About www.squeak.org web page

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Tue Jun 10 06:50:59 UTC 2003


All IMHO, of course, but...

The main purpose is to introduce Squeak to people who have heard of it
from somewhere.  "www.squeak.org" is very easy to remember, and it's
something I use all the time to refer people to.

It is very important to immediately direct the appropriate people to
www.squeakland.org.  The appropriate people are mainly teachers and
graphic artists: people who view Squeak as a multimedia content system
that happens to have a neat couple of programming languages in it.

The bulk of squeak.org is for people who have the other slant, that it's
Smalltalk with great multimedia stuff.


I think www.squeak.org can safely be pretty static.  Almost all dynamic
content is on the Swiki already, and regular Squeak people visit the
Swiki a lot more, anyway.  Thus, squeak.org should introduce Squeak to
total strangers and then direct people to the Swiki for more
information.  Regular Squeak users will consult the Swiki for almost
everything.  Thus, Smaller is probably better for squeak.org, as
tempting as it is to load it up with things.  For example, the download
page should link to the Swiki instead of trying to stay current.  (And
incidentally, the download page on the Swiki could probably take a
looking-at!)

The essential thing to have on www.squeak.org, other than the links, is
a description of the overall dream of Squeak.  It could reasonably keep
the pages on notable features of Squeak, just like it already does.  As
a particular example, it's a real shame the picture no the front page is
never explained as having been generated very easily in Squeak.  Squeak
has some radical differences from what people expect from a "programing
system", and the main point of the site is to get these differences
across to people and get them thinking.

Again, this is all just my opinion.  And note I've cleverly failed to
explain exactly what the dream and distinctions of Squeak *are*, in
order to keep the message reasonably short.  :)


Lex



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