Re: [ox-en] Website
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 23:05:28 +0200
Hi StefanMz, Mathieu, all!
Great discussion :-) . I think the new Oekonux website will become
very good :-) .
I worked a lot on the ideas_ page. Especially the "Possible goals"
section is now structured very well and I also added a section "Inform
about Project Oekonux". I think we are already close to do the first
concrete steps soon.
.. _ideas: http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Project/WebSite/Ideas
Below I won't reply to things which are reflected on the ideas_ page
already.
4 days ago Mathieu O'Neil wrote:
Now, I just don't have the time to learn reStructuredText.
Well, in fact you are using it already unknowingly more or less. That
is one of the reasons I like it so much: Simple things are not only
simple but reflect common usage.
The point is that you always need to learn some markup language if you
want to write more than one paragraph after another. IMHO
reStructuredText has a astonishingly reasonable learning curve. And
you can do amazing things with it. And you can convert it to lots of
formats. For instance it would be a no-brainer to convert all pages to
PDF.
2 days ago Stefan Meretz wrote:
On 2009-05-15 14:45, Mathieu O'Neil wrote:
In my view to make the website attractive it would help to have
regularly updated content and / or interactivity.
Yes, bloglike teasers from new articles and news.
Ok. Understood.
Interactivity:
comments?
As far as I can see comments would be the first suggestion where real,
technical interactivity is needed. In the sense that someone can enter
some text in a web form. Right?
Possibly there could be a [link to a] new featured text on the front
page each month: this would be a way to rebuild from the ground up by
re-introducing new and old "important" [ox] texts.
Good idea!
And we could feed the topics from maillist debates into a sidebar.
Very good idea - especially because when automated this needs no more
effort :-) .
Also I think it would be good to have some interaction where a person
involved in the theory or practice of peer production responds to
people / engages in dialogue every month.
This takes some effort to find people being ready to take this "peer
producer of the month" position, write some overview of the activities
etc.
I think we should try to prevent a fixed timing. I do not see that we
have the resources for this at the moment. But a fixed timing is
rarely needed in the web :-) .
Another more relaxed way to do this could be an interview. We could send
a list of questions (which have to be carefully prepared) to peer
producers and theorists and present them on the side under special
category (to be easily find).
Well, I'll try to sort this a bit - to make it fit into my
non-web-designer brain ;-) .
By interactivity you basically mean that "the Oekonux community"
responds to / approaches someone outside "the Oekonux community".
Right?
The other suggestions to me sound more like a regularly updated
website (beyond the mail archives of course which are regularly
updated).
Finally I want to raise the question of aesthetics. Evidently for
StefanMn it is important that the tools used conform to certain
standards. Another concern is that the website look and feel good.
An important point.
I'm a bloody layman here and my design capacity in these things are
non-existent. I'll gladly leave this to someone else...
The only requirement from my side is that the design should be not too
aggressive and - if possible - should work with 800px wide screens -
to make access for poorer people / countries easier. And of course
without any ads!
I could imagine having a blog in the front with promoted (existing)
articles and news, interviews, project-of-the-month etc. and a wiki in
the back where articles are collected and developed. Alternatively a
Content-Management-System with such corresponding features could be used
(like Drupal, Joomla etc.)
I used Plone_ a bit and it has a lot of features - among them
supporting reStructuredText. The installation I'm using in my job is
maintained by a non-technician so it should be fairly simple. However,
I have no idea whether all your ideas could be done with it.
Unfortunately the installation I'm using is a bit outdated so I can
not conclude from this.
.. _plone: http://plone.org/
Although I like reStructuredText I propose to use MediaWiki in the back,
simply because so many people know it from Wikipedia (if not using a
complete CMS which, on the other hand, is more complicate to administer
and modify).
The main question here is: Who should be able to use this. Anyone or
just a few selected editors? So far I think a few selected editors
would suffice.
My cent for the moment. I'll continue to work on the ideas_ page and
may be I start some prioritized todo list soon listing things which
seem to be consensus already.
Grüße
Stefan
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de