From: Ben Giddings <bg-rubytalk@...>
Date: 2005-01-20T07:44:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity

Dick Davies wrote:
> Well, couldn't that be done with the ruby-lang.org domain? All we need is 
> 15 minutes work on DNS and a few ServerAliases. ruby.org would be ideal, but
> the general 'ruby mafia' single domain[0] would still work.
> 
> Not exactly what you were looking for, but almost as good.

Yup, and I think that's a good step, but I don't think they should be 
added as vhosts until the sites have a more unified look and feel (and 
until all the server and domain owners decide it's what they want to do).

I always come back to google, because I think their design is so good, 
but try going there and clicking on "web", "images", "groups", "news", 
"froogle".

Each site is different, especially news, but it's clear that you're on a 
google site.  They all have roughly the same header, the same looking 
search bar, etc.

Now compare that to Perl (www.perl.org).  If you click on the links at 
the bottom, "books" has the same sort of look and feel as the main site, 
as does "dev", but "bugs" is pretty different, and "history" looks 
nothing like the other sites, the most prominent banner on that page is 
"Washington University in St Louis", and there's no link back to the 
other perl pages from there.  Jobs is another different site, and again, 
no link back, or on to other sites from there.  Same with 
learn.perl.org, lists.perl.org and use.perl.org.

So... if we just made the DNS change now, we'd be doing about as well as 
Perl... but isn't the whole point of Ruby to do better than Perl?

In any event, if we were to get all the major sites under the 
ruby-lang.org or ruby.org umbrella, one major benefit would be searches. 
    Searching for Ruby stuff would be as simple as using Google and 
telling it to use the ruby-lang.org domain.

Ben