Re: SEUL: Target for rough outline for SEUL website

[Roger R Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

> I think the initial SEUL page (not seul-edu) should more obviously indicate
> that SEUL isn't a monolithic project but is more an "umbrella" of subsections that
> all have similar goals.  Perhaps it could use the "town" metaphor, with seul-edu
> represented by a school house, seul-pub by a TV station, the various HOWTOs and
> advocacy docs we have by a library, etc.  We could and should have a news
> section that's kept updated regularly, perhaps represented as a billboard.  The
> various sections will need to decide how to represent themselves internally, although
> I can be counted on to offer an off-the-cuff opinion on almost anything.  Not
> that that's particularly helpful.

Urm.

I've always been under the impression that the seul frontpage should be very
simple and clear. Currently a hit to the frontpage consists of:
athm-209-218-xxx-22.home.net - - [16/Oct/1999:10:15:05 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 6598
athm-209-218-xxx-22.home.net - - [16/Oct/1999:10:15:05 -0400] "GET /images/seul1.jpg HTTP/1.0" 200 1808
athm-209-218-xxx-22.home.net - - [16/Oct/1999:10:15:05 -0400] "GET /images/c1grblue.GIF HTTP/1.0" 200 6163

This is about 15k. I have this weird notion that people are capable
of reading text and getting as much information and enjoyment out of it
as they would by looking at little pictures of umbrellas and houses and
libraries. I can see why seul-edu would want to do a bunch of pretty pictures
in their layout, and that's fine. But it will take some more convincing before
we convert the seul frontpage to a more cluttered, graphics-oriented design.

On the other hand, I will freely admit that I'm oldfashioned in this respect,
and maybe I'm just refusing to see "how the new world works". 

When I put the current webpage up, I got several mails from people saying
"finally, a clean simple webpage. You wrote that by hand, didn't you? It
shows, because there isn't any extra garbage in there."

I think the fundamental problem is that (and don't let this get out ;)
I want to see SEUL succeed, but I'm not cut out for "thinking at the end-user
level". Meaning, I'm much happier doing development work for cool hacker toys,
or discussing TCP protocol internals, or arguing about why the GPL is the only
license we should be using.

I have no idea if seul should move in the direction of having a graphically-
oriented frontpage. If all of you think it should, then by all means somebody
should step forward and move it in that direction.

--Roger