From: gabriele renzi <rff_rff@...>
Date: 2005-01-20T07:16:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity

why the lucky stiff ha scritto:
> Ben Giddings (bg-rubytalk@infofiend.com) wrote:
> 
>>In the perfect Ruby world that exists only in my head, www.ruby.org 
>>would be the official Ruby site, and would be a simple page for newbies, 
>>with few links and an easy way to find out what they need to find out 
>>about Ruby.
> 
> 
> This conversation is rubbing off.  I'm seeing things.  Here's a mockup:
> <http://redhanded.hobix.com/cult/rubyorgMockup.html>
> 
> There's some commentary in the post, so I won't repeat it all here,
> despite the welling enthusiasm I feel for such a project.
> 

too many people saying 'great' so I'll try to say "bad" :)
Please consider that I actually like this theme, I'm trying to be critic 
so that it can be made better.

First, where are docs? were they outsourced to ruby-doc in toto or
it is my chance to just read the 4 "learn ruby" titles?
And why is "browse handbook" which (if I knew what "the handbook" is) is 
supposed to bring me to documentation, separated from the other stuff?

What is the difference beetween "ruby sites" and "get involved" ?
is redhanded that much different from ruby-doc.org or rubyxml ?

Why should a reader care about ruby being 1.8.2 ? isn't a "download" or 
"get ruby!" link enough?

Where should a wannabe core developer go? how do he accesses ruby.core 
or report a bug?


Is RAA considered abandonware?

Since 5 out of 10 links on the news section of current ruby-lang are 
from 12/2004, and the older is from 5 months ago, why is that considered 
  "not current" ?
Maybe because there are old pages buried in the site but not on the 
home, I think (i.e. the infamous 1.4 manual).

What happened to the japanese version of the site?

How can I contribute money?

I understand this is a mock page, what I mean is that once you go this 
route you may end up re-adding lots of the stuff wich is there aty the 
moment, again  messing up the page.

IMO, a good approach is the on of Pike's homepage 
(http://pike.ida.liu.se/) as someone pointed out more than one time.

News on the right, with RAA/RF feed bottom.
Propaganda, success quotes, "What's this" and "contribute" link on the left.

And a menu. There are so much things to show up, that it does not make 
sense to try to fit in one page.

A nice, simple 4/5-item menu would be killer.

- Documentation  (ruby license,tutorials, rdoc, links to ruby-doc)
- Development (bug report, cvs, links to ruby-core/dev,raa,rubyforge, 
rcrchive)
- Community (wiki, ml/ng subscribe, blogorrea)
- "Download" (tgz, win version(s), rpms,deb,ports,whatever)
- No about. we have the propaganda box and the doc page for that

and the tiny "jap/english" can fit right there :)

Ah, and definitely, less red.