So I've been playing some more with blog software, and I've switched over to using wordpress, since it seems to be a little easier to use. You can see my toy site here:
http://blog.idle-minds.net/ Right now it supports some pretty trivial stuff. Most importantly is the felix syntax highlighting :) But seriously, I've got it set up to CC a mailing list whenever a blog post is made. Unfortunately, my domain stopped forwarding mails while I was testing this, so I haven't yet checked to see if comments are forwarded as well. Going backwards is a bit more difficult. There are some plugins that can do that for drupal, but they only forward to a drupal forum, not the blog. Finally, all these blog software things really seem to be ugly php code on the backend, and I don't have any interest in tweaking things to get them how I like them. I'm considering using a web framework like rails or django to just do this ourselves. Of course that's a much larger engineering task when we just need to have *something*. One can always dream :) The next thing is how to best structure the webpage. Here's some ways of doing things. First, we have django: http://www.djangoproject.com/ While they've written custom software, the layout of having an informational front page, a blog on the side, and a trac website under "code" seems pretty well integrated. the front page has highlights from the blog, but the mailing list is under another tab "community". Another is google web toolkit. They basically have two entry points: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/ http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/ First is an informational page about how to find it, documentation, and etc. The second is similar to sourceforge, where there's a tracker, a wiki, and the svn repository. There's links to an external blog and the mailing lists. ruby: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ This may be more along the lines of what we're thinking. The main page has an excerpt from the ruby blog. There's tabs along the top pointing to documentation, but development info is buried. We'd probably want to bring this out more. finally, macports. These guys may have a format I'd be happy to steal from: http://www.macports.org/ As opposed to all the other pages, this one manages to have a pretty seemless integration between the info site and the dev site through careful layout. By using both vertical and horizontal tab-bars, the trac service doesn't seem like it's an external project. For us, I'd like to take the macports format. I've looked at a bunch of other services for ticket tracking and subversion support, and I think trac offers a wonderful combination of the two. Unfortunately, this would require the risk of self-hosting. We can mitigate this, though. The most important thing is to not lose the repository, and we can mirror it onto sourceforge.net or code.google.com. The rest we'd have to set up a mysql dump and back it up locally. Amazon does have a service called S3 that is supposed to be reasonably cheap for remote backups. The last component is the mailing list. That's another thing we could host ourselves, or pass it on to someone else. The web-interface from sourceforge is pretty useless and isn't indexed, so I prefer google groups. The main problem with it is that we can't automatically migrate the emails. So, what we could do is migrate the lists, then keep the old one as a read only archive. So, the basic layout for the website I'm imagining: shared vertical tab bar: main page downloads blog wiki -> link to trac's wiki documentation (merge with wiki by having it on the opening page?) tickets -> link to trac's ticket tracker development -> link to trac main page: blurb describing the project / sales pitch svn path to get source quick example on how to build recent blog headlines recent group traffic downloads: svn path to get source older versions (possibly use sourceforge / google for downloads) blog: full archive and articles -e ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Felix-language mailing list Felix-language@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/felix-language
