Re: Ruby Visual Identity Team

On Feb 17, 2005, at 12:17 AM, James Britt wrote:

> I nominate me to redesign ruby-doc.org.  I appreciate the offer, but 
> altering the aesthetics without changing the underlying behavior is 
> not going to work.

Hear, hear. I think that the problem with Ruby's online presence is not 
a matter of visual appeal or the lack of nice logo. The problem with 
Ruby's online presence is much more about functionality. For example, 
when I look at ruby-lang.org my first thought is not that the site has 
the wrong colors or fonts, but that the last post to the front page was 
in December ... which would make a newcomer think that Ruby is sleepy 
little language, and nothing of interest has happened to it in the last 
two months.

This isn't meant as a criticism of James or whoever runs ruby-lang.org, 
just a suggestion that if you're not already involved and are looking 
to help out, it might be more helpful to 1) put more Ruby-related 
content on your own blog or 2) volunteer to help out with existing 
sites to help add or debug more features.

> I'm unhappy with the series of boxes (too, um, boxy), but they'll do 
> while I sort out some other things.  Adding neat curved box corners 
> and other visual treats has been put aside while I nail down behavior. 
>  Once that is stable it will easier to apply the appropriate styling.

So James, are you planning on moving away from the current blog-style 
front page, with individual dated posts? Personally I think that's the 
thing people want to see when they come to a front page: Plenty of 
activity.

> Each box shows resources culled from links posted to del.icio.us. 
> Clicking the resource name just loads that page.  Clicking the little 
> 'i' next to a resource shows you what people have posted it and their 
> extended comments.  A modern browser is required.  Haven't tested in 
> older browsers (or even many current ones), so field reports are 
> welcome so that it degrades nicely

This can be done outside of a given web page, using the Tasty 
bookmarklet:

http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2004/07/tasty-redux

Personally I'm not too hot about embedding these sorts of tools in the 
web page itself.

> The browse page is a variation on what I haphazardly described in my 
> RubyConf '04 talk.  It organizes resources as tagged on del.icio.us; 
> the tricky part is automagically metatagging the del.icio.us tags so 
> that some higher-level grouping is feasible.  In theory one should be 
> able to navigate through known Ruby docs and resources by drilling 
> down via facets, but it is not as clean as it should be.

Cool. You might find Topic Maps useful for this, or maybe that's too 
heavyweight. I'm quite sure your not the only person trying to harvest 
good taxonomies out of a folksonomy like del.icio.us.

> On a more general note, I'm all for people trying to clean up sites, 
> making suggestions, fixings links, getting things into better shape, 
> but I'm dead against any sort of formalization of the process across 
> multiple sites.
>
> I really, really believe that things happen in the Ruby community as 
> well as they do because people feel they can contribute something in a 
> community spirit while doing so in a personal manner.  Trying to 
> enforce a uniform anything could be trouble; things tend best to arise 
> out of a loose consensus and running code.

I very much agree. And I hope my comments above don't come across as 
suggestions, not really criticism: I use ruby-doc almost every day and 
am already pretty happy with it. Thanks, James!

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/