Re: SEUL: Website still going on?

[Ian Bicking <ian@chicagonet.net>]

On Sat, Oct 16, 1999 at 01:34:33PM +0000, Doug Loss wrote:
> Be more specific on the problems, and we can try to help.  I use ppp all the
> time, and the only problem I have is the occasional <does not resolve> message
> from my caching DNS server.

I just realized that I'd disabled my loopback device at the same time I
disabled the default routing for ethernet.  It confused me badly, causing
a new problem when I fixed an old problem, not knowing if I broke something
or if I only fixed part of an old problem.

But I think it's okay now.

> > Anyway, I'd like to get to work if we can.  I think the we
> > need to really just do stuff, and then we'll have something done,
> > and then we'll keep doing stuff, and eventually it will all be
> > good and the people shall look upon it and give it their
> > blessing.  Or something.  The website design has been talked
> > about for a while, and it should start happening.
> > 
> Agreed.  Let's rough out a plan for the site, parcel out responsibilities, and
> have at it.
> 
> > Can we set up an alternate site (www.seul.org/edu/experimental)
> > to create the new pages in parrellel?
> > 
> I don't think we should revise just seul-edu.  The whole site needs a redo. 
> Whatever we do should apply to SEUL generally.

Okay.  I don't know much about what's happening in SEUL in general...
anyway,  I was just thinking that if we have an experimental place 
we can share ideas more concretely, trying them out on that location
without messing up the site too badly.

It would be nice to just copy the site to the experimental location,
then have at it.  Of course, we need to plan and all that... but I
think doing is more important than planning at the moment.  Maybe
with a real space to play in, things will happen.  Then we'll have
concrete things to plan...

> > I'd be interested in sorting through all the archives and making
> > a more useful archive -- human editted and all that.  That sort
> > of thing appeals to my monotonous, anal side sometimes.
> > 
> Show us what you're thinking of, and if it doesn't suck we'll probably agree to
> it. :-)

I guess it's the same thing Bob was thinking about (Bob?) -- but I'm
not sure.  Anyway, I was thinking of taking all the archives and sifting
through them.  Getting rid of the chit-chat and other noise messages
which aren't appropriate to save for posterity, categorizing them (for
instance, there's lots of X-terminal messages spread over a number of
threads), maybe editting down some messages, collecting the links, etc.

I mentioned kernel-traffic a while ago <http://www.kt.linuxcare.com>
and that's a little like what I'm thinking of, only organized over the
entire history of the mailing list.

seul-edu@seul.org is the main source of, well, anything on seul-edu.  I
think that's fine and there's a lot of advantages to the more casual,
interactive nature of a mailing list.  But the archives themselves aren't
a great way to look through that resource.  The archives should still
remain, of course, as a complete and persistant reference to the mailing
list.  This would just supplement them.

My initial idea for implementation is to take the mail -- seperated into
individual files and in original format -- add some machine-generated
markups (paragraphs, header parsing, and what-not), and then read over
that all and edit the machine markups (isolating code, special formatting,
etc.) while (more importantly) adding markup to categorize and edit them.

The tags would be ad hoc -- like <mail category="xterminal"></mail> or
that sort of thing.  Maybe there's well defined tags already in use --
I don't know (?).  I'd have to think a while about what tags.  Then I'd
use XML tools to make HTML pages out of them.

Later, maybe it would be worth it to make dynamic web stuff for searching,
giving specific view, etc.  I want don't want to eliminate any information
that would make this possible, but I don't think the dynamic stuff needs
to exist to make this useful.

Most of the work is actually reading through all the mail, but like I
said, that sort of tedium appeals to me sometimes.

-- 
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< Ian Bicking                 |  bickiia@earlham.edu                >
< drawer #419 Earlham College |  http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~bickiia >
< Richmond, IN 47374          |  (765) 973-2824                     >
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