From: Curt Hibbs Date: 2004-05-14T06:00:46+09:00 Subject: Re: Presenting a more unified front (Ruby webring?) Phil Tomson wrote: > > Curt Hibbs wrote: > >Assaph Mehr just posted the first presentation to Why Ruby > >(http://whyruby.rubyforge.org/). Its intended audience is software > >developers. You can download it here: > > > > http://whyruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Ruby_Presentations [snip] > Curt, > > It's great that you've set this up and it's wonderful that people are > putting presentations there ( I need to put my OSCON presentation "Ruby > for Perl Programmers" there), so don't take the following as a criticism. > > When you look at Ruby's web presence it seems very disconnected. > There's: > *http://www.ruby-lang.org (I tend to view this as the official Ruby > site), > *RubyGarden (http://www.rubygarden.org) which has a large Wiki of > Rubystuff. > *Rubydoc (http://www.rubydoc.org) which is becoming a major source of > Ruby Documentation. > *RubyForge (http://www.rubyforge.org) which hosts a lot of Ruby projects > and WhyRuby? > > ....I'm sure there are others I have missed. Basically, we've got stuff > all over the place. I agree with you completely. I have (perhaps unconciously) been trying to organize all of my efforts on RubyForge to (at least) not make the problem worse. > If I were a Ruby Newbie just coming into the language and community I > think I would find it a bit overwhelming. Where should I start? > Is there > a single source for all of these links? Where should I go for a > 'one-stop' source for all things Ruby? In fact, I had this problem myself when I first discovered Ruby. The problem worse now. > Of course, the way we're doing things has it's advantages. If one of the > sites is down, others will probably still be up. Just as well, I think it would be a bad idea to try to put everything on one site. It just not practical, and its good to have each site (or sub-site) to have a focus. > Is there any way we can present a more unified front even if in the > background things are really distributed among several websites? > > Some ideas (not saying they're good ideas, but I'm trying to start a > discussion): > > * What if all the Ruby sites linked each other, maybe like a webring? I have never found webrings to be useful. They suffer from a sort of tunnel vision where you click from site-to-site but never get to see the "big picture". This makes it too time consuming to find what you want. Consequently, I no longer even try to follow any webrings. > * What if all the Ruby sites had a similar style so that when you move > from one to another it looks seamless, even though you're moving to > different sites? I don't think this is very practical either. Just off the top of my head, I would say that the major, active Ruby sites are: http://www.ruby-lang.org/ http://raa.ruby-lang.org/ http://www.ruby-doc.org/ http://wwwrubygarden.org/ http://rubyforge.org/ (my apologizes for any significant sites that I omitted). It would be a significant step if each off these sites shared a common html block of links to each other (identified as Primary Ruby sites). Even better would be (as you said at the start) an official one-stop, all things Ruby resource page that would be an annotated, organized list of links to these primary sites and other sites. The right home for an "official" ruby "start page" like this would probably be at ruby-lang.org, but another good choice would be at www.rubycentral.com (good domain name). I'm not sure if rubycentral is owned by Andy Hunt, Dave Thomas or both, but the site has not been active, and something like this could reinvigorate it with renewed purpose. I'm sure this could be worked out. To make this happen would take someone willing to do the work to organize and maintain the site (I can't do it, I way overbooked already). If someone was willing to step up to the plate and offer to put together and maintain something like this, I certainly would be willing to help negotiate with all of the players for reciprocal linking. Anyone want to do this? Curt