From: Ben Giddings Date: 2005-01-25T09:04:33+09:00 Subject: Re: Best ways to accelerate Ruby's popularity David A. Black wrote: > When it comes to the miscellaneous fan/hacker/enthusiast sites, the > Ruby community at large has no control over their existence. (This is > the Web, after all.) So rather than worry about the problems they > create, I'd like to see energy go into thinking of ways for the > community to encourage and support the efforts of people who want to > create their own Ruby sites. I can't help thinking that a > proliferation of Ruby sites -- especially if the community embraces > them and helps them out when necessary -- is part of the solution to > raising people's knowledge about Ruby, not the problem. > > (I know this sounds a bit Utopian, but as a first approximation I'd > rather try to flow with the nature of the Web than swim against it.) > > There's certainly evidence that non-official sites -- that is, sites > that are not DNS-connected to ruby-lang.org, nor maintained by the > ruby-lang.org admins -- can be of tremendous, sometimes immeasurable > value. The online Pickaxe, ruby-doc.org, why's Poignant Guide, and > the RubyConf presentation archives at Zenspider.com spring to mind. > > As for the official site(s) -- I'm personally not a big fan of trying > to bring about a consistent look or "branding", partly because I don't > think it's meaningful in a situation where non-official sites can be > so important (and we, the community, really are not in a position to > decide up front that they are not important). Certainly re-designing > ruby-lang.org is a possibility, though I'd like to hear from its > admins and maintainers before making a lot of plans on their > behalf. Ok, well maybe the problem is different then. Maybe the problem is that ruby-lang.org needs to be drastically improved. Try to find the Ruby API documentation on the ruby-lang.org site. As far as I can tell, it isn't there. There are tons of links to other sites with documentation, but it seems to me that documentation of the language's API is important enough that there should be an official copy of it on the site's home. I agree, _why_'s stuff is amazing. I think it's a great example of what can happen with community / enthusiast sites. On the other hand, it seems to me that the main site for the language should cover everything that's really essential. I think, at the very least, the home page for a language should have things like: [X] An "about" page [X] A download area [ ] Installation guides / instructions [ ] An introduction to the language / beginner's guide [ ] C API / interfacing with other languages guide [ ] API documentation [ ] Standard library documentation [ ] FAQ [X] Mailing lists [ ] Bugs [X] Announcements The [X] marks things that are hosted and clearly findable on the ruby-lang.org site, the [ ] marks things that aren't. Much of this stuff exists, but it's not at ruby-lang.org, and even though ruby-lang.org might link to it, the lack of consistent style doubtless makes new users somewhat suspicious about how authoritative it is. I don't know, but maybe the Japanese side of ruby-lang.org does better in this regard. It just seems to me that Ruby needs more "official stuff" (mostly documentation) for English users. Maybe all it would take is that the maintainers of the English language site bring some of the existing things over to the official site. Some things should really be there, and wouldn't be too hard to move over, like the core language API docs. Other stuff might still need to be written. I don't know. I just think that there isn't enough stuff on ruby-lang.org to convince a wary newcomer that they have indeed found the official Ruby homepage, and that it is a mature language, in active development, with lots of users, and with lots of real-world uses. If NaHi or whoever maintains the english part of ruby-lang.org is listening, please speak up, and tell us what you think. If there are things you'd like / need for the site, let us know. If anybody knows who does maintain the site, let us know so we can volunteer to help out. Thoughts? Ben