SEUL: Website beginnings

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

There are many new faces on seul-pub-www right now. As Simon (our
old webmaster) is disappearing, we need a new set of webmasters
for the seul pages. I sent out mail this afternoon describing how I
want to set this up: basically, my ideal webmaster team is a black box
that will do the right thing. :)

You guys have free reign over what should be done and how it should
be done. People who have expressed interest in helping with the seul
webpages are:

mdunnett@citilink.com
pete@seul.org
wearl@jps.net
cuplan@seul.org
sheeque@geocities.com
heiko@spraynetwork.de
cbhiii-linux@ic.net

Some of them have introduced themselves here; some have not.

Things that I see that could use some work:

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At www.seul.org/archives/, the button doesn't list all our lists
anymore. Oops. In fact, that list doesn't even list seul-pub-www.

The faq sucks, as Cuplan said.

Searching on archives still isn't implemented. That's going to be
difficult for you guys, since the website is not on the development
machine (see below). It means Omega should deal with it, ideally.
But we know how quickly that's getting done..:)

It would be cool to add a "list of recent posts" to somewhere
prominent on the site. Like, the last 2 days, all lists that seul
hosts.

I need people hunting for apps and telling project independence
about them; we may even help out with their website and/or take
that job off their hands, if we are organized and effective enough
to do this. I'm sure they wouldn't mind.

I also need people hunting for useful docs and telling us about them.

My links page (www.seul.org/what/links.html) really needs a
maintainer, and somebody to spruce it up a bit. It's yours if you
want it.

I have a habit of finding cool projects that have a lot of potential
but live on geocities, or worse, have no host site at all. See also
www.geda.seul.org, www.freehdl.seul.org, www.wxftp.seul.org,
www.freecase.seul.org, www.independence.seul.org, linuxunited.org.
If people find projects that fit with seul's goals, tell me.
Furthermore, we should probably mention this (subtly!) somewhere
on our pages that those sorts of people would look. The more work
we can get other people to do, the better. :)

The Whylinux? document needs an active maintainer. More important,
somebody should contact other linux-advocacy-docs and try to
coordinate the development of one (or a few) comprehensive
well-written global documents along those lines. Let me know if
you're interested, else I'll bring it back up in a couple of weeks.

Documentation on how to do website work for us. (See below.)

Make those damn frames go away. If you guys can come up with a
good way to design the site that's still as useful but doesn't
involve frames..I hate them. I'm sure other people hate them too.

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Anyway, that's a smattering of things that come to mind. There
are many more, I'm sure. 

What you guys will probably want to do for now is become familiar
with the website and how it's designed. Simon has lots of docs
living under http://www.seul.org/pub/website/, particularly
http://www.seul.org/pub/website/gettingstarted.html
Read that and see if it makes any sense. If you have questions,
ask them on seul-pub-www@seul.org and they will get answered
(and then once you've figured it out, go fix the docs so that
they'll make sense to the next person who reads them :)
It's probably possible to condense the documentation a bit, so
it's more palatable.

The short summary:
1) if you don't have an account on cran, contact me (tell me
what username you want) and I'll fix that.
http://www.seul.org/sys/doc/dev-faq/general-FAQ.html looks like
a good read for more details on how to deal with cran.
2) you can either keep your cvs repository on your machine
(instructions on doing that are in those docs), or you can keep
it on cran itself. Currently the repository is only a couple of
megs, so I don't care which one you choose. It should be based
on your proficiency with ssh/cvs and the speed/stability of
your net connection.
If you choose to have the repository on cran, do this (from ~):

mkdir -p work/seul
cd work/seul
cvs -d /home/seul/cvsroot/ checkout .

Then you will have the repository set up in that directory,
and you can do things as normal.

sdoc will take a bit of getting used to. It's really very
simple from the perspective of writing pages: you get to use
a couple more tags than normal html supports, and they make
your page easier to write. Keep in mind that nothing is set in
stone -- you guys can conclude that think the <section> tag
should generate different-looking html, and make that happen.
Mark Dunnett is familiar with sdoc from the development side,
and Pete is familiar with it from the writing side.
The only other tricky part is that the website itself lives
on belegost -- not cran. Which means that it's difficult to
hose both at once, but it also means that it's not-quite-easy
to debug between them, particularly if you don't have access
to belegost. Pete has access to belegost; I'll give more of
you accounts if you find the need.

Anyway, read things and get up to speed, introduce yourself,
do whatever you think necessary. :)

Clarification: seul-pub is for discussion of the "public"
side of seul. This includes the website. However, there exists
a list seul-pub-www that is for more detailed discussion of
the website itself. Consider it as:
seul-pub is for people who want to be kept informed about what's
going on. Status reports, lists of changes, etc are cool for there.
seul-pub-www is for people who want to do all the webwork, discuss
the advantages of one implementation over another, how to actually
implement things, etc.
Cross-posts are fine (if they're appropriate for both).

Thanks. Ask me (actually, ask seul-pub-www -- I'm on all the seul
lists, of course) if you have any questions.
--Roger