Hey all,
Okay, so my claim that I would have the website re-organization "done
tonight" was rather overstating my abilities. Aside for the need for sleep
and the demands of Real Life and such, I was ignoring the fact that my main
home PC is currently in some distress due to distro flux. But that turns out
to be a blessing is disguise, because perhaps a little bit more planning is in
order (see below), and keeping people informed is good (transparency (where
have I heard that before?)), and, well, 'cause trying to do it all in one
evening would probably have been a Really Bad Idea(TM).
REVIEW
For those who were not at today's meatspace meta-meeting
(AutumnalSummit2005), here's the summary:
The main GNHLUG website is currently implemented using something called
TWiki. TWiki has this concept of "webs". They are kind of like directories,
except they only go one level deep, and there is no root directory. (Okay, so
maybe they're more like 5.25-inch floppies with MS-DOS 1.0.) The individual
web pages (called "topics" in TWiki-speak) exist in those webs.
Currently, all of our original content exists mainly in the "Www" and
"Organizational" webs, with a smattering in "Main". We have two different
URLs (www.gnhlug.org and wiki.gnhlug.org), which bring you to two different
webs. For reasons that have been beat to death, many of us, myself included,
are convinced that this is the wrong way to go. We've even badgered those
who disagree into trying it our way.
THE PLAN
The plan is to take all our original content and merge it into the "Main"
web. The Main.WebHome page/topic will become the new GNHLUG home page, which
will appear when you pull up either of the www.gnhlug.org or wiki.gnhlug.org
URLs. Public pages, user pages, organizational pages, project pages, it will
all exist in one, big, happy wiki.
As far as "Joe User" is concerned, there should be little that is seen as
different. Links within the site will all still work as now. The regular URL
(http://www.gnhlug.org) will still bring one to the home page.
Externally bookmarked URLs will likely break. I can't think of a nice way
around this. To me, this is the biggest downside to this. However, it should
all be easily findable again, and I honestly don't think there are that many
people with bookmarks deep into the GNHLUG site. Of course, I've been wrong
plenty of times before.
IMPLEMENTATION
Most of the work can be done via the standard TWiki web interfaces. I have
volunteered to do the grunt work. It'll mainly be a lot of clicking "More",
then "Move Page", and so on. During the actual process of the moving, if
anyone else tries to do work on the wiki, they will likely collide with me.
Fortunately, I think I can get this done in half a day on a weekend some time
soon.
Much of the existing navigational will be retained, at least initially.
That includes the rough hierarchy created by the existing link structure.
I do intend to make the "GetInvolved" and "Organizational" aspects more
prominent on the home page, mainly by linking to them.
I'm also going to phase out some of pages that don't contribute anything
other then a list of links to Linux software. Instead, I'm going to provide
links to pages that do a better job then we ever could (e.g., Freshmeat,
Linux.org, Google, etc.). Others have already solved those problems; we
shouldn't try to do it ourselves. Actual content will not be deleted; just
the glorified bookmark files. :)
Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Pizza?
-- Ben "You are in a maze of twisty wiki pages, all alike" Scott
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