[Fwd: Re: www.gtk.org]

[Shawn T Amundson <amundson eventloop com>]

[ This was sent by me to gnome-hackers mailing list earlier
  in the month.  Since this is the better place for this 
  discussion, I'm forwarding it here. ]


On Wed, Nov 08, 2000 at 12:34:55AM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> Most work on the GNOME web sites is done pretty much ad-hoc by those
> who have interest and time. There is a mailing list
> gnome-web-maint nuclecu unam mx which gets mail to
> webmaster gnome org, and where I think most discussion of web site
> matters goes on.

Currently, gtk.org webmaster e-mail goes to the gimp.org webmaster
mailing list, and is ignored too often.  What I've wanted to do for
some time is put this under some type of request system so that there
is a guarentee that everything gets replied to.  This of course is
only if the webmasters are as lazy as I and the rest of the ones on
our list are.  I think the best choice for this would be 'Request Tracker'.  
(http://www.fsck.com/projects/rt/)  What it takes is a group of people
that agree to help out with the requests.  I would imagine this could
be useful for GNOME webmaster mail in general. 

> I think either we need to move that list to gnome.org and make it
> public subscription or create an additional public subscription list.

This sounds like an excellent idea to me.  Archives good.  Until
that exists, I'll assume that gnome-hackers is the correct forum.

> That's probably the first step; beyond that there is a need to
> make some decisions about:
> 
>  - What target audiences we want to serve with what sites

In my opinion, we need these sites:

 * Users Site
 * Foundation Site
 * Developers Site
   - CVS Site
 * Software List
 * News Site

Obviously I probably have excluded something from this list and
these sites already exist in some form or I would not have listed
them at all.  I think listing these first is the important first 
step to figuring out the overall navigation.  

I think the duplication between www.gtk.org and developer.gnome.org 
needs to be avoided somehow.  developer.gnome.org seems to get more
attention updating, but I'd bet that www.gtk.org gets more hits. 
And they duplicate a lot of things.  Perhaps we should combine them
and only have one site?

I think the GNOME news site should become www.gnotices.org.  This is 
an excellent name for the site and gives it it's own recognition value.  
This will enhance the number of people who visit it.  The current URL 
can be set up to redirect.  Also, it should be set up so squishdot 
is at the top of the site, or the site kind of looks like a hack.  This 
is possible at least with the current Zope and using Apache redirects.  
There is even a FAQ question for it I believe.  

I think the software list should be combine in some fashion with
Advogato's project list.  I think strenghtening it on Advogato has
more potential to help more projects than just GNOME alone, which
is a win for everyone.

I also think that it might be desirable to add to advogato so 
that we can put diaries of GNOME-related people on the developer's 
site.  Which would require being able to assign yourself as a 
general "GNOME developer" in advogato.  (But other categories should 
be added as well, so other projects can use this too, like Apache, 
KDE, etc., etc., etc.)

>  - How to provide effective navigation between the different sites
>  - How to provide some visual consistency between different 

These are difficult.  But I do hear rumors that we do know of some
graphic-capable people in the group that I'm sure will help with
enough convincing.  (Get out the nail gun.)  ;-)

>  - What common tools, if any we should use for generating content.

A highly controversial topic, for sure.  

-Shawn

--
Shawn T. Amundson                       amundson eventloop com	
Research and Development                http://www.eventloop.com/
EventLoop, Inc.                         http://www.snorfle.net/

"The assumption that the universe looks the same in every
 direction is clearly not true in reality." - Stephen Hawking