Hi - Top posting. What we want to do is analogous to www.apache.org changing "features projects" and the blog and svn / feeds every hour.
To figure out how this might work examine www.apache.org main page with the bookmarklet. We can republish the header every day or hour via the CMS. No need for javascript. Here is how - rewrite site/content/brand.mdtext every so often using say a perl or xslt script. (similar for the NL sites) Then execute the publish script. This stage and publish process can be automated. I won't have time to look into this myself this week, but it should not be hard. Regards, Dave On Nov 23, 2012, at 3:25 PM, Kay Schenk wrote: > On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 2:31 PM, Rob Weir <robw...@apache.org> wrote: >> On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Juergen Schmidt <jogischm...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >>> >>> Am Freitag, 23. November 2012 um 18:26 schrieb Rob Weir: >>>> Currently our website has a header, controlled by >>>> ooo-site/brand.mdtext, that we use to promote special events and >>>> announcements. This header shows up on every page on the website, >>>> except for wiki and other non-static web pages. >>>> >>>> This header is our single most effective way to promote things. It >>>> gets 750K+ views per day. This is far more than our blog, Twitter, >>>> mailing lists, Facebook, etc., combined. >>>> >>>> However, this position currently can carry only a single message at a >>>> time. So when we have several messages in quick succession, we need >>>> to halt the old announcement and replace it with a new one. For >>>> example, when I added the marketing volunteers, I had to stop the call >>>> for QA volunteers. Juergen has a call for translators coming, and >>>> that will likely cause us to halt the marketing call for volunteers. >>>> And we want to put up a FOSDEM call for papers soon as well. >>>> >>>> So the way we're using this it is all or nothing. A message either >>>> gets 750K views a day or it gets nothing. >>>> >>>> I think this is not optimal. It is natural for us to have several >>>> ongoing promotions, and it would be sufficient if we could more >>>> effectively share that space. >>>> >>>> One idea might be to not have a static message in brand.mdtext, but >>>> encode several messages in a Javascript file, a JSON object that lists >>>> all the current messages along with their weighting. Then we could >>>> have our website header show a random message, respecting the weights. >>>> A high weighted message would get more views than a lower weighted >>>> one. But even 10% of 750K is a lot more views that our blog will >>>> receive. >>>> >>>> Does this make sense? >>> for me it makes a lot of sense and we try to use the page hits in the most >>> efficient way. >>>> >>>> Any other ideas? Any ideas on how to implement this? >>>> >>>> Another idea is to allow graphical as well as the current text-only >>>> promotions. A banner graphic can be even more effective. >>>> >>>> >>> >>> no real idea how we can achieve it, the CMS is limited as far as I >>> understood but Joe is probably open for improvements. I am a poor web >>> developer ;-) >>> >> >> We don't have PHP at runtime, but we do have perl at page build time, >> e.g.,: >> https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/ooo/ooo-site/trunk/lib/view.pm >> >> But hard-coding at build time doesn't give us rotation, unless we have >> a cron job or something that marks all the files as dirty every 5 >> minutes or so. I don't think we want that. >> >> It might be worth looking at how the ASF home page handles its >> "featured projects": http://www.apache.org/ >> >> Or we can just do with Javascript. It is easy enough to make the >> experience for those without JS to be the same as what they see today, >> a single hard-coded message. >> >> -Rob >> > > javascript with some random selection is certainly the path of least > resistence. And, how are folks downloading OpenOffice unless they use > JS? Well, they can, but I would bet more than 90% of users have JS > enabled. > > I thought at first you mean like a continuously streaming banner which > you can do with a java applet, but that leads to other issues. > > JS is good...it's uncomplicated for future maintenance as well. > >>> Juergen >>>> >>>> Regards, >>>> >>>> -Rob >>> > > > > -- > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > MzK > > “How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world > she wants, rather than to create it herself?” > > -- Anais Nin
