On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 13:28:58 +0900, James Britt
<jamesUNDERBARb / neurogami.com> wrote:
> organization depends on identifying what goals the site means to serve,

What are your ideas here? How does it compare to your vision for ruby-doc?

> the visual harmony is a red herring.

Think duck typing. If one class has #to_s, another #to_string and
another #as_a_string, how should the phraser know that those all do
the same thing? The name of a method is to a phraser as a web site's
design is to a visitor.

> ruby-lang site says, "Go here to see active Ruby projects", then it's
> pretty clear it's related and valuable.

But if the first reaction is "this isn't what I'm looking for", then
the person is going to look somewhere else. The first reaction isn't
based on a "go here", but what they see when they first get there.

> > Removing dead links on the ruby-lang site would be a good first step.
> 
> But before anyone sets out to update the links on ruby-lang,

Well, what I mentioned has already been done in the time it took you
to write your email :)

> a) this sort of content even belongs there

It doesn't. My first thought was "replace the page with a link to
ruby-doc" then I realised that ruby-doc isn't really at that stage
yet. Better to have the page on ruby-lang for now.

> b) if so, how  can it be arranged so that keeping up doesn't become a
> full-time job?

The easy answer is "make it a wiki"and it's already been done:
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby/

> Why manually update a set of "In the news" links on ruby-lang when you can
> just grab and cache RSS feeds?

Why do it at all? There is no need to keep track of every time the
word Ruby is posted on a site. News written by "Ruby", whatever and
whover that is, should really go to one place.

> It is not easy to find the right balance, and people ought not be thrust
> into "expert mode" right off the bat, but I suspect that many things
> that may one thinks of as valuable to a newcomer will quickly strike
> them as just more stuff taking up screen space as they soon get more
> familiar with a site.

I don't understand what you are trying to say. Are you just being
cynical? That's my impression, sorry if I'm mistaken.

Douglas