From: Luke Galea <lgalea@...>
Date: 2005-01-20T11:55:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity

As a recent adopter of Ruby I've gone through some of the pain of finding ruby 
docs for the uninformed.. and I know it seems stupid but the fact that the 
"Core API" and "Std-Lib" aren't on the "Documentation" page on ruby-doc.org 
threw me off..

I only found them because of google searches, bookmarked them and later found 
out how I was intended to find them..

On Wednesday 19 January 2005 21:43, James Britt wrote:
> Ben Giddings wrote:
> > 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).
>
> Making anything harder than it already is will be the kiss of death.
>
> Site should try to follow basic good layout and navigations standards
> (de facto, not de jure) as a matter of general good sense.  Maybe some
> common themes will evolve over time.
>
> > 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.
>
> The branding and marketing (which is pretty much the flavor I'm getting
> here) is not a bad thing, but something of a side issue.
>
> For example, when I read about people having issues with finding Ruby
> documentation, the most common problems are
>
> 1) They do not know ruby-doc.org exists.
> 2) They know about the site, but there are no docs for what they want to
> do.
>
> Issue one is increasingly rare; most Ruby sites have links to ruby-doc
> (and, writing this, I realize I'm been dopier than usual, as ruby-doc
> seems to have nary a link to any other Ruby site.  Ah well.  All is
> changing anyway.)
>
> Issue two is more critical, and, all things being equal, needs more
> attention.  And it is improving every day, but more is always welcome
> and needed.  People should feel encourage to put up Ruby sites and host
> threads, forums, docs, apps, project, cartoons, and what have you.
>
> Official or not.
>
>
> James