All, Occasionally, we all have the need to give a reference to a presentation to someone e.g. on the users mailing list. For example:
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/6b604dd26142038a4abb1c378af49beee12d4ae1d2d8dc65391fd701@%3Cusers.tomcat.apache.org%3E In that case, I gave a direct link to a specific presentation (my Monitoring w/JMX presentation from ApacheCon NA 2016). I think this isn't good for 2 reasons: 1. Links are fragile. I may remove my presentation from people.a.o/~username, that stuff may be relocated, etc. 2. It may not be the most up-to-date version of that presentation. I gave a similar talk at ApacheCon NA 2015 but the 2016 version is better. If I do another one in 2018, presumably it will be the best, most up-to-date one and yet I've emailed-out links directly to the 2017 (and presumably 2015) version. 3. It avoids the Tomcat "presentations" page. Presumably, someone interested in one presentation may be interested in the others. The alternative is to say "go to /presentations.html" and search for "topic X", but as that page fills-up, I suspect people will be unlikely to actually find and read the document. I think a direct-link is probably best, if possible. I'm wondering if there might be a way to fix these. My initial idea was something like an "always up-to-date link to presentation X" where X is whatever presentations we often refer to (e.g. Mark's "tracking-down memory leaks in web applications"). That doesn't fix issue #3 but maybe someone else has an idea. What are our options when it comes to something like a URL which is an alias to the "latest presentation X"? If I were in control of the web server(s), I'd use something like mod_alias to perform a temporary-redirect from tomcat.apache.org/presentations/current-X to people.a.o/~user/whatever. That just needs to be updated any time the presentation is updated. That's a little fragile, too, since anyone making a presentation would have to register the presentation under a well-known name and then submit requests to update it. That means work for someone here (likely Mark, part of Infra). Is there a way we could do this such that any committer could update such redirects? Any other thoughts or ideas? In order to satisfy #3 above, perhaps we could have a dynamic (or maybe auto-generated but not actually dynamic) page which lists all the presentation topics and floats the "requested" one up to the top. Something like: [Tomcat Presentations] You have requested the latest version of "Monitoring Tomcat w/JMX". You can find it here: [direct link to latest] You may be interested in these other presentations as well: * [Other topic A, link to latest] * [Other topic B, link to latest] * ... Or even more good stuff: [link to /presentations.html] WDYT? Thanks, -chris
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