Re: Page Layout Update

[karderio <karderio gmail com>]

Hi :o)

On Sun, 2006-09-10 at 00:04 +0200, Quim Gil wrote:
> Hi Karderio, thank you for challenging the home with good arguments.  :)
> 
> El ds 09 de 09 del 2006 a les 02:32 +0200, en/na karderio va escriure:
> 
> > I certainly wouldn't put planet GNOME feeds on the front page.
> 
> Others would, since this block was an idea suggested by no-Lee-nor-me.

Well, my opinion is worth what it is worth, I guess :o)

> I think it's appropriate: Planet GNOME is probably our most read GNOME
> subsite, there must be reason for that.

I'd venture to say that Planet GNOME attracts more visits mainly because
it is dynamic content. It gets updated orders of magnitude more often
than wgo for example...

> >  Users
> > either won't know what people are talking about, or be confused to the
> > point of suspecting the site to be compromised when they see a bloke
> > talking about his last holidays in Spain.
> 
> Many will know, or will want to know at least. Let's remember that our
> targeted users are freedom/software enthusiasts, independent software
> developers, public sector, press and GNOME contributors. That user Joe
> with no idea nor interest in free software is not our target.

Good to know who we're aiming at, I've been arguing for Joe on the basis
that GNOME should be "easy for everyone to use". (I hope this quotation
conveys the idea of simplicity and elegance I believe GNOME aspires to,
I didn't look far, I took it from the GNOME about page).

If I may argue that it should pose no problem for these people to click
on a Planet GNOME link, while it could potentially confuse or put off
Joe.

A suggestion, if one wished to promote pgo, could be to have a
sentence/paragraph in the introductory text (I'm daring to write
something silly again to illustrate this, it's not an argument;) : "Come
visit the people who make GNOME by visiting their <a>planet</a> !"

Another reason to have a bit of fixed text on the first page would be to
feed the search engine's web crawlers.

If dynamic content was to be included on the front page, would pgo/news
not also be a good candidate ?

> The PLanet block shows at least that "GNOME is People", something that
> apparently we want to make visible and explicit. If the title is too
> geeky we will be showing that we know a lot about geek stuff (which is
> not bad). If the title is too personal/off-geeky we will show that this
> is community made by normal people who also go on holidays to Spain. 

We could also write in a short text "GNOME is made by friendly geeky
persons who live on their own <a>planet</a>". If this sort of message is
important to convey, it can be written explicitly to be sure that the
visitor gets the right impression.

> GNOME is People... like you, is what this Planet block would be showing.
> Think that Microsoft, Apple and other corps wouldn't dare to have such a
> free window anywhere in they websites, leave alone in the homepage.

Perhaps Microsoft would ask themselves the question "what will make us
most money?" to determine what to put on their website... Perhaps we
should be asking "what will promote GNOME the best?".

We could put porn on the website, they wouldn't dare do that either, and
it would sure get us press coverage :o) (Joke !!, please don't take this
as a jab, it isn't - sometimes I just can't help myself :> Sorry if you
have anything against porn, but it never hurt anybody apart from the guy
who got run over by the porn lorry (Joke !!, I'd better stop this
now) :)

> If we would be showing the last 3 posts, now they would be:
> 
> [Havoc's hackergotchi] - DAV and gnome-vfs (Havoc Pennington)
> 
> [Miguel's hackergotchi] - Mono, .NET and Linux in Firenze (Miguel de
> Icaza)
> 
> [Luis' hackergotchi] - Four more miscellaneous bits (Luis Villa)

Well, I'm afraid I don't think you can draw any conclusions from the
last three posts...

Incidental, and not to prove anything, the last three posts are
currently :

[It freaking hurts] - A bad knee problem I wouldn't like and a story
about what personal web software to use (Bryan Forbes)

[in a strangely wrong-looking locked box in an old junk shop an ancient
papyrus was found] - WOW !!! (Thomas Thurman)

[Bush Questioned on Torture] - Political vid, the guy honestly doesn't
look any more bothered, incoherent or plain dumb than usual AFAICS
though (Miguel de Icaza)

Great reads ! :o)

> Not bad. In any case a blog title totally off topic, horrible,
> compromising etc won't last in the wgo home more than few hours. These
> are a minority, most Planet blog posts are totally on-topic.

> > Perhaps something of an introductory text along the lines of "GNOME, the
> > soft fluffy computer simplifier !\n\n If you want to know more or even
> > see the contraption in action, click 'about'. Find out how to get your
> > hands on it by clicking...".
> 
> This function is already covered by the Slogan component in the top
> right column.

Thanks for clearing that up :) I'm not sure this can be overdone in the
small space available on the front page though.

> > I do hope that each link in the Primary Nav Bar will link to a single
> > set of subpages. For example, when I click on About, I would expect
> > *all* the pages in that section to be displayed in the block of links
> > shown on the right. This could maybe even be a rule of thumb, anything
> > requiring another level of hierarchy being either badly organised,
> > superfluous, belonging on another site or in a new primary section.
> 
> This is the normal behavior of a navigation scheme, yes. Currently wgo
> mixes things up in many cases, both in the top nav bar and the nav bar
> block in the right column, but this is something we need to fix. This
> belongs to http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/Navigation though.

COOL :o) (sigh of relief :o)

> > I suppose the site will be displayed in the language sent by the users
> > browser...
> 
> We assume this, yes. See http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/Localization
> ("How do we choose the correct localization?"). Now that you mention it
> though, it is not defined in the web policies. I've added a comment to
> http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/WebPolicies since this should be perhaps
> an i18n policy. Thank you for benchmarking our documentation!  :)

btw, was there a previous discussion, where can one find it ? (Dare I
guess that any discussion occured on IRC ?)

btw, the ComponentSelection [1] page lists a news section rather than a
planet section for the front page.

In any case I suppose what goes in the offending space isn't all that
primordial, to me it still seems far from the best idea to put pgo there
though :)

Love, Karderio.


[1] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/ComponentSelection