This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/websites/index-rss.html
Of course, that is just a static copy, the real changes are in my git checkout. I made a copy (using rsync) of my local repo to here:
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/websites/fedora-web/
The changes include a new class for fedora.css. Also, I used the rss.html that Ricky committed, changing it to be the feed using the new style, and then pulled that in to index.html with an XInclude. Took a bit of wrangling to get the CSS to work right inside of the #content class, but I finally got it done and a bit improved from last time.
Unsure if this is the exact look that we want. I recommend two things:
1. We iterate on this design that I did and get it posted 2. Work on a better replacement, if/as we feel there is one needed
If you all agree, I'll be glad to make the changes into fp.org/data/content/index.html directly and commit them for further review. Let me know if the git repo above is useful as-is, if I need to tweak something, or if you'd prefer that I post patches for review.
- Karsten
Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
Change Fedora People to Planet Fedora please. Let's be consistent.
Rahul
On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 10:19 AM, Rahul Sundaram sundaram@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
Change Fedora People to Planet Fedora please. Let's be consistent.
Rahul
+1
On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 22:49 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
Change Fedora People to Planet Fedora please. Let's be consistent.
Done.
I updated the static snapshot with some changes in the content but mainly the CSS.
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/websites/index-rss.html
This style has multiple feeds in one column, with some feeds pulling only one update. For FWN, this works to put up one entry that changes weekly. Today I noticed when I rebuilt the page that the same entry for this week's FWN was up from the FWN feed and the fedora-announce-list feed. This is the state I captured in the current static page.
I tried setting a bottom-border style for the <li> element, but the way the Python renders the page generates a new <li> for each item in a feed. This put a line under each title, which wasn't really needed for readability, and didn't show any separation of feeds within one column.
Instead I used <hr> with a style wrapped in the #content <div>. The <hr> is brought in contained in an <li></li>. This nicely forces a line between actual <li> elements in the source that separate the actual feed calls. It's an OK hack.
How does it look visually? I tried it in white and the current dark gray. In all of this, I updated the dashed lines to dotted, to match the rest of the page style.
I'll note here that all of this is solved in the single-column style that was put forth previously. I'm beginning to get interested in doing a single column version, as it would be useful under the banner widget on start.fp.o.
In a single column, we can stack feed titles with the feed source:
Planet Fedora Post title 1 Post title 2 Post title 3 News FWN Announcements f-announce-l feed f-dev-announce feed Fedora Stories Post title 1 Post title 2 Red Hat Magazine Post title 1 Post title 2 Dev Fu Post title 1
... Karsten
On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 10:09 -0700, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/websites/index-rss.html
Of course, that is just a static copy, the real changes are in my git checkout. I made a copy (using rsync) of my local repo to here:
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/websites/fedora-web/
The changes include a new class for fedora.css. Also, I used the rss.html that Ricky committed, changing it to be the feed using the new style, and then pulled that in to index.html with an XInclude. Took a bit of wrangling to get the CSS to work right inside of the #content class, but I finally got it done and a bit improved from last time.
Unsure if this is the exact look that we want. I recommend two things:
- We iterate on this design that I did and get it posted
- Work on a better replacement, if/as we feel there is one needed
If you all agree, I'll be glad to make the changes into fp.org/data/content/index.html directly and commit them for further review. Let me know if the git repo above is useful as-is, if I need to tweak something, or if you'd prefer that I post patches for review.
- Karsten
2008/3/31 Karsten 'quaid' Wade kwade@redhat.com:
This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
Looks very nice so far, this is cool. I think maybe the same background color as 'get-fedora', and the rounded corners on the 'boxes' containing the individual feeds.
If you all agree, I'll be glad to make the changes into fp.org/data/content/index.html directly and commit them for further review. Let me know if the git repo above is useful as-is, if I need to tweak something, or if you'd prefer that I post patches for review.
+1 to getting changes into the git repo. I am not sure we have a policy for 'feature additions'[0] in terms of version control but creating $some_branch would get it in everyones hands. And then we can worry about getting changes into master>live.
-- Craig
[0] features that maybe take longer than actual bug fixes, so lets not get them in the queue (master) until they are ready. But, spoken as a long time svn user who has not mastered git foo yet, but feels this exact kind of pain at $dayjob.
- Karsten
-- Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr. Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org gpg key : AD0E0C41
On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 20:12 -0400, Craig Thomas wrote:
2008/3/31 Karsten 'quaid' Wade kwade@redhat.com:
This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
Looks very nice so far, this is cool. I think maybe the same background color as 'get-fedora', and the rounded corners on the 'boxes' containing the individual feeds.
The blue-gray as here?
http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora
I dunno how to do rounded corners, is it done with images and ...?
Also we have rounded in the graphic ad widget things, but otherwise it's pretty much 90-degrees all over the project pages. After seeing that all over redhat.com for years, I'm sort-of in to the square edges. :)
If you all agree, I'll be glad to make the changes into fp.org/data/content/index.html directly and commit them for further review. Let me know if the git repo above is useful as-is, if I need to tweak something, or if you'd prefer that I post patches for review.
+1 to getting changes into the git repo. I am not sure we have a policy for 'feature additions'[0] in terms of version control but creating $some_branch would get it in everyones hands. And then we can worry about getting changes into master>live.
Yeah, I'm not sure how to make that happen cleanly, though. Anyone want to clear that up for me?
-- Craig
[0] features that maybe take longer than actual bug fixes, so lets not get them in the queue (master) until they are ready. But, spoken as a long time svn user who has not mastered git foo yet, but feels this exact kind of pain at $dayjob.
- Karsten
-- Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr. Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org gpg key : AD0E0C41
On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/websites/index-rss.html
Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr.
Would it be possible to differentiate the author and topic title in planet feed? E.g. by a font size or color?
Adam Pribyl
On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 13:34 +0200, Adam Pribyl wrote:
On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/websites/index-rss.html
Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr.
Would it be possible to differentiate the author and topic title in planet feed? E.g. by a font size or color?
Not the way the Python appears to be written; it pulls in ${entry.title}, and that is all together in the feed from the planet:
http://planet.fedoraproject.org/rss20.xml
I think it would need to differentiate within the feed for us to parse it. We cannot rely upon the : character in case it ends up in a title later, or it would be a pretty careful regexp hack.
- Karsten
On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 18:09 -0700, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 13:34 +0200, Adam Pribyl wrote:
On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/websites/index-rss.html
Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr.
Would it be possible to differentiate the author and topic title in planet feed? E.g. by a font size or color?
Not the way the Python appears to be written; it pulls in ${entry.title}, and that is all together in the feed from the planet:
http://planet.fedoraproject.org/rss20.xml
I think it would need to differentiate within the feed for us to parse it. We cannot rely upon the : character in case it ends up in a title later, or it would be a pretty careful regexp hack.
the rss output is a template that gets dumped out, just to clarify a bit.
-sv
On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
I know its a bit late for this but can we not do this on our front page?
Exactly what are we trying to accomplish and is putting this feed on the very first thing people see when people look for Fedora accomplishing that?
I certainly don't have veto powers over the website or anything like that but I've fought 3 fights already to keep stuff off of the main page. I missed this one or I would have fought it too. I say again:
There's a reason http://www.google.com/ is king and http://www.yahoo.com/ isn't. If google can exist at the size it is with the simple home page it has and we can't, we've done something wrong.
2 cents.
-Mike
On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 11:34 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
I certainly don't have veto powers over the website or anything like that but I've fought 3 fights already to keep stuff off of the main page. I missed this one or I would have fought it too. I say again:
There's a reason http://www.google.com/ is king and http://www.yahoo.com/ isn't. If google can exist at the size it is with the simple home page it has and we can't, we've done something wrong.
Im not an authority here but one thing that ive discussed a lot with some other people is the lack of information fp.o currently has. I understand the point of not filling every possible white space in the site with information, but Im sure many people here agree that there are a lot of white spaces that are not being used that, if we use them carefully and esthetically we can manage to get a great website with enough information and not too overwhelming for the eye
I proposed a similar idea some time ago by adding a third column to the current design and only having one section handling rss news. I still like more that idea than this one, as having three different sections just for news is like wasting space unnecessarily (only one column with news is enough and leaves more space for some other important things)
Anyway this is just a proposal and as i said to Karsten Wade, im really happy to see somebody working on this.
On Tue, 1 Apr 2008, Juan Camilo Prada wrote:
On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 11:34 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
I certainly don't have veto powers over the website or anything like that but I've fought 3 fights already to keep stuff off of the main page. I missed this one or I would have fought it too. I say again:
There's a reason http://www.google.com/ is king and http://www.yahoo.com/ isn't. If google can exist at the size it is with the simple home page it has and we can't, we've done something wrong.
Im not an authority here but one thing that ive discussed a lot with some other people is the lack of information fp.o currently has. I understand the point of not filling every possible white space in the site with information, but Im sure many people here agree that there are a lot of white spaces that are not being used that, if we use them carefully and esthetically we can manage to get a great website with enough information and not too overwhelming for the eye
Lack of information? Whats missing? Be extremely specific. Also let me know that of the information you find missing, how it will be fulfilled by linking to planet, devfu and FWM? Remember, we're not adding content. Just more things to click on.
I'm almost positive I'm in the minority here but I'm taking a difficult position of simplicity (as you'll find I almost always will).
-Mike
On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 21:44 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
On Tue, 1 Apr 2008, Juan Camilo Prada wrote:
On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 11:34 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
I certainly don't have veto powers over the website or anything like that but I've fought 3 fights already to keep stuff off of the main page. I missed this one or I would have fought it too. I say again:
There's a reason http://www.google.com/ is king and http://www.yahoo.com/ isn't. If google can exist at the size it is with the simple home page it has and we can't, we've done something wrong.
Im not an authority here but one thing that ive discussed a lot with some other people is the lack of information fp.o currently has. I understand the point of not filling every possible white space in the site with information, but Im sure many people here agree that there are a lot of white spaces that are not being used that, if we use them carefully and esthetically we can manage to get a great website with enough information and not too overwhelming for the eye
Lack of information? Whats missing? Be extremely specific. Also let me know that of the information you find missing, how it will be fulfilled by linking to planet, devfu and FWM? Remember, we're not adding content. Just more things to click on.
You are right about the planet and maybe about devfu, what i do not agree is about fwn. I think that the idea of having a website for the project is to let people knoe about the project and not just about the released distro. News are important to the community and having news in the front page is always a good idea. I dont know anybody who likes to read news that also likes to start digging here and there just to find whats new. As in a newspaper the first page is what will catch people attention, and having a very simplistic style with no news and just saying the general idea of the fedora project is not that appealing.
As of what you said about google's success having a clean interface, its kinda irrelevant here (no offense) but, google is a completly different application. it is meant to be a browser and just that so it focus its attention on being a browser. Of course they have lot more applications and each one has its own interface but the thing is that... google is an aplication not an informative website which should focus on a completly different goal.
our primary purpose with the website (at least thats what i think) is to catch people attention and that can only be achieved by showing information. Perhaps this is not a discussion to be made on this topic but as an example, i cant see good information about how to get involved, we simply specify a link to the wiki and thats all, so we are leaving that kind of information to another application (the wiki) which i think its making useless the fp.o website.
Another example is the download section, yes we say "these are all the ways you can install fedora" but then we dont say which is better for the user (i385, x86_64, etc...)
Having information in the front page makes it easier to let people know what they want without making them digg into the website, and in the website world i think thats a plus in terms of usability.
Im not a marketing expert so i dont really know what would be better to set on the front page to get people atention, probably somebody better than me and more informed about the project could share his ideas about what catch people attention. As for me, i think news and Events are one of the more important things to show in the front page.
On Tue, 1 Apr 2008, Juan Camilo Prada wrote:
On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 21:44 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
On Tue, 1 Apr 2008, Juan Camilo Prada wrote:
Lack of information? Whats missing? Be extremely specific. Also let me know that of the information you find missing, how it will be fulfilled by linking to planet, devfu and FWM? Remember, we're not adding content. Just more things to click on.
You are right about the planet and maybe about devfu, what i do not agree is about fwn. I think that the idea of having a website for the project is to let people knoe about the project and not just about the released distro. News are important to the community and having news in the front page is always a good idea. I dont know anybody who likes to read news that also likes to start digging here and there just to find whats new. As in a newspaper the first page is what will catch people attention, and having a very simplistic style with no news and just saying the general idea of the fedora project is not that appealing.
You'll be happy to know that FWN is linked on the main page and other pages via a banner ad then. So that problem is already taken care of.
As of what you said about google's success having a clean interface, its kinda irrelevant here (no offense) but, google is a completly different application. it is meant to be a browser and just that so it focus its attention on being a browser. Of course they have lot more applications and each one has its own interface but the thing is that... google is an aplication not an informative website which should focus on a completly different goal.
Fine, lets not talk about google. Lets talk about www.debian.com. Is that more what you had in mind? The fact is that its _HARD_ to say a lot in a little space. But its worth it to do it. We still don't have one persons vision on the website so everyone gets on board and says "Look what we could do!" Which is just going to turn the website to crap.
We've done it once already, less then a year ago the website was almost unusable. So much crap, most of it developer oriented, so when users showed up they had no idea what to do.
our primary purpose with the website (at least thats what i think) is to catch people attention and that can only be achieved by showing information. Perhaps this is not a discussion to be made on this topic but as an example, i cant see good information about how to get involved, we simply specify a link to the wiki and thats all, so we are leaving that kind of information to another application (the wiki) which i think its making useless the fp.o website.
Thats because the wiki is full of developer content. There's a few things in there for the end user. But I'd wager less then 10% of the 10,000+ uncontroled pages to which no one is accountable is for an end user. We linked to the wiki because we figured people were used to drinking the sand. In my opinion the wiki shouldn't be linked to directly from there anyway.
Another example is the download section, yes we say "these are all the ways you can install fedora" but then we dont say which is better for the user (i385, x86_64, etc...)
So fix the download page. Not the landing page.
Having information in the front page makes it easier to let people know what they want without making them digg into the website, and in the website world i think thats a plus in terms of usability.
What information? I was very VERY specific in asking you for what information was missing from the main page and you (and no one else so far) has given me any information thats missing from the front page. The fact is the categories we have on the main page are exactly what people are looking for. Getting involved, getting fedora, docs.
Im not a marketing expert so i dont really know what would be better to set on the front page to get people atention, probably somebody better than me and more informed about the project could share his ideas about what catch people attention. As for me, i think news and Events are one of the more important things to show in the front page.
Yeah, www.debian.org is a real attention getter. And at 117 links on the main page its a wonder anyone gets anywhere. Simpler == harder. Simpler == better. But without someone taking care of the website people are just going to constantly say "hey, this should be on the front page" with no one saying no. Just last month a group, very losely related to Fedora (and as a group does not report to the board in any way) wanted to add a whole other banner system to the website on the main page.
-Mike
On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 08:56 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
You'll be happy to know that FWN is linked on the main page and other pages via a banner ad then. So that problem is already taken care of.
Banners are cute ways to attract attention, but unless they are diagrams or interactive, pixel-by-pixel they are a huge waste of space compared to words.
Static words are useful, but pixel-by-pixel are a waste of space compared to dynamic content.
In my opinion the wiki shouldn't be linked to directly from there anyway.
The wiki needs to be re-invented to include community documentation that is useful to end-users. Hiding it isn't going to accomplish that.
Another example is the download section, yes we say "these are all the ways you can install fedora" but then we dont say which is better for the user (i385, x86_64, etc...)
So fix the download page. Not the landing page.
+1
Having information in the front page makes it easier to let people know what they want without making them digg into the website, and in the website world i think thats a plus in terms of usability.
What information? I was very VERY specific in asking you for what information was missing from the main page and you (and no one else so far) has given me any information thats missing from the front page. The fact is the categories we have on the main page are exactly what people are looking for. Getting involved, getting fedora, docs.
We have a few different directions to take. One is to do everything from various gut instincts, which honestly is what you are proposing. "Simpler is better." Yes on a child's tape player; no in a cockpit.
Without anything to compare what we did with what we are doing with what we might do, we are just shooting in the dark. At least having different content on the front page we can have some better idea of what people are and are not doing. Do more or fewer people click on the Planet links than on the "Join" links? Do more or fewer people click on an RHM article about how-to do something in Fedora than on the "Docs" link?
- Karsten
On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 09:15 -0700, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 08:56 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
Another example is the download section, yes we say "these are all the ways you can install fedora" but then we dont say which is better for the user (i385, x86_64, etc...)
So fix the download page. Not the landing page.
+1
mizmo and I were talking about this last week and she was working on a mockup that she said she was going to post soon... ;-)
Jeremy
Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
"Simpler is better." Yes on a child's tape player; no in a cockpit.
Simpler's better in a cockpit too - just enormously harder to achieve.
At least having different content on the front page we can have some better idea of what people are and are not doing.
Permit me introduce the word "funnel" into the discussion (for those previously unacquainted with the term in this context). The idea is that a landing page provides links to the major subdivision of a site by topical areas of interest. Each subdivision offers successively more focused direction to sub-topics, funneling the visitor ever more explicitly toward the desired content. This model does not preclude alternative "quick-links" that provide direct access to the more focused content for the more sophisticated or returning visitor. I appreciate that having a "surf-ever-deeper" to find your goal model is unappealing in some ways, but this brings us back to the interaction design issue. I suspect that each of us owns preconceptions and biases as to the nature of what visitors seek. However, these biases are based in personal preferences not necessarily accurately reflective of what the majority of visitors truly want or expect. On this list alone, over the past, few days, I have seen more than one request that reflects a very limited grasp of geek-dom as it relates to the usage of the website as a tool to access the content. Newbies need things that we do not.
I still favor the involvement of REAL user-interaction design folks. Is there a hard deadline on "the final solution"?
On 2008-04-02 12:49:27 PM, Richard Harrison wrote:
Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
"Simpler is better." Yes on a child's tape player; no in a cockpit.
Simpler's better in a cockpit too - just enormously harder to achieve.
At least having different content on the front page we can have some better idea of what people are and are not doing.
Permit me introduce the word "funnel" into the discussion (for those previously unacquainted with the term in this context). The idea is that a landing page provides links to the major subdivision of a site by topical areas of interest. Each subdivision offers successively more focused direction to sub-topics, funneling the visitor ever more explicitly toward the desired content. This model does not preclude alternative "quick-links" that provide direct access to the more focused content for the more sophisticated or returning visitor. I appreciate that having a "surf-ever-deeper" to find your goal model is unappealing in some ways, but this brings us back to the interaction design issue. I suspect that each of us owns preconceptions and biases as to the nature of what visitors seek. However, these biases are based in personal preferences not necessarily accurately reflective of what the majority of visitors truly want or expect. On this list alone, over the past, few days, I have seen more than one request that reflects a very limited grasp of geek-dom as it relates to the usage of the website as a tool to access the content. Newbies need things that we do not.
Definitely +1. On that note, I'd prefer news to be on a separate news page (and possibly get a large banner on the front page, as Mairin might have mentioned before).
I still favor the involvement of REAL user-interaction design folks. Is there a hard deadline on "the final solution"?
Nope. It'd be nice to have something ready for F9, but we are still free to make changes afterwards.
Thanks, Ricky
Mike McGrath wrote:
Thats because the wiki is full of developer content. There's a few things in there for the end user. But I'd wager less then 10% of the 10,000+ uncontroled pages to which no one is accountable is for an end user. We linked to the wiki because we figured people were used to drinking the sand. In my opinion the wiki shouldn't be linked to directly from there anyway.
Having spend lots of time on managing wiki content, I wouldn't say trashing it repeatedly as some kind of unwieldy beast is going to help any. If anyone wants to help manage the content better, your contributions are most welcome.
Rahul
On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Mike McGrath wrote:
Thats because the wiki is full of developer content. There's a few things in there for the end user. But I'd wager less then 10% of the 10,000+ uncontroled pages to which no one is accountable is for an end user. We linked to the wiki because we figured people were used to drinking the sand. In my opinion the wiki shouldn't be linked to directly from there anyway.
Having spend lots of time on managing wiki content, I wouldn't say trashing it repeatedly as some kind of unwieldy beast is going to help any. If anyone wants to help manage the content better, your contributions are most welcome.
10,000 pages? Can you give me a rough estimate of what those 10,000 pages are used for?
-Mike
On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Mike McGrath wrote:
On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Mike McGrath wrote:
Thats because the wiki is full of developer content. There's a few things in there for the end user. But I'd wager less then 10% of the 10,000+ uncontroled pages to which no one is accountable is for an end user. We linked to the wiki because we figured people were used to drinking the sand. In my opinion the wiki shouldn't be linked to directly from there anyway.
Having spend lots of time on managing wiki content, I wouldn't say trashing it repeatedly as some kind of unwieldy beast is going to help any. If anyone wants to help manage the content better, your contributions are most welcome.
10,000 pages? Can you give me a rough estimate of what those 10,000 pages are used for?
Also the 4,000+ attachments. Can you let me know what those are for? If you detect anger in my voice its because I now have to figure out how to migrate all of that stuff and with the exception of a few people I've had almost no help in doing it.
I trash the wiki because it wakes me up at night (literally). I trash the wiki because I can never find anything I'm looking for on it. I trash the wiki because even now as we migrate it to a new platform I see an immense amount of just "Stuff" thats not categorized and to which no one is responsible.
-Mike
Mike McGrath wrote:
On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Mike McGrath wrote:
On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Mike McGrath wrote:
Thats because the wiki is full of developer content. There's a few things in there for the end user. But I'd wager less then 10% of the 10,000+ uncontroled pages to which no one is accountable is for an end user. We linked to the wiki because we figured people were used to drinking the sand. In my opinion the wiki shouldn't be linked to directly from there anyway.
Having spend lots of time on managing wiki content, I wouldn't say trashing it repeatedly as some kind of unwieldy beast is going to help any. If anyone wants to help manage the content better, your contributions are most welcome.
10,000 pages? Can you give me a rough estimate of what those 10,000 pages are used for?
Also the 4,000+ attachments. Can you let me know what those are for? If you detect anger in my voice its because I now have to figure out how to migrate all of that stuff and with the exception of a few people I've had almost no help in doing it.
The fact that there is 10,000 pages and 4,000 attachments from people who had to sign the CLA in the first place should tell you how much it is being used by the project. When we have something better to manage that content like the plone stuff that never really materialized, we can trash the wiki. Till then it is the best we got.
Rahul
On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 23:03 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
The fact that there is 10,000 pages and 4,000 attachments from people who had to sign the CLA in the first place should tell you how much it is being used by the project. When we have something better to manage that content like the plone stuff that never really materialized, we can trash the wiki. Till then it is the best we got.
We're going to have to ask those couple of thousand of people to take some ownership of their content.
In the new wiki space, we must make it mandatory that pages have ownership. It can be an individual, a SIG, a project, whatever.
FWIW, the 10,000+ pages include a significant amount of l10n, so the number of 'identical content in multiple languages' pages is going to be a fraction of the total.
- Karsten
On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 11:34 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
I know its a bit late for this but can we not do this on our front page?
Glad you weighed in, I've been wanting to counter the "But look at Gooooogle! It's so slick and bare and minimum and cooool! Why would we want more on a page than a search box?" meme that gets tossed around. :)
Exactly what are we trying to accomplish and is putting this feed on the very first thing people see when people look for Fedora accomplishing that?
We are providing a view into:
* Community vibrancy * Community content * Community events and announcements
Let's check how popular they are compared to other parts of the Fedora front page by watching the traffic they attract. There is not universal agreement that "bare minimum" is enough for our front page. There seems to be a trend for, "pare to bare minimum, then slowly increase and see where that gets us." This is part of that philosophy.
I certainly don't have veto powers over the website or anything like that but I've fought 3 fights already to keep stuff off of the main page. I missed this one or I would have fought it too.
This has your comments:
https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/357
Note that the original request came, iirc, from a discussion you and I had at FUDCon. I don't recall any invoking of the Great Google God of UI Design at that time.
I say again:
There's a reason http://www.google.com/ is king and http://www.yahoo.com/ isn't. If google can exist at the size it is with the simple home page it has and we can't, we've done something wrong.
Mike, when Fedora is a search engine, then your argument will make sense. We are instead a vibrant community trying to attract contributors, developers, and a few users. Where that is more important to Google, their pages are richer[1].
Giving those people the bare minimum ... well, is it working? Is it not working? How do we know?
Do you read the emails that come in to webmaster@ and askfedora@ about what people can and cannot find on our websites? Sure, no one has said, "Where is your news feed?" but how will they even know if we don't show them that it exists. A feed does this:
* Shows the existence of something useful * Does something useful (link to the feed source, link to article, direct RSS feed link, etc.)
As opposed to a dead link that just hints at something useful.
To put this another way, I'd TOTALLY REPLACE the links to "Documentation" and "Release Notes" on fp.org and start.fp.org with a cool feed like this:
Docs/Kbase Latest kbase entry 1 Latest kbase entry 2 Latest FAQ entry 1 Latest Doc updated
... with 'Docs' a link to docs.fp.o and 'kbase' a link to (the fictional) kbase.fp.o.
Now, you can argue that "Docs" and "Kbase" as pure links are good enough. Sure. If you know what you are looking for and that it is contained in "Docs" or "Kbase". What if I want to know how to join Fedora? Do I know if "Docs" is or is not going to help me with just the word "Docs"? OK, so now we've added "Join". etc. Non-dynamic links are not always the best way to link to information.
So, let's agree that minimalistic has its advantages, and recognize that it has to be tuned to the situation. Fedora's pages need the right balance, and "look like Google" just ain't it.
- Karsten
[1] Richer Google pages:
http://gmail.com http://code.google.com/soc/2008/ http://docs.google.com/
They have one, big purpose on their front page (search) that ties into all these other, niche purposes. If our only purpose was to distribute Fedora, we could do "Get Fedora" and have a search box, and that's it. But it unfortunately is not our only goal, so overly minimalistic design fails us.
On Tue, 1 Apr 2008, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 11:34 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
I know its a bit late for this but can we not do this on our front page?
Glad you weighed in, I've been wanting to counter the "But look at Gooooogle! It's so slick and bare and minimum and cooool! Why would we want more on a page than a search box?" meme that gets tossed around. :)
I'm taking my dog out of this fight seeing as A) I'm alone and B) don't have the time to follow up on this. I'll get back in the fight in about 6 months if the website starts to look like this.
or
http://www.bermuda-triangle.org/
We're at 22 links on the main page.
$ wget -qO- http://fedoraproject.org/ | grep -i href -c 22
-Mike
On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 09:00 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
I'm taking my dog out of this fight seeing as A) I'm alone
You are not alone, but you don't have a plan either. At least have some respect for the existence of this mailing list and the people here, as we try to build process, methods, and leadership. For better or worse, "we" are the people in charge of the website's look, feel, and user experience.
- Karsten
On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 09:00 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
I'm taking my dog out of this fight seeing as A) I'm alone
You are not alone, but you don't have a plan either. At least have some respect for the existence of this mailing list and the people here, as we try to build process, methods, and leadership. For better or worse, "we" are the people in charge of the website's look, feel, and user experience.
I have plenty of respect for everyone on the list. I do. But I'm well aware of what a slippery slope is and I fear that we're doing it. Having said that.... I'm not a UI designer. And thats why I'm not fighting against this any longer. Put 'er up. Bring people to the site.
-Mike
websites@lists.fedoraproject.org