Squeak.org Website (Was Re: Will StrongTalk revitalize Smalltalk ?)

Russell Allen russell.allen at firebirdmedia.com
Fri Jul 5 02:35:20 UTC 2002


Karl Ramberg <karl.ramberg at chello.se> wrote:
> I think the Squeak swiki show pretty well what's going on in the 
> comunity. The Squeak.org pages could just redirect to the swiki.
> Karl

(There is, of course, a link from squeak.org to the swiki)

I would partially agree with this.  The swiki states that "This
discussion is an annex to the Squeak homepage at Squeak.org", but
historically the squeak.org page has really been an annex to the main
content on the swiki - for a long time it was only one page :)

I was intending to try and make it more like the examples of python.org
and ruby-lang.org etc, but simply haven't had the time.  Also, I am
begining to think that it is the wrong approach (too limited;
heirarchical, worrying about access and trust issues etc)

Mainly the pages for a language like squeak have:
	* licencing information
	* downloading and version information
	* introductions and general features
	* documentation (in particular, a reference manual and introductory
tutorial)

All of this information is available (albeit in a less structured form)
on the swiki.

My suggestion, therefore, is to:

1.  Make squeak.org point to the front page of the swiki
2.  Refactor the swiki front page to make it much smaller and simpler,
with only the amount of information found on the front page of
squeak.org
3.  Create pages on the swiki that mirror the content found on
squeak.org
4.  Modify the swiki template to:
	(a) make the site look more like a 'normal' site (ie bar on left etc)
    (a) provide some nice css defaults for fonts etc
    (b) put links to the most common pages (home, about, features,
documentation, download) in either a bar on the left of each page or in
the bar on top

And then, just go our merry way with the most democratic homepage of any
language :) :)

The only problem that I can see is the question of hosting - does minnow
have the capacity to serve out the traffic that squeak.org gets? 
Alternatively, does the machine squeak.org is currently on have the
ability to run a swiki?

I am happy to help out with any of this process.

Comments?

Russell


----------------------------------------
Russell Allen

russell.allen at firebirdmedia.com

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