From owner-freebsd-www@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Apr 27 09:15:45 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-www@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3BD891065678 for ; Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:15:45 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from murray@stokely.org) Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com (ug-out-1314.google.com [66.249.92.168]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D07658FC22 for ; Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:15:44 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from murray@stokely.org) Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id y2so489134uge.37 for ; Sun, 27 Apr 2008 02:15:43 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.66.218.15 with SMTP id q15mr3075787ugg.36.1209287743006; Sun, 27 Apr 2008 02:15:43 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.67.20.17 with HTTP; Sun, 27 Apr 2008 02:15:42 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <2a7894eb0804270215g28e22367r5001d0afa3000f23@mail.gmail.com> Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2008 02:15:42 -0700 From: "Murray Stokely" To: freebsd-www@freebsd.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Subject: Some thoughts about www.freebsd.org, and call for volunteers X-BeenThere: freebsd-www@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: FreeBSD Project Webmasters List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:15:45 -0000 I've been thinking of various ways to make the content we present on http://www.FreeBSD.org more compelling and up to date. A more complete description of some ideas I'm planning to work on is posted here : http://murrayfreebsd.blogspot.com/2008/04/thoughts-on-wwwfreebsdorg-2-of-2.html If anyone is interested in helping to implement any of these ideas please let me know. Some of the concrete things I'd like to see in the near future include : * Better integration with CVSWeb, P4Web, ohlone.net, and cia.vc. A number of sites offering third party open source metrics have become available in recent years such as ohloh.net and cia.vc. We should ensure that our content is available on those sites and better utilize some of the features they provide. For example, customizable RSS feeds of code changes in specific subtrees should be made available, perhaps even only those changes that match complex search queries. Dynamic lists of the most active developers, or the parts of the source tree that are changing most rapidly could be displayed. * Better utilization of our own structured data. We have geographic information about usergroups and events, and so it is natural to display the information to the user as a map rather than an extremely long list on one giant HTML page. It would be even better if this could be displayed as an image map or with javascript popups or integrated to one of the large online maps services. * Enabling comments and feedback on items posted to the site. Readers of the site should have the opportunity to comment on newsflash entries and vote on development project ideas/priorities. Requiring updaters of the site to manually edit news.xml may not be the best way to handle this. Perhaps some kind of blogging software could be used which is then scraped into a static newsflash.html file while providing links back to the official blog to facilitate user comments. * Integrate with other web sites. Since we have structured data representing events and other content on the site, we could construct links to videos or photos tagged as 'freebsd' on Flickr or YouTube during the days of each conference. There is no excuse for the technical content from any recent BSD conference not ending up there. Likewise, we should automatically update public Google/Yahoo calendars, and allow anyone visiting the site to instantly add an event to the calendar software of their choice. I've written a prototype web application to replace the Ideas database (ideas.xml) at http://apps.stokely.org/ideas. This application allows users to add new development project ideas, to comment or vote on existing ideas, to search the database, and to subscribe to RSS feeds of a specific search or the comments and activity on a specific idea. - Murray