Re: SEUL: Re: Website redesign

[bickiia@earlham.edu]

Howdy.  I'm also interested in helping on the seul/edu (seul-edu or
seul/edu?) site.  I've spent a good portion of the last month learning
HTML and stuff, so I feel like using it.

Robert Hopcroft <hopcroft@uswest.net> wrote:
>finally realized what I had been searching for. What I want is for the

>SEUL web site to be inspirational. A visitor comes away a better
person.
>One can be inspired by art, music, etc. Seeing a masterpiece is
>inspirational. I want the seul site to be a masterpiece.

Ah... great aspirations.  I like the notion of being more than a
depository for information (though we could really use information as
well).  The normal alternative being a portal, but portals are cheesy
and dumb, or at least the word "portal" is.  But maybe if we renamed
ourselves iSeulEdu we'd be cool.  Anyway, there's not a whole lot to
port to, so that's really out.

But we can make something a little richer than a straight, utilitarian
site.  One thing that I think is important is that a lot of newcomers to
Linux get a utilitarian view of it and miss out on the background and
motivations behind it.  That's one thing.

Then there's the multitude of details.  Tips, tricks, case studies,
testimonials.  We could have a page called "tips and tricks", but that's
not very useful.  It's not organized the way a person *uses* the
information.  In fact, tips and tricks are never actively used -- they
sit in the back of the brain until they are useful, or else they solve a
problem that bugs you until you learn the trick.  But, I'm rambling on
something that's only vaguely related.

Which is kind of what I like.  One of the best sites I've read through
is the Portland Pattern Repository/WikiWiki.  The subject of it never
really caught my imagination very well (it's about programming patterns
and OO, mostly), but the organization did.  Oh, it's at
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors

Anyway, it has these deep and rambling organization of pages, created by
all these different people, with parenthetical thoughts that spin off in
every which direction.

I don't think that's quite appropriate for seul-edu.  But the
parenthetical thoughts are good.  Anecdotes and thoughts, maybe.

All of this probably shouldn't be set up in a deeply nested web of
hyperlinks, but there's other ways to present a bunch of notions at a
time.

If we can get some pictures of happy kids happily using Linux
(preferably without that glazed-look that kids get on computers), we can
randomly insert them in pages (not completely randomly, of course --
arbitrarily?)  Little things like this.

And we can take other people's content and slap them into the seul-edu
page.  Not without permission, but HOWTOs and all that are all fair
game.  But people's bios, selected threads from the mailing list, that
sort of thing.  I kind of like what Kernel Traffic/Kernel Cousins does
<http://www.kt.opensrc.org>, summarizing mailing list traffic.  We could
one-up that -- or maybe it's centralization -- and turn threads into
real pages, to save ideas for posterity while editting them to be more
useful than the archives.

Well... what was I getting at again?

I guess that means I'm through with this message.

  -- Ian