From: E S Date: 2005-02-18T06:04:43+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby Visual Identity Team > L�hett�j�: Francis Hwang > Aihe: 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 A 'ruby' doesn't really lend itself for logos, so being that this is a sleek, elegant, sneaky and fuzzy language, I vote the logo will be of a cat: ^_^ Courier New, yellow on a red background :) > 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/ E