michaels on Wed, May 05, 1999 at 11:21:35AM %2B1000 References: <19990504163533.S14492@lehman.com> <19990505112135.B3157@caamora.com.au>
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On Wed, May 05, 1999 at 11:21:35AM +1000, jonathan michaels wrote: > On Tue, May 04, 1999 at 04:35:33PM +0100, nclayton@lehman.com wrote: > > At the moment the FDP doc/ tree and the www/ tree sit a little uneasily > > together. Building the website requires that the doc/ tree be available > > as well, and in the process all sorts of symlinks are created and little > > hacks exist in several Makefiles to get the build to work properly. > > > > It's all fairly fragile, and I'd be happier if it was a little more > > separate. > > i was wondering why it was done the way it was from teh > begining, i put it down to amerian ideosyncractic behaviour, no > insult intended ... ummm, i'm getting to be overly 'sensative' > today. Having developed my fair share of websites professionally, the FreeBSD site is a good example of what happens when a site grows organically. This is no slight on the various people that have taken on the role of FreeBSD webmaster over the past few years -- maintaining even a medium size site such as the FreeBSD one rapidly becomes difficult when content is added willy-nilly, as has happened in the past. Looking after it is (literally) a full time job, and we don't have the luxury of having anyone who can do the work full time. > > For an idea of what I'm thinking of, take a look at http://docs.sun.com/. > > Take their "Hardware" and "Software" headings and replace them with > > "Books" and "Articles", and it's pretty close to the end product I have > > in mind. > > the first time i went thier and saw what they did it made me > wonder why we couldn't/didn't do it like that as well .. > cncdering we were supposed t be as 'mature' as teh sun crowd. We can. It's all a question of available time. FWIW, I'm not going to be able to do any of this for a couple of months at least -- the DocBook conversion of the other content has to happen first, and there are numerous other things on my plate that demand more of my time (a little hint; with a bit of luck the book "Teach yourself FreeBSD in 21 days" will be one of them). I'm throwing out comments now partly because I have some spare time to talk about it, and partly because someone else reading this might be able to pick up the ball and run with it now. > while i'm here .. have you looked at teh overal mess teh > freebsd website really is. sun (from memory) asks if you want a > text version and then gives the viewer a clean presentation. > > when i use lynx, the freebsd site is a vertitable nightmare to > navigate, maybe a checkpoint could be inserted and teh user > asked if a text version is required and a text version be > supplied if requsted. > > maybe my yetagain whine will become irrelevant onc3 i get and > start to use w3:amaya/toth combination .. but, lynx may still > be the one if this new gui fails to meet exectations. > > this whole issue of organisation is a subset of teh broder > problm od usability/readability. tackling teh one without the > any referance t its kindred spirit will produce yet another ork. As I say, it's a full time job. If anyone is interested in looking at the usability and organisation of the FreeBSD web site, go to it. Your first task would be to assess the current site, categorise the content on it, and work out how it's organised, and then come up with a new, better, organisation. Preferably an organisation with rules about what content goes where, and tries to anticipate likely new content to be added over the next 12-18 months, so that it doesn't descend in to another hodge-podge of content. After you've done that, post the organisation here (or put it up on the web, or something) so that other people can comment on it. After an iteration or two of this you hopefully have something that everyone likes. Then you go off and work out how to actually do the transition. Expect all this to take 3 months at least. I wish I was back in my first year at university. This is just the sort of thing I would have done. N -- --+==[ Systems Administrator, Year 2000 Test Lab, Lehman Brothers, Inc. ]==+-- --+==[ 1 Broadgate, London, EC2M 7HA 0171-601-0011 x5514 ]==+-- --+==[ Year 2000 Testing: It's about time. . . ]==+-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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