From: James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@...>
Date: 2005-02-18T10:32:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Visual Identity Team

Francis Hwang wrote:
> 
> 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.

Indeed.  There are several issues here, one of them being aesthetics and 
"identity", but another is the behavior and services of each site.  It 
is easier (relatively) to offer new colors and layouts for a site than 
to completely rethink its reason for being.


>> 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.

Yes, I'm moving the news blog off the main page; I just don't see that 
as main service of the site.  I believe more people are getting such 
news and updates from RSS feeds. It's become too much work to manually 
track each new Ruby doc resource, and there is very little report 
concerning either the documentation project or documentation tools 
(which is pretty much the original purpose of the site).

I believe that people have two main issues with Ruby documentation: 
either it just doesn't exist, or they can't find it (or don't even know 
about it).  Yet there is a boatload of information out there.  Not just 
formal API docs, how-tos, or articles, but blogs and wikis and 
whathaveyou.  Ruby-doc can best serve users by helping connect 
developers to docs; the news blog stuff is now pretty incidental.

I also don't see the site as being driven by novelty; it's a more of 
service or tool.

> 
>> 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

Ah, quite nice.  This presumes, though, that the data will always come 
from, or only come from, a given source.  You also have to have a given 
browser and install an extension to use this.


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

The goal is condense/filter resource metadata to help users make better 
choices.  People are free to ignore it.
> 
>> 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.

Topic maps might be a bit to heavy-weight.  I've been working with XFML 
(XTM-lite, so to speak), and there will likely be an XFML feed from 
ruby-doc.  Among the goals is to offer data feeds that others can use to 
help drive their own Ruby applications.

> 
>> 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!


You're welcome.  I appreciate the comments.

And thanks to the increasing number of people writing about Ruby.

James