Francis said:
Hear, hear. I think that the problem with Ruby's online presence is not
a matter of visual appeal or the lack of nice logo. The problem with
Ruby's online presence is much more about functionality. For example,
when I look at ruby-lang.org my first thought is not that the site has
the wrong colors or fonts, but that the last post to the front page was
in December ... which would make a newcomer think that Ruby is sleepy
little language, and nothing of interest has happened to it in the last
two months.
This isn't meant as a criticism of James or whoever runs ruby-lang.org,
just a suggestion that if you're not already involved and are looking to
help out, it might be more helpful to 1) put more Ruby-related content
on your own blog or 2) volunteer to help out with existing sites to help
add or debug more features.
Indeed. There are several issues here, one of them being aesthetics and
"identity", but another is the behavior and services of each site. It
is easier (relatively) to offer new colors and layouts for a site than
to completely rethink its reason for being.
So James, are you planning on moving away from the current blog-style
front page, with individual dated posts? Personally I think that's the
thing people want to see when they come to a front page: Plenty of
activity.
Yes, I'm moving the news blog off the main page; I just don't see that
as main service of the site. I believe more people are getting such
news and updates from RSS feeds. It's become too much work to manually
track each new Ruby doc resource, and there is very little report
concerning either the documentation project or documentation tools
(which is pretty much the original purpose of the site).
I believe that people have two main issues with Ruby documentation:
either it just doesn't exist, or they can't find it (or don't even know
about it). Yet there is a boatload of information out there. Not just
formal API docs, how-tos, or articles, but blogs and wikis and
whathaveyou. Ruby-doc can best serve users by helping connect
developers to docs; the news blog stuff is now pretty incidental.
I also don't see the site as being driven by novelty; it's a more of
service or tool.
This can be done outside of a given web page, using the Tasty bookmarklet:
http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2004/07/tasty-redux
Ah, quite nice. This presumes, though, that the data will always come
from, or only come from, a given source. You also have to have a given
browser and install an extension to use this.
Personally I'm not too hot about embedding these sorts of tools in the
web page itself.
The goal is condense/filter resource metadata to help users make better
choices. People are free to ignore it.
Cool. You might find Topic Maps useful for this, or maybe that's too
heavyweight. I'm quite sure your not the only person trying to harvest
good taxonomies out of a folksonomy like del.icio.us.
Topic maps might be a bit to heavy-weight. I've been working with XFML
(XTM-lite, so to speak), and there will likely be an XFML feed from
ruby-doc. Among the goals is to offer data feeds that others can use to
help drive their own Ruby applications.
I very much agree. And I hope my comments above don't come across as
suggestions, not really criticism: I use ruby-doc almost every day and
am already pretty happy with it. Thanks, James!
You're welcome. I appreciate the comments.
And thanks to the increasing number of people writing about Ruby.
James