On Jul 4, 2005, at 2:40 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:
In a way I am but only because you made a major point of a company not linking to or mentioning Squeak.org because of a) the general look of the site and b) the content on the site. While a) might be fixable for most of the audience b) certainly isn't.
Andreas,
I agree with you in general, but I don't think that (b) isn't fixable - or at least, I would claim that it currently needs fixing. Look at the very first sentence on the current squeak.org: "With the Squeak programming system, we have made some delightful and powerful educational applets. " For someone coming to Squeak looking to use it for business, that will be the first sentence and quite possibly the last they read - not because there's anything wrong with educational applets (there's everything right with them, in fact), but because that person will assume that this tool is not aimed at them and go elsewhere.
I think it's just an accident of presentation, but that paragraph about Squeakland ends up being the defining description on the squeak.org home page because of its placement. It doesn't surprise me at all that netstyle didn't want to link to that. Move it or downplay it or remove it, and you'll remove about half the reservations I would have about linking to squeak.org.
For the other half:
Because may be squeak.org is dead anyway.
Only once we start ignoring the contents for the looks of the site.
The contents have been ignored, apparently, for about 5 years: the "Where is Squeak Headed" section claims to be "coming soon" and offers "Entering 2000" as the latest material. Anyone would think that Squeak has been stagnant or abandoned since the days of superbowl ads for online petfood... we need to fix this if we're going to have any credibility.
By deciding what we choose to present on the website we will attract a certain audience. Choosing a purely business oriented presentation will certainly attract the business kind of guy and (almost) certainly alienate the media/fun/education kind of visitor. And quite possibly vice versa and that's the essence of the question: Should we go broad, and risk that some companies don't link to/mention Squeak.org because they feel it's too risky or should we go narrow, catering to some particular subgroup (which doesn't have to be business) instead? You seemed to make a point of that the website should be done in a way that some companies link to it - I just called this into question since I think the website of the Squeak.org community needs to be broader than that.
OTOH, a project (such as Seaside) might provide their own presentation and I think it's perfectly fine for a particular entity (company or otherwise) to link to that project instead of Squeak. This is commonplace in many other communities and environments and I don't see why Squeak.org would have to subsume all of these individual projects.
The bottom line here is that I think we shouldn't be scared of some company/project saying "I'll rather link to Seaside/wxSqueak instead of Squeak.org because it has a more business-oriented look and feel" I think that's *good* since it allows Squeak.org to remain relatively broadly focused.
Yes, I agree. The apache.org site is a good example here: there's almost nothing on the top-level site, and everyone always links to one of the (many) project sites. One thing that makes this feel a little more cohesive is that they are all something.apache.org. I don't know if that's a can of worms we want to open, but in theory I can see having a very simple, general www.squeak.org with tweak.squeak.org, wx.squeak.org, and so on below it serving individual communities.
At any rate, I see no problem with netstyle & co linking to seaside.st instead of to squeak.org. We could, for example, put download links to Squeak VMs on that site too (there's already an image download) so that someone that was only interested in using Seaside could get everything they need from there. But if we go that route, one thing we do need is prominent links from squeak.org to all of the various sub-community sites, so that if someone stumbles upon squeak.org through some other means they can find their way to the right place.
Avi
PS - in this general vein, I think it's really unfortunate how common it is for people mentioning Smalltalk to link to smalltalk.org, which is more of a personal site than a community one; and conversely, that there's no particular Smalltalk site that *is* worthwhile to link to. www.whysmalltalk.com is the best I know of; do others have better suggestions?