Re: [hackers] A Proposition
On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, Zack Rosen wrote: Basically I am proposing we dissolve the H4D working group and reform the organization as the Dean Space development community. Snap snap. Looks good to me. I have deanspace.net and deanspace.org; i can update the IPs as soon as you tell me where to point them. Should i point them at the same IP as hack4dean.org for now? -- ?!ng
[hackers] RE: offline cuz its easier as I'm learning hte ropes
(1) I was thinking the same thing, but before we start pushing it, the link to the Get Local tools, the stuff allowing you to put up your own thermometer, and Meetup are all important links. Are those in all the kits? (2) What do you guys need to feed the events from the Get Local tools to the pages? This is a very easy and useful module to create. DFA should just have a feed up with all their little side bar image links, and we should feed it into a module (block) on Drupal that also contains links to main DFA sites. Also, states should have a feed up with links to all the city pages under them, and all city pages should grab the feed and display the links in a block as well. There is only a little bit of dev required to make this piece of magic work, and these are _essential_ things to have on the sites... ...Volunteers? -Zack
Re: [hackers] Browser Detect?
On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, scorpiosunmoon wrote: Am I missing something? Is there a built in browser detect? Or something along those lines??? I haven't checked them all but many of these themes look pretty funky in Netscape 4. Netscape 4 is (i'm afraid i cannot put it more delicately) a piece of junk when it comes to CSS. It blatantly ignores the standard, it's full of bugs, and its release did untold damage to the Web by delaying the adoption of CSS for many years. Probably tens of thousands of person-hours of work have been wasted all over the world because of the incompetence of the Netscape programmers. For users who still suffer with Netscape 4, the best solution is likely for some kind soul who still runs NN 4 (i don't have it any more) to develop a theme that specifically works around its problems. We may be able to throw in a user-agent check that chooses a different default theme when the user is running NN 4. -- ?!ng
[hackers] Re: [developers] MetaDean NodeTracking Design Doc
As I see it there are two purposes to having MetaDean rate content: 1) To tell what's hot, popular, kickin' etc. (most important) 2) To allow for some kind of editorial comment on content (e.g. Be aware of this awful news article; it's a complete hack job.) Item #1 is accomplished by having metadean observe how often a given piece is showing up around the net, how often something is re-syndicated. Perhaps this isn't feasable, but I always thought it would be rather simple to keep track of the origin of a piece of syndicated content. Then when MetaDean sees that a piece titled Insightful Poll Analysis originating from user fooboo on node desmoins.fordean.net is popping up on 35 sites, this piece will presumably get a high rating. Or, looking at your question again, maybe we have different understandings of bubble up syndication: MetaDean doesn't really have much to do with this. If MetaDean picked up low-lying content and pulled it to the top, it wouldn't really be bubbling up. The whole notion of the bottom-to-top feed is that it occurs though different site admins and blog editors deciding that each other's content is worth linking to or re-posting. Item #2 is encapsulated in the normal blog format. We have to trust that we're smart enough and tasteful enough to do our own editorializing. If someone just links to a dean-bashing article, pretty soon someone will pick it apart in their blog, and then that blog content becomes the hot link. This making sense to y'all? -j Looks great so far Josh, but my one big question is - how does MetaDean assign ratings to content so that it can be bubbled up? Will sites ping the server? Or will it just have feeds for hot items? Or is there an easier way to do this that my addled brain isn't coming up with right now? -Zack -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joshua Koenig Sent: Friday, July 25, 2003 3:18 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Zephyr Teachout Subject: [developers] MetaDean NodeTracking Design Doc A first stab at a design doc for node-tracking MetaDean is here: http://www.hack4dean.org/phpwiki/index.php?NodeTracking If no one else does it, I'll hammer out a first-draft SQL schema over the weekend. The other big question now is where we're going to set up our sandbox. Note that when I talk about MetaDean from now on, I'm talking about tracking nodes/sites and content only, not talent. The talent stuff is going under the Visible Volunteer social networking tool (aka Deanster). Unless there are objections, of course. ;) cheers -josh Politics is the art of controlling your environment. Participate! Elect Howard Dean President in 2004! http://www.outlandishjosh.com/politics/dean/ Politics is the art of controlling your environment. Participate! Elect Howard Dean President in 2004! http://www.outlandishjosh.com/politics/dean/
Re: [hackers] Browser Detect?
netscape 4 Well, for my public facing sites here, I only worry about NS6 and up (the mozilla versions) and we indicate clearly what browsers we do support on the home pages; browsers are still free and easy to in stall and NS 6 has been out for like a year now or more so, though a site should be made idiot proof, it should not have to be vegetable proof; the user does have some responsibility for their own online experience, IMHO. CMR --enter gratuitous quotation that implies my profundity here--
Re: [hackers] RE: [developers] MetaDean NodeTracking Design Doc
Looks great so far Josh, but my one big question is - how does MetaDean assign ratings to content so that it can be bubbled up? Will sites ping the server? Or will it just have feeds for hot items? Or is there an easier way to do this that my addled brain isn't coming up with right now? Keep in mind that I'm still coming up to speed especially on MetaDean stuff: Could we put (or are we already putting) some kind of tag on things like national, regional, state, city, ranked not by location so much as by interest and we can sort things out that way? Am I making any sense? My eyes are still crossed from module writing. :) I have read the wiki about MetaDean. - Lynn Siprelle * Writer, Mother, Programmer, Fiber Artisan The New Homemaker: http://www.newhomemaker.com/ Siprelle Associates: http://www.siprelle.com/ People-Powered Howard! http://www.deanforamerica.com/
Re: [hackers] A Proposition
I'm for the transition to DeanSpace as well.. CMR --enter gratuitous quotation that implies my profundity here--
[hackers] endorse.module now available
I don't have it up at sourceforge yet because I'm trying to work on that whole cvs/sourceforge thing. So until I figure that out or give up, hrere it is: http://www.siprelle.com/endorse.tar.gz Regards, Lynn S. - Lynn Siprelle * Writer, Mother, Programmer, Fiber Artisan The New Homemaker: http://www.newhomemaker.com/ Siprelle Associates: http://www.siprelle.com/ People-Powered Howard! http://www.deanforamerica.com/
[hackers] Draft Deanster Design Doc
Here's a draft of my design doc for Deanster (a.k.a. the talend database, the visible volunteers, the front room). Please excuse the parts that aren't quite filled in yet and feel free to correct me where I'm wrong: http://www.hack4dean.org/phpwiki/index.php?TalentDatabase peace -josh Politics is the art of controlling your environment. Participate! Elect Howard Dean President in 2004! http://www.outlandishjosh.com/politics/dean/
[hackers] Fwd: User account details for joshk at Indiana for Dean
Some very interesting perspectives from the webmaster at indianafordean. Worth a read. He's invited any of us that want to discuss further to join him in IRC. irc.openirc.net #deanchat cheers -josh From: IFD Webmaster [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sat Jul 26, 2003 3:42:56 PM US/Pacific To: Joshua Koenig [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Zack Rosen [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: User account details for joshk at Indiana for Dean So, do you intend to take a stock Drupal source tree, hack it up, and then release that as your kit? I would prefer to see the tools you're building be drop-in modules, and any core Drupal code modifications rolled into the main source tree. Hopefully this is the approach you're taking. Looking at the design goals again, here are a few concerns to think about: Calendar: The tool doesn't send E-mail reminders prior to the event. The Dean groups in our state are hooked on Yahoo Groups, and their calendar does this. The existing Drupal calendar needs to be modified to support this. Mailing List/Message Forums: The majority of Dean groups across the country are using Yahoo Groups/Lists. How do you intend to convince all of these folks to move away from those and sign-up to local site lists? Frankily, there are just too many mailing lists already.. look at our site.. Indiana has five! I think the logic of mailing lists for small groups, forums for big ones is backward. A web-based forum is not a good medium by itself for large groups where there will be many postings. Even with threading and searching, it becomes hard for people to dig out the information they're looking for. If you really want forums, get every state for Dean site setup with one mailing list each by consolidating the existing lists, and then tie this in with a web-based forum and an NNTP news feed. See http://papercut.org/ which is written by a friend of mine. The mailing list would then populate the forums and the news feeds. All the information is now the same for multiple tools (which lets people use the ones they're most comfortable with)... syndicate the results. Getting existing mailing lists consolidated would allow more thoughts and ideas to reach everyone involved, instead of having isolated pockets of information, and requiring everyone to subscribe to multiple groups or look at multiple places/tools. Social engineering plays a role in this as much, if not more so, than technical prowess. News/Blogger Tools: Many folks have their own blogs on other blog sites. Is it really necessary to have even more? I would encourage these tools to be disabled locally as we have done, and just have folks use existing blog resources. As long as those provide RSS ability, it's trivial to syndicate them on the local site. General concerns: It's a lot of effort for little gain in terms of practical usability to end-users. All of this relies on the assumption that the consumers of these services check websites more frequently than they check E-mail. It also assumes that existing sites not using Drupal will be compelled to switch because of the new tools, and that these folks have the necessary technical expertise to set it up. I'm not sure who these 40 groups are, but I assume some of them are existing state for Dean sites. If you've noticed, a lot of those use the http://www.fordean.org/ tools, which is a pretty good indicator of their abilities. The majority of existing sites are not dynamic or DB driven. Our philosophy is not based on flooding the web with more Dean sites, but rather enabling Dean-supporters to easily set up locally-relevant nodes which are used by campaign participants to coordinate,to get information that's specific and relevant to them, and to express their own voice in a way that the entire campaign can potentially hear. While this sounds like a noble goal, the to easily set up part assumes a lot. Setting up Apache/PHP/MySQL and installing Drupal+Hack4Dean kit isn't trivial for my interpretation of the target audience. Look at those 40 groups you mentioned. Is it safe to say they have the ability to do this? Most people don't have the first set of requirements. They would have to pay to host their sites on an ISP that does, which usually isn't cheap. This isn't meant to sound negative again, but I'm just curious if you've done a reality check lately. :) Maybe my assumption regarding the target audience is wrong. In any case, it may be a good idea to provide resources for those interested, such as a listing of ISPs that would be suitable for hosting Drupal sites. What about hack4dean.org and americansfordean.org? Where are you hosting your sites? I am only running indianafordean.org because I don't pay for my bandwidth, and had existing server resources in place for my other projects. It shouldn't cost people too much to do this sort of thing. We then want to implement a mothership node which can track all the multivariate RSS feeds which are
[hackers] Themes upgraded in SF sandbox
See them in action: http://dean.sourceforge.net/ Download them for yourself: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dean/ Changes: bluesky - removed screenshots and fixed footer Dean01 - fixed footer simpledean - newer version supersimpledean - new theme Let me know if you change your theme included in this distribution and if you have any more themes to include. Great work making these, keep it up. -Neil -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] aim: ndrumm3 http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/~ndrumm
Re: [hackers] endorse.module now available
Lynn...I installed your endorse module and set it up. I also made a block to promote it to keep on the front page. You can see it in action at www.uppervalleyfordean.com/drupal/endorse On Saturday, July 26, 2003, at 06:37 PM, Lynn Siprelle wrote: I don't have it up at sourceforge yet because I'm trying to work on that whole cvs/sourceforge thing. So until I figure that out or give up, hrere it is: http://www.siprelle.com/endorse.tar.gz Regards, Lynn S. - Lynn Siprelle * Writer, Mother, Programmer, Fiber Artisan The New Homemaker: http://www.newhomemaker.com/ Siprelle Associates: http://www.siprelle.com/ People-Powered Howard! http://www.deanforamerica.com/
Re: [hackers] Fwd: User account details for joshk at Indiana for Dean
This is long, forgive me. I started to respond to this in depth but I found myself repeating myself a lot, so I'm going to sum up (believe it or not, this is the summary). I don't speak for the group, I can only speak from my understanding, but my understanding is this: On coercing other sites into using our kit: This is A tool, not THE tool. Folks are welcome to use whatever tools they've got. We're focusing on drupal because we think we can easily set it up both as modules for existing drupal sites to drop in and also as a kit folks can roll out and have an easy-to-work with set of tools. I am fond of saying I am a designer who learned to program in self-defense, and granted, I am a quick study but I'm not THAT quick and in the last month I've written three themes and a couple of modules, and I have two more themes underway. If we do this right, we will have a kit that allows you to run an install script from the web and bing you're ready to go--if you choose to use the hack4dean/DeanSpace install. On mailing lists vs bulletin boards: I'm with you on that one. Mailing lists scale much better than bulletin boards, except that searching a Yahoo group sucks rocks. I'm hep with the gateway vibe myself. On feeds: Let's say I'm the webmaster of Oregon4Dean. (I have no idea if there is one, I haven't looked yet. If there isn't, I think I just volunteered myself. K.) I don't have time to search through every weblog in/about Oregon to find the ones for Howard Dean--and I even know how. I'd rather depend on my software to allow interested people to set up a political blog if they'd like on my site, and then rely on the networking/syndication tools to send that info up and down the hierarchy.* I myself have two blogs, three if you count the hack4dean one I'm running at Kombucha Brewers for Dean. One is my ezine's blog, where I try to cover news that's important to my readers, one is at my religious website where I cover news related to earth spirituality (where I run drupal), and once there's a local or virtual Dean community I want to join I'll probably get a political one going too. I don't like cluttering up my more site-specific blogs with other issues like politics other than occasional mentions. I imagine I'm not the only experienced blogger who feels that way, for one, and for seconds, if this works the way we think it's going to, we'll be bringing in a lot of folks who've never even HEARD the word blog before and getting them excited about the possibilities (I'm watching this happen right now on my religious site and we're not even involved in something as exciting as a grassroots campaign). People who want to opt out of this aggregation, that's fine, opt out. It's all good, as the kids say these days. On hosting: We've been going around and around about the feasibility of setting up a host of our own and I'm staying out of that one. Under FEC rules, if I'm understanding this right, my corporation Siprelle Associates Inc. can contribute $2000 worth of hosting services. It charges $10/mo under family and friends rate for hosting that includes PHP, MySQL, email and blah de blah, so that works out to 200 months of hosting. Let's say we go all the way, and we have every reason to believe we're headed for November '04 . That works out to about 14 sites for 14 months, if they were established today. So we line up 1,000 people and companies like SA, and you know we're out there. I don't think that's such a tall order. I really don't. And this is if we make things official or whatever. I am so not following the FEC conversations, I am just trying to keep my nose clean and code. Discuss. :) Lynn S. *Having said this, a blog/site registration module to allow bloggers and site managers with RSS feeds to register their feeds at DeanSpace sites and add them to the Dean aggregation/distribution of info is not a bad idea. DON'T LOOK AT ME, I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO PROGRAM SOMETHING LIKE THIS. Well, actually, I think I might if it's just registering the feed. oh god, what have I done...
[hackers] phew!
There's already an Oregon4Dean! Lynn S. - Lynn Siprelle * Writer, Mother, Programmer, Fiber Artisan The New Homemaker: http://www.newhomemaker.com/ Siprelle Associates: http://www.siprelle.com/ People-Powered Howard! http://www.deanforamerica.com/
RE: [hackers] A Proposition
So - does anyone volunteer for the following not-so-fun-but-very-important tasks? - Writing Install / Admin doc's for newbie admins to go along with the kit's. - Working on an install script / package for newbie admins. -Zack -Original Message- From: Shannon Little [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2003 10:39 AM To: Zack Rosen Subject: Re: [hackers] A Proposition I'd strongly...VERY strongly suggest that new and better installation instructions are included. Don't depend on the drupal instructions because they stink and are confusing for the average person. Like I said when I first joined...I had installed a lot of php scripts before and installing drupal was a total pain in the kiester. If any announcements are made before the ease of installation issue is dealt with the group is going to be totally bogged down with answering install questions and it will interfere in the ability to get the tools done. There also needs to be VERY clear instructions on how to set up the forum and various modules that use taxonomy. I just finally got the forum working last night because the explanations in the taxonomy admin section don't tell you what vocabulary to use. Suggestions should be added that tells people what vocabulary should be used for which module that requires taxonomy. Drupal is a great CMS, but it's not nearly as user friendly as others. I think there will be MANY people who will want to utilize the tools...so it's important to make things easy to understand for those of us who are a little technically challenged. Just my two cents. On Saturday, July 26, 2003, at 02:27 AM, Zack Rosen wrote: So here it is. Say what you think. If nobody objects, let's do it. If there are concerns, let's figure it out. If it is unworkable we forget it. Basically I am proposing we dissolve the H4D working group and reform the organization as the Dean Space development community. This entails: 1) Setting up a new Drupal site on deanspace.net / org 2) Get new mailing lists / forums / communication means to use for development discussions set up on the site and shutting down H4D's. 3) Figure out how we are going to host the site ourselves 4) Start working on setting up a tech / admin help desk with the Drupal project module to assist the test nodes in setting up the code 5) Announce the project formally on DFA, and tell people who will want to run our code to start experimenting with Drupal RC 4.2. 6) Make another call for dev help, and direct people right to the new DeanSpace community. 7) Get some test nodes up running our early code and working with us to test the tools as soon as they go on the CVS. Thoughts? -Zack
