On Mar 24, 2008, at 9:40 AM, Steve Litt wrote:
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.
I also think the LyX.org site is OK except for the background and the
white text... changing that alone could make a huge difference. I
have to admit that I learned some nice CSS tricks directly from the
LyX source code, about five years ago. The page hasn't changed much
since then, and maybe a general make-over will be useful simply as a
statement of how active LyX is as a project.
Jens
