www.squeak.org finally updated
Avi Bryant
avi.bryant at gmail.com
Mon Jul 4 13:18:23 UTC 2005
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?
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