Re: [seul-edu] Forming a coalition to promote free and open toolsand content in education

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 01:15:27PM +0930, Michael Hall wrote:
> OK, a quick hunt around the usual sites hasn't turned up any 
> web-ring scripts, but there are enough clues there for me to knock one up
> myself, I'd say. I'd do this in PHP and maybe some JavaScript. So, the
> main question is where would the web ring be hosted. Is SEUL's server OK?

Yes, we can host it. But see below --- I don't think it's a "web ring"
that we want.

> And while we're at it, are there any special features/functionality that'd
> be good to include?
> 
> Off the top of my head, I see a logo/button on member web pages that takes
> a viewer to a page with a complete listing of all members on it, possibly
> searchable if that is deemed necessary (by topic, language, whatever). And
> a button/link back to where the viewer came from. Links could all be added
> by users (ie they do all the typing), with vetting simply requiring the
> click of a button by whoever is doing the vetting. Again, I can do all
> this in PHP/MySQL or PostgreSQL. 

Yes, I think this idea would be very useful. Les Richardson already has
some code that could probably be trivially adapted to do this. (Which
doesn't mean we should bring yet another person into this. If you want
to write it, that's great. Just so we have something that works.)

What you have described above is not a 'web ring'. I think a lot of
people react against the idea of a web ring, because they're associated
with flashy gaudy unprofessional sites. We *must* be professional here.

> Other web-rings seem to pass viewers on to another page one at a time (at
> random?). Is this what we need?

This random button is a novelty feature on web rings that quickly
wears out and isn't terribly useful anyway. Feel free to outvote me,
but...yuck. :)

I think a good clean list of projects, along with a short description
of each project and its primary contributions, would be very very useful.

Everybody can mirror it or link to one.

--Roger