On Monday 24 March 2008 10:56, Joost Verburg wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > In other words, her spontaneous reaction to the original www.lyx.org and > > the wiki is that they currently suck. Guess I should be glad that the > > wiki wasn't worst at least... Slashdot got some good comments from her > > though. > > I agree that the current wiki looks a bit better than www.lyx.org. But > for example the introduction text of the wiki is way too long and too > technical. I would expect the homepage to give an overview of the > content instead of being a wiki help page. > > Joost
Inspired by this thread, I took a look at the LyX website. Except for the silly background graphic and ridiculous colors, it's not bad. You can navigate fairly well to find what you want. If you want www.lyx.org to be REALLY useful to LyX users needing information, consider formatting it the way I format "Linux Library" at http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/index.htm. This page has all Linux related links on one page, but they're arranged hierarchically so the user isn't overwhelmed. Because they're all on one page, navigating the hierarchy is instantaneous regardless of connection speed. Because they're all on one page, they can be found either by "drill down" or by text search. For the person wanting to quickly find the right information, this interface is ideal. My system provides the ability to put text descriptions to the right of each link, so the use knows what he's clicking on. In the hierarchy, all nodes except leaf nodes start with an elipses, so you know whether you're going to visit a new page or just drill down some more. Maintenance of this page is trivial. The source for the page is a tab indented text outline. The fast way to maintain it is with VimOutliner, but you can easily maintain it with any text editor. After making a change or addition, you just run the new source outline through a script that converts it to HTML, and then upload the HTML to your server. Because the source is kept as an outline, the resulting web page tends to be a highly organized hierarchy, especially if care is taken when designing the outline. If you guys want to make your web page work like this, I'll slap your favorite free-software license on my script, give it to you, and you can modify it to give just what you need for www.lyx.org. Thanks SteveT Steve Litt Books written in LyX: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting Troubleshooting: Just the Facts
