Re: original ILUG-Delhi website revisited

[Sandip Bhattacharya <sandipb@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I must finish by saying that its still a great effort from Sandip. Prompt,
> neat, and the sort of thing only someone with a name like that could have
> done ;-) I hear the next meeting's agenda is to give him shabashis... Who
> will maro my proxy?

Ok. Ok. All this shabhashi thing is finally getting on my nerves. At
first I thought that as long as people send it for me, it is ok ... ;)

But, let me first point out that the "effort" out there on the Nuked
site is to be given to the proper people. The fast transfer of the old
site to the new one should be actually given to the creator of PHPNuke
'cause because of his design, a new PHPNuke site can be started off in
, believe it or not - 15 minutes. And when you see the installation
steps, you would see it involves 3-4 lines. My effort has only been in
customising some logos, moving data from the old site to the new one
one by one using more-or-less copy-paste.


> For the new visitor, its intimidating. You come there looking for some
> info, trying to find out what this Linux-Delhi hullabaloo is all about,
> and what you get is yet more hullabaloo, that too posted by some member a
> month back. Real information about what Linux-Delhi is, what it does, how

Minor nitpicking. But most of the stuff on the older site is _months_
old. 

> to join it etc.  is hard to find. I havent yet found a suitable, easily
> accessible, permanent place to put all my articles about The blood
> donation camp, /dev/null etc in.

That's why I didn't put those articles there in the first place. ;) 
Seriously, given some thought, these articles _can_ be reorganised into
categories. 

No out-of-the-box solution is perfect. In most cases these require
heavy customisation to meet the needs. Even in our case, we need to
rearrange the links, blocks etc. to give as much information as
possible as we would like. Some of these might even require hacking into
the PHPNuke code.


> And it's bloat. And bloat, by definition, is a bad thing. At the risk of
> sounding as if my MBA is getting to me, stuff thats technically "cool"
> isnt what we always need. I think the older site was simple, more
> informative, and easily accessible. Nishi's new site... with the same sort

Well my MBA reminds me, that appeal to the class that you are
targetting for conversion. ;)
"Cool" looking sites are more likely to
impress new folks wondering what Linux or linux-delhi is all
about. 

I think we have to consider our priorities. What is the site supposed
to be about? Is it supposed to be a site trying to promote
Linux,linux-delhi and open-source to outsiders, or is it just another
place for resources of Linux people who are likely to visit it
frequently. 

Till now, I haven't found out a single reason to go to linux-delhi
other than checking out the next meeting date(when it is updated) or
finding out the address of the majordomo server so that I can
(un/re)-subscribe.

Mostly, i think people who come to linux-delhi are folks who are
coming there out of curiousity. They are generally people who are
coming here for the first time. And you would agree, for such a
clientele, looks rulez! They are less likely to be enthused seeing a
site suitable for recommendation by anybrowser.org, or something
similar to the gnu.org site. 

And besides I have visited the nuked site
using lynx. It does look slightly unordered, but I could still find my
way around.

Most importantly, remember the primary reason why Raj decided to use
PHPNuke at all - to get rid of the responsibility of managing new
content. It is definitely _much_ more easier for other folks to
contribute than before. And we don't have to depend on the free time
of the webmasters to see that the content is updated. 

> informative, and easily accessible. Nishi's new site... with the same sort
> of stuff, and added functionality like a tightly integrated membership
> section and web-based maintenance etc. looks like a better bet to me.

It is still possible to make a plugin to use a similar stuff. Only
limitation, it has to be in PHP. Frankly, I am biased a lot towards
mod-php than cgi-perl. ;)

> Although I still hope Nishi would change the colour scheme. Its so like a
> Sarvodaya Vidyalaya uniform, i just noticed :)

Another place where Nuke scores. If you would like a new color scheme,
concoct one and it would be added to the themes list.

- Sandip

-- 
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Sandip Bhattacharya 
sandipb @ bigfoot.com
http://www.sandipb.net
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