Shlomi Fish wrote:
On Friday 02 December 2005 16:10, Dotan wrote:
Shlomi Fish wrote:
On Thursday 01 December 2005 22:42, Dotan wrote:
Alon Altman wrote:
On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, Dotan wrote:
I didn't talk of W2L I talked of the web archives and I did advertise
JLCs W2L series on FOSS related sites (you might want to check which
club has its coming events on the events boards in Whatsup,
Linmagazine and IGLU, you may also check which club had ads in the
Tapuz and Nana forums prior to it's series opening and the
instaparty. BTW in Tapuz it was some tech forum that made my
announcment sticky and not the Linux forum)
So, you took care of your own interests, when you could have invested
exactly the same amount of effort to advance the W2L series for all
clubs.
No I couldn't because you choose to address CS-students and such that
look for linux on google. This is not the audiance I was advertising for.
It seems that you are more interested in your own personal success than
advancing free software in Israel. Way to go!
Well... the W2L site does not link to the JLCs W2L dedicated site but we
link to yours.
A link could easily be added, if you told us to.
I'm sure you know of the site. You can decide where and what to link. I
choose to link the general site but the general site webmaster choose
not to link the JLC page.
We have a link to the JLC page. And you can have always asked. I am not a
mind-reader yet, you know.
read the mail and you won't have to read the mind
http://mirror.hamakor.org.il/archives/w2l/09-2005/0572.html
that was way before (almost two weeks) the general site was updated.
Maybe you even know of http://linmagazine.co.il/node/view/11839
Note that I began revamping the existing jlc.iglu.org.il site, but then
after a JLC meeting which I did not attend, someone called me and
informed out of the blue, that he created a new site in PHP for the club,
and that I should host it on Eskimo.
You might recall we had different problems with the site and that those who
volunteered to update it did not give results. I'm very happy with the
whole new site Yehuda came up with in a time frame which the previous
existing site didn't even got to be updated.
I started updating the previous site, but was stopped in the middle. He could
have helped me with the previous site, but he didn't. The decision to abandon
the previous site was made _while I was working on it_ and _without me saying
anything about it_.
but some people seem to
like ugly "informative" websites.
I like informative websites, but I don't think they should be ugly. If the
website is ugly it's because no-one moved a muscle to change the fact.
Ram offered his help but was sent from one person to the other cause one
don't have time and the other don't like PHP/frames/icons/links...
No he was not. He was sent to me. I told him I'd rather that he won't do his
site in PHP, because it was unnecessary in this case. So Ram automatically
deduced that the HTML should be written by hand, and as a result asked me if
he can do it with frames. However, frames are Evil
( http://www.html-faq.com/htmlframes/?framesareevil ) and I told him to avoid
it. I said that he should generate the web-site's HTML instead, using a
pre-rendering program, and after consulting with Alon, it was decided that we
_will_ allow him to use PHP. (Due to his cluelessness) However, we did not
hear from him since.
need I say more?!
I can understand why he preffered to make better use of his time
Moreover the general W2L was not updated long after the JLC published
its schedule and untill pretty short time before the series actualy
started.
Did you send me the up-to-date schedule in time?
Yes
I see. It was integrated eventually. However, then there were other later
changes that I was not notified about.
The only change I can recall from my original post was the move from
Wednesdays to Tuesdays.
Adopting the "eventualism" as the mode of action makes it hard to keep
you updated so I might have missed some changes.
All in all I believe our site was much better then the general one
and it's too bad you choose not to link it (AFAIK Ram was willing to make
the general site look better but his offers were rejected).
No, they were not. Ram contacted me about the site. I told him it's not
necessary to write the site in PHP, and he thought the only alternative
was to write it directly in HTML. I told him he should use my existing
Web Meta Language framework, but he did not know it, and refused to
invest time in learning it. Alon eventually told me to let him write the
site in PHP, and I told Ram it's OK, but Ram did not produce any results
since.
Eventualy is the key word here.
No it's not. All of this took one or two days. Ram had plenty of time to
revamp the site, but he did not move a muscle.
After you wasted two days of his time did you call him again and asked
him for help?
I thinks visitors of the general W2L site could and yet may get a very
wrong impression about Linux due to look and content of the site.
Perhaps, but that's what we have now, mainly because only Alon and I
updated it.
As I said there were other options that beurocracy scared away (this
refers to what you called "eventualy").
Maybe Ram was scared, but that was his fault. If he were a bit more clueful,
he would have known that he can generate static HTML using Perl, PHP, Web
Meta Language (which I'm using), Python or whatever. But he obviously thought
that the only options were either using PHP on the server side or writing
HTML by hand. We eventually let him use PHP on the server side, but then he
did not do anything about it, and even did not let us how he felt, so we
could have told him he could go ahead.
BTW Haifux too started building a dedicated site but couldn't came up
with one in time.
Yes, I saw that.
BTW, as I pointed out in a previous message, the jlc.org.il site has
several deficincies which also weren't fixed:
<<<<<<<<<<<
1. Uses un-userfriendly URLS:
http://jlc.shared.mirimar.net/?page=lectures/lectures
Why the "?". Components should be seprated by slashes. Otherwise up
buttons don't work.
I guess it comes from the PHP. BTW Does IE has up button?
You can still use more friendly URLs in PHP. The PATH_INFO environment
variable is intended for that. I do it all the time in Perl.
I might take a look at it, thanks for the tip (but one will have to
concider such change will break existing links).
I don't think MSIE has an up button by default. Maybe there is one in, in its
enhanced browsers, or in MSIE 7, or by installing an extension. However:
1. There's an up button for Konqueror.
2. There's an up button in Opera.
3. There's an up button extension for Mozilla.
2. Doesn't have a contact the webmaster link in a footer at the bottom.
Contact details and other inforamtion regarding the site are availble in
seperate page linked from the sidebar.
http://www.jlc.org.il/?page=thissite
Naturaly it wasn't my call but I think it gives a clean nice look.
Well, looks aside, you should put the contact information in the bottom.
Why? and maybe this "looks aside" is what made the general W2L site what
it is.
3. Is Hebrew only and doesn't have content written in the English language
for international users.
We are a local club - Lectures are givven in Hebrew, the forums are in
Hebrew, the common language in the meetings is Hebrew and our target
audiance (which include school kids as equale participants) knows Hebrew
much better then English
Right, but at least have a page for International surfers. And you could have
a bi-lingual site. Also, aren't there many Jeruxers who are native English
speakers?
Can you refer me to IGLUs Hebrew pages?
I know a JLCer ( :P) who's native Spanish speaker, will it do?
4. Is slow.
I'm using it now and it seem fine. Maybe you ment its "slower then pure
html" but thats something else.
Anyway trying to open your homepage took longer than opening the JLC page
Sorry, it used to be slow at the time. Now it seems pretty fine.
You are not visiting the site before commenting?!
I'm offended ;)
5. The navigation menu at the right does not look well in Konqueror.
Looks great on my Konqueror. As I know your habits you probably disabled
some option which cause the menu to look wrong.
That's not what I did. I disabled nothing. Again, this is probably an old bug
that was fixed.
The site is the same as it was from day one.
6. The current link in the navigation menu is not highlighted.
You might note pages have titles.
So? You should still show the user where he is in the navigation menu.
Why?
7. No next page/prev page/up page navigation controls in the Mozilla
navigation bar, or otherwise.
True. I never used it so I didn't notice.
OK.
8. Is written in PHP, which is unnecessary in this context. A static HTML
site is perfectly fine. (and mine is).
So?!
"So?" It would be safer, faster and generally saner to generate the site from
templates and input files, instead of using PHP. Any server-side-scripting
technology (and PHP in particular) opens the site to a great deal of problems
which are completely non-issues with purely static HTML sites.
When I talked to the original web designer on that and told him that he
shouldn't use PHP and should rather use static HTML, he laughed at me and
said if I also expect him to use gopher. But any clueful webmaster knows that
there's still a lot of place for static HTML or for partially static-HTML
sites, because sometimes you don't need the power that server-side scripting
languages give you.
I can't recall any problems with the site so far. Either we were very
lucky or PHP (and Mirimar network our generous host) is not as bad as
you think.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
Dotan
