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Date:      Mon, 26 Jun 2000 19:49:48 +0900
From:      Jun Kuriyama <kuriyama@FreeBSD.org>
To:        doc@FreeBSD.org, committers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: The website
Message-ID:  <7mu2eg4sz7.wl@waterblue.imgsrc.co.jp>
In-Reply-To: In your message of "26 Jun 2000 09:33:42 GMT" <20000625200029.I470@kilt.nothing-going-on.org>
References:  <20000625200029.I470@kilt.nothing-going-on.org>

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At 26 Jun 2000 09:33:42 GMT,
nik wrote:
>      This also means that a huge reliance on CGI scripts is also a bad
>      thing.  At the moment mirrors can participate by setting up a fairly
>      simple webserver that just has to serve static content.  The few CGIs
>      that we do have all refer back to the main site.  If we were to force
>      the mirrors to run the CGI scripts we put a bigger burden on them, both 
>      in terms of the computing power required to run the scripts, and also
>      because they will probably (quite reasonably) want to audit them before 
>      they run them on their own systems.

I think so.  We should reduce unneeded CGI scripts but this check
should be done carefully.  I think current CGI set in www.FreeBSD.org
is quite minimal and difficult to replace with static contents.  I'd
like to see a list of what part of CGI should be replaced.

>      This limits the amount of dynamic content we can put on the site.
>      However, all is not lost.  We already rebuild the website twice a day.
>      This means that twice a day the content on our pages can change, or can 
>      be generated at build-time.  It's not quite the same as truly dynamic
>      content, but it's a fair compromise.

I don't know about the machine load of web building, but it is
difficult to build web stuff more frequently?  Japanese web server
re-builds contents once per an hour, and this helps visitors to see
latest news. (like announcements, ftp/cvsup/www site trouble, seminor
informations, etc.)

>   *  We should be reusing the orange left hand bar across all the pages.
>      It's an accepted design standard on many websites, and there's no
>      reason to be gratuitously different from the crowd unless you're trying 
>      to win design awards.
> 
>      If you take a look at http://www.demon.net/ you'll see how their left
>      side navigation bar expands and contracts as you move through the site, 
>      showing you where you are in the site, and useful places you can go
>      from there.
> 
>      I like this.  It's also not too programmatically difficult to do using
>      our SGML tools.

I'm not expert on web design, but this should be reviewed widely
before replacing.

>   *  We might want to give each mailing list its own home page.  I knocked
>      up a rough prototype of this a while back, which you can find at
>      http://people.freebsd.org/~nik/lists/.  It needs work (in particular,
>      it needs integrating in to a complete site plan, rather than the rough
>      proof of concept it is now) but it's (IMHO) a good way of organising a
>      lot of our content.

Yeah, there stuff is good candidate to be written in XML as original
source? :-)

>   *  The front page (and some related pages) have *got* to change more
>      frequently.  At the moment you can come to the FreeBSD home page once a 
>      day, or once a week, and to the uninitiated the project may as well be
>      dead.

Agreed.  IMHO, top page should includes some latest news.

>      * Providing a place to showcase a "Project of the week" on the front
>        page (or "Project of the day", or whatever).  This would link to one
>        of the FreeBSD development projects, with a brief description and a
>        pointer to the project's home page.
> 
>      * As above, but for a "Committer of the Week".  IMHO, each committer
>        could write up a couple of paragraphs about who they are, how they
>        got involved in FreeBSD, what they're working on, and so on.

I think there ideas are difficult to continue in long term.  Many
hackers don't like writing there contents.

>        If I had my way, failure to provide this after a reasonable amount of 
>        time (6 weeks say) would be grounds to get the commit bit removed.
>        The individual chunks of the project don't exist in a vacuum, and
>        IMHO all committers should be expected to be able to do this, given
>        reasonable notice.

Of course, this is ideal.  But should we remove someone's commit privs
who only have time to hack source code, not document?  Yes, documents
should be written by developpers who writes the code, but real world
is more difficult, isn't it?

>      * On each build, generate links to BSD stories on Slashdot, DaemonNews,
>        BSD Today, the O'Reilly Dev Centre, and others.
> 
>        Yes, it's the "P" word -- we should be a BSD Portal.

Hmmm, it is good idea but it can be done automatically?


-- 
Jun Kuriyama <kuriyama@FreeBSD.org> // FreeBSD Project


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