From: Ben Giddings <bg-rubytalk@...>
Date: 2005-01-20T07:35:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity

James "ruby talk" Britt wrote:
> ruby-doc offers assorted things for download, but arguably all
> documentation-related.
> 
> Off the top of my head, the only except may be the (now outdated )
> actual Ruby source code tarball.

On closer inspection, that is the only thing that isn't arguably 
documentation-related.  On the other hand, it's the first thing you see 
on the downloads page.  Probably the rest of it is good to keep, though 
it might help to organize it better.

Even as a sorta-vet Ruby user, I'm not sure what the "Ruby documentation 
bundle" would contain, and how it's different from the RDoc HTML or the 
ri data files.

Now, I'm not sure *how* it should all be organized, but I think 
something along the lines of the PHP documentation:

http://www.php.net/docs.php

Or the GNU make manual:

http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html

Something where you can find the general category of thing you're 
looking for, then the specific version.

> There are assorted technical and practical issues with having all site
> grouped by a single TLD. A more significant matter, though,is that
> every Ruby site is run or maintained by a fan/user/enthusiast.

I don't think the technical issues should be too hard.  Apache, at 
least, is happy to serve docs from multiple virtual hosts, and something 
can be known as say rubyforge.org, www.rubyforge.org and 
rubyforge.ruby-lang.org pretty easily.

I think the more significant part is the fan/user/enthusiast thing 
though.  Some people (Tom Copeland and _why_ for example), seem to be 
chomping at the bit to make their sites amazing, and would probably have 
the time and energy to make their sites more official.  Other people are 
doing it as a hobby, in whatever spare time they can happen to find.  It 
would be unfair to ask them to take on the responsibility of being an 
official site maintainer.  I dunno, maybe there's some way of 
compensating them for their efforts?

> Classifications and categories are hard to get right, and differ among
> users. It is not so much that people must get to the exact site they
> need on the first guess at a URL, but that whatever site they are on
> makes it easy to get to where they want to be.  (And a big part of
> that is helping users know where they should probably want to go, and
> what they probably need.)

Right, and I think that's the thing that needs the most work.  I think a 
search function would really help a lot with that, and if everything 
were under the same tld, then google, told to only return sites from 
that tld, could really help.  Better organization of all the available 
stuff would help as well.

But, as a minimal thing, I think having a common toolbar on each core 
site with a logo and links to the other core sites, would be a big boost 
to userfriendliness.

Ben