Puppy's Website: Discussion

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raffy
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very useful

#16 Post by raffy »

These are very useful points. Thanks, tom, for starting the discussion. Let me try to add some of my own 2c.

A "wiki" is very easy to place within Puppy's web presence. Most distros have a wiki and forum in addition to the main website. And speaking of being bullet-proof, Puppy's wikkawiki has proved itself to be (quite) one. (Here, am just trying to state the facts - Lobster is the wiki admin, but I help by adding users manually to help beef up security.)

I guess the only missing service of the current wiki is photo uploading.
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nic2109
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#17 Post by nic2109 »

This is Really Good Stuff. Well done, and please keep at it. It's easy to get discouraged by negative feedback, and even easier by no feedback!

Ill increment the counter registering those confused by the current setup. Some of it is innocent and caused by outdated links, but some is duplicated such as the Forums (or should that be "Fora"?) - yes there is more than one - and really does need to be sorted.

Don't underestimate the commitment needed to maintain such sites up-to-date. This single statement brings with it a host of spin-off issues:
1. The fewer the admins the easier it is to enforce a common look and feel; stick to policies; keep secure.
2. The fewer the admins the more onerous the task; the more dependent on just a few people (who signed up 'cos they were already fully engaged in the "project" but are busy as it is) and the more likely to get out of date when they are on holiday or get ill or take up a new hobby (or even get a life!).
3. ........and so on.

One paradox is that to keep it secure you'll need fewer admins; and to keep it useful you need more!

There is no solution to this, just a set of compromises which different people judge differently.

I suggest that as active members of the Puppy Community we need a moderated discussion (this thread will do nicely if tombh is willing to continue), a summarised set of proposals (tombh again?) and a preference-indicating mechanism (let's not call it "Voting" 'cos that seems too mechanical, though some sort of ballot might need to be part of the process).

And lastly, all the other sites will need to be re-visited to ensure that they are updated as appropriate and include links to the new main site. This might be quite tricky to accomplish and the owners/admins will all need to be onboard.

A Good and Necessary project in its own right, but not one to be undertaken "lightly, wantonly nor inadvisedly".

PS. Wasn't ttuuxxx looking at doing something similar?
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darrelljon
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#18 Post by darrelljon »

How about a shop? You could add FatFreeCart quite easily.

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WhoDo
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#19 Post by WhoDo »

This is just a GREAT start, Tom! Well done! Among the various suggestions, all of which have merit, I think the one I'd see as most important would be cross-browser compatibility, especially with IE6-7. Let's make those refugees drool over Puppy from the get-go! :wink:

Keep up the great work. I'm getting really excited by the possibilities here. Well done, again!
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klu9
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#20 Post by klu9 »

@TomBH
looks good, but are you implying the forum, manual, Barry's blog etc would still be off on separate sites?

I guess I'm a stick-in-the-mud; I won't be happy until there's "one site to rule them all". One domain, one registration / login, one look, one menu / navigation.
[size=75]- Remember: it's a [url=http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppyLinuxMainPage]wiki[/url]. You can contribute too! :D
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tombh
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#21 Post by tombh »

I've set up another thread -- Puppy Website: Looks, Bugs and Wishlists -- and renamed this thread to "Puppy Website: Discussion". Don't worry about choosing the right thread, they definitely overlap I know, but it might just help keep things a bit more organised. To start things off on the other thread I've made a list of the current suggestions and answered a few practical points.

So to give an idea of the kind of things we can discuss on this thread I'll briefly outline the ideal Puppy Website!

The ideal Puppy Website will have a design that is simple, yet professional, unique, yet welcoming. There will only be one official community site, it will include the forum and only require one username. It will have a full-time administrator and be hosted by a professional, secure and helpful hosting solution. It will always be up to date and inspire regular contributions from Puppy enthusiasts.

Now, all that may not be possible! But, what I do know is that we already have here everything that is needed to make, at the very least, one unit of improvement to the current situation -- in the sense that more than one person has come forward to freely offer what they can to the project. But of course we should be able to improve things by more than one unit! So the question is what is a sensible goal to aim for?

My current proto-site is, in a way, my answer to that question, though it makes some assumptions which really need to be tied down to actual people, numbers and resources. I think it would good to, as far as is possible, find out who is willing to contribute something. It doesn't matter what or how much someone can contribute as long as they are able to commit to that. For instance, I know that WhoDo is willing to offer leadership on the project and even though he has not coded any HTML has been of invaluable support to me so far. Also forum member prit1 has been contributing his web programming skills and is learning Drupal.

The other considerations that come to mind are;
*As nic2109 suggested, who and how many are willing/able to take on admin roles and learn a little bit about Drupal?
*Current manual maintainers. I think it is seriously worth thinking about creating a "Manual Editor" role on Drupal that allows a manual to be maintained and updated on-site. Is anyone really willing to do that?
*Is pupplinux.org hosted with the same sorry excuse for a hosting service that Barry uses for his blog? Are they really the best people to invest all our hard work in? What other hosting solutions are there?

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#22 Post by Caneri »

@klu9,
agreed...one site to rule the roost so to speak and be "official" and secure!!..with mirrors for each continent as in one for North America, one for east Asia/Australia,one for South America and one for European countries so users have a somewhat local connection to Puppy with a common interface and common updates.

@Thomas,

I wanted a professional to handle security and the like for months now and have emailed and pm'd to various puppy people..the problem is how to pay a pro and which pro to use. I have delved into this a bit as my intention for puppylinux.ca is along the lines of your design.

My project from the start was to provide space and bandwidth...not a new web page for users. My server will be available for whatever fills the need of the direction this is taking.

My opinion is, this direction is a must have. Well done.

Eric
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tombh
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#23 Post by tombh »

@Oblivious:
Puppy linux is blah blah and was created by Barry Kauler. Barry maintains his own site (link). Puppy is such a corker [...] For further info about the site, contact xxxxx.
I think that paragraph was spot on! I wish I had had something like that to introduce me into the world of Puppy! We are, after all, designing the 'front door' here.

@Caneri: So are you offering your server as a possible host for the website? I'm sure it could handle the bandwidth, but that's quite a lot of responsibility to take on, on your part. There's the keeping up to date with security patches, regular backups, do you have PHP and MySQL installed too? Then we would also need to redirect puppylinux.org on DNS.
The other option is choosing another hosting provider, they are relatively inexpensive, I know that in the UK, a hosting package to suit Puppy's needs wouldn't cost more than £50 a year.

@Community: There has been a lot of good feedback, but does anyone have any feelings the other way? Any concerns, doubts, etc. Your contributions would be very welcome.
And generally, if there is anyone out there who doesn't feel it's there place or that their thoughts don't amount to much, then please don't let that stop you. Just because you've never posted before doesn't mean that your thoughts don't count!

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#24 Post by Caneri »

Hi Thomas,

My host is pretty much full featured with php5,database,Drupal,Joomla,Photogallery software from Coppermine etc etc.

One good thing about my server is it's located in Canada which means there is no country in the world that is banned from access.

I also find the support quite good. I have always had a solution to problems.
Look here
http://www.netfirms.ca/web-hosting/web- ... -business/

This is my setup...and it's a Linux server which is good. Click on applications on demand for a list of software available.

Eric
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LOF
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#25 Post by LOF »

Hi guys.

I'm loving this discussion and feel it is a really iportant one to be having for this community. I think that what we really all seem to want is continuity. We want all the various sites to fuse together in one big place so that the brand new user and the experienced community member alike can get what they need. My opinion is that we need a site wide header/menu that would carry across to all apsects of the community.

See below a quick mockup of what I mean:

Wiki Home:
Image

Forums Home:
Image

Case example: Think how the Ubuntu wiki (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/) header/tabs work. You always know how to get everywhere else.

What do people think?
Cheers,

[b]LOF[/b]
:D

Caneri
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#26 Post by Caneri »

Hi LOF,

yup...my sentiments exactly.

Eric
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#27 Post by Lobster »

What do people think?
If that top bar can be hidden or rolled up
and it does not slow too much for dial up
seems great 8)
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darrelljon
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#28 Post by darrelljon »

Loving it, or should that be LOFing it.

raffy
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session or cookie flag

#29 Post by raffy »

I like it, too. :)

Using this feature means a page modification for all Puppy sites (wiki, forum, blog), and autohide would require the addition of a session/cookie flag and a Hide/Unhide button. Did I miss the code by LOF?

Added: Maybe "Support" will be better than "Shop", where we list willing Puppians in different continents?
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ttuuxxx
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#30 Post by ttuuxxx »

To tell you the truth I like the Fedora Layout better.
http://fedoraproject.org/
like the little arrows on the left table cell.
ttuuxxx

Plus the nifty language bar. Is really nice for other locales
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Pizzasgood
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#31 Post by Pizzasgood »

Using this feature means a page modification for all Puppy sites
Not if you used frames. Then you could have the new site incorporate all the others without changing them at all. Plus, that way people who want nothing to do with it can just keep using the addresses to the actual forum/blog/wiki/whatever and not get a frame shoved down their throats, and without needing cookies to "save" the setting.

On the down side, using a frame would mean you get that much less viewing space, since you can't just scroll away from them. I didn't work with frames for very long back in my web-coding days, so I don't know if it's possible to set up a chunk of javascript to 'collapse' a frame by resizing it. If it is, that would be cool. I know that the frames can be set as manually resizable as long as you don't make the border invisible. That's a little ugly though, unless you can apply style-sheets to them. I got into CSS after I stopped using frames so I'm not sure if you can do that. I know you can use CSS on forms and such, so I wouldn't be surprised.

Anyways, as a worst case scenario there could be a link on the upper part that sends you to the actual page without using frames, like Google Images uses. And every browser I've ever used also supports right-clicking and choosing "view this frame only" or some such thing.
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LOF
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#32 Post by LOF »

Did I miss the code by LOF?
Nope. That was only a mockup. If people want then I'll code something nicer as a 100px frame or so. Frames are the bane of many web developers though and are discouraged by many. But it seems that this might be the best way of going about it.

Frame code would probably be as follows:

Code: Select all

<html>
 <frameset rows="100px,100%">
   <frame src="frame1.htm">
   <frame src="frame2.htm">
 </frameset>
</html>
Obviously a homepage like tombh's site would still be required for everything to come back to.

To add my own personal experience, I found Puppy hard to get info on to start with, as it was impossible to keep up with the latest stuff here when only really using the wiki. Some huge glorified rss feed would be great to keep up with the latest news and announcements (think LatestNews wiki page on steroids).

@ttuuxxx - the fedora menu is very aesthetic and minimalistic but would work better as a top menu rather than a side one. We all much prefer scrolling down to scrolling left and right. Great design though.
Cheers,

[b]LOF[/b]
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headfound
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#33 Post by headfound »

There is a CSS frame example right here -

http://www.cssplay.co.uk/layouts/frame.html

each page must have the frame coded to work though. Is there any way of getting a php script to grab (for example) the pages called from this forum and dynamically sticking the css on top so the end user just clicks the forum link and its done?
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#34 Post by Lobster »

One way to set up a news type environment (similar to digg.com)
is Pligg
http://www.pligg.com/

It is easy to set up (even I have done it) 8)
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#35 Post by SirDuncan »

Frames would not necessarily be required to achieve that effect without page modification. PHP should be able to do it, and you could still scroll down and away from it. The trick would be writing the code that changes all of the links on included pages to point to the PHP version of the page instead of the normal one. I'm afraid my knowledge of PHP is not great enough to do that without some research.

I personally think that we need to move all of the main Puppy pages to a central server so that we have an easier time dealing with security. While we are at it, we might as well re-do the sites and combine them. I guess I prefer to stick with what Tom is already doing.
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