From: James Britt Date: 2004-05-14T06:25:41+09:00 Subject: Re: Presenting a more unified front (Ruby webring?) Phil Tomson wrote: > 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. True, but, then again, it's the Web. > > 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? I would suggest one should go first to ruby-lang.org, which (ideally) would give enough direction on where to go next based on a user's needs. Whether the site does this well for enough people is open to discussion. > > 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. It also means that control and management is distributed; there is no core group of site masters responsible for content, design, access, hosting fees, and so on. For example, ruby-doc.org hosts some files, but largely points to resources located elsewhere. Among my current projects is to improve the indexing and classification of these resources so that finding appropriate documents is easier. To be a better table of contents/index/topic map/whatever. Now, while I'm happy to host files on ruby-doc.org, doing so doesn't really add any value, and may actually make it harder on people since they have to go through me to get things up, get files changed or deleted, and so on. Same goes for rubyxml.com . These sites act more as metadata sites than content sites, though sometimes the content is on the same server. > > Is there any way we can present a more unified front even if in the > background things are really distributed among several websites? Sure. For example, I would like to see a taxonomy of Ruby web sites, something one could navigate as a faceted collection. (Adding such as faceted collection is on my growing To Do list for ruby-doc.org.) > > 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? It might be simpler to link to common page stored in one (reliable) place, something easy to keep up-to-date. Or have something rsync a local copy from a common site. (It would interesting if sites also published XFML feeds; other sites could than, in theory, present aggregated, faceted lists of remote content.) > > * 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? Evil. I might as well use Python if I'm going to have style dictated to me. > > > Any others? Site designers should make sure they put appropriate metadata into the keyword and description meta tags to make the site more accessible to search engines. Offering an RSS feed is helpful, too, as it makes it easier (for me, at least :) ) to follow a site by adding it to my feed aggregator (currently Bloglines). Oh, and then add your site to Artima's Ruby Buzz, too. http://www.artima.com/buzz/community.jsp?forum=123 > Is this really a problem at all? There may be issues with duplicate effort, but I can't think of any examples offhand. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that. James Britt www.ruby-doc.org www.rubyxml.com