From: Dick Davies <rasputnik@...>
Date: 2005-01-20T13:03:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity

* James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@neurogami.com> [0153 01:53]:
> Ben Giddings wrote:
> >James "ruby talk" Britt wrote:
> >>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.
> 
> Serving from the same machine is one thing; servicing requests when the 
> sites are on physically distinct machines, under separate administrative 
> control, is another.  I don't know enough about Apache to say for sure; 
> it may be enough to engineer redirects to other sites so that a request 
> for docs.ruby.org (or whatever) lands you on www.ruby-doc.org.

Yeah, you could do it with a vhost and mod_rewrite on the main ruby server,
but if you're going to get a new dns record setup, why not point it
at the final destination in the first place?

The advantage here is that if ruby-lang.org goes tits up, the other sites 
still work.

I suppose if some people don't have access to their webservers it might be
a problem, but then we could fall back to a rewrite hack on widgets.ruby-lang.org...

w.r.t. the 'common theme' idea, I think having a host which is part of the main
ruby site lets people know you're official. Beyond that it's a bonus (I'm assuming
some people have sweated blood to get their sites just so, and will hand over their
css rollover hack when you prise it from their cold dead hands...)

-- 
'The State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things
badly , does small things badly too.'
		-- John Kenneth Galbraith
Rasputin :: Jack of All Trades - Master of Nuns