Re: Hello and some questions

On Wed, 2003-12-17 at 12:32, Josh Berkus wrote:
> > This is too rich. As the guy who has actually been stymied on several
> > attempts to move techdocs into the future, and the one who is actually
> > updating the content now, please let me know when one of you two is ready
> > to "start running things".
>
> Um, no offense, but I don't see anything happening with Techdocs now, from
> anybody. Including you.

Like maintaining the list of hosting providers? Or the list of support
companies? Or researching and updating missing/broken articles? Or
adding new articles and links? Maybe those types of things aren't sexy
enough for you though?

Early on I tried to get some kind of revision system set up by getting
the code into CVS, to allow anyone to get access to enable contributing,
only to have folks bypass CVS and/or complain that CVS wasn't an
acceptable form on managing content, so I acquiesced.

I also tried to get the site moved over to the new VM, but we got
stalled there after Dave/Marc had trouble getting Zope set up and Justin
was unable to assist. Shortly there after the plan to set up and move
everything to bric was announced, so again I acquiesced.

The next thing I started doing was some planning on content that could
be moved out of techdocs and onto the main www server code, only to be
stymied there because of Andreas work which would lead toward parallel
development.

Even now I feel like rewriting some pieces of the back end, but it seems
like a waste of time if we ever get Andreas code done and/or the site
moved into bric...

I wont argue that techdocs is somewhat of a bastard child these days,
but it's certainly not due to lack of effort on my part.

>
> You seem to think that there is some floodgate
> > of authors writing articles with no way to get them on-line... I just don't
> > think thats the case.
>
> Have you taken a look at General Bits lately? Elein manages to get 2 new
> articles a week -- partly because she's persistent, and partly becuase
> authors submitting to General Bits don't need to do their own HTML
> formatting.
>

Help me out 'cause I don't see all of these articles you are referring
to. Unless you're referring to the different sections of each issue of
General Bits (?) which Elaine writes herself (which are pruned from the
mailing lists...) But I certainly can't find the "two new articles a
week" of the caliber you find on techdocs (Set Returning Functions, Full
Text Indexing, Adventures In PostgreSQL, etc..) Don't get me wrong,
there are some good articles on the General Bits site, like the recent
article you co-authored on performance tuning, but given that Elein
doesn't use a fancy CMS nor were you refused help with putting your
articles up on techdocs, I don't see how her site's architecture has any
bearing on getting articles written. IMHO it's too bad she doesn't use
her persistence to help improve the situation with the community sites
rather than splintering things further on her own (something I have
mentioned to her before).

You know though, I see a pattern here... take the jobs.postgresql.org
site, which is still not updated with the text that I suggested close to
two weeks ago. While several people keep kicking back and forth ideas on
what would be the ideal solution for a jobs site, Marc has quietly
implemented a solution (the jobs mailing list) that offers the majority
of functionality that most people would want, yet outside of myself
there has been virtually no support given for that idea, I guess since
people didn't think it was good enough... ?

> > but all of this is secondary to getting Andreas code finished up so we can
> > begin unifying the various websites. Thats where we really need to
> > concentrate because it is the roadblock to new development...
>
> Agreed.
>

Actually thats not totally fair to Andreas and Co., since there is
nothing stopping you all from installing bric and moving content into
it...

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL