Re: [CompStrm Wiki] a nice looking web page...

[Bill la F. <laf...@ya...>]

James,
   
  Delighted to hear back from you. Hope you're feeling better. But I'd rather have long term involvement that a fast burnout on this project--I look forward to working with you for a long time. :-)
   
  As for the logo, I think equal emphasis is good. Agile too often refers to a programming style, like XP, and there are so many wiki's out there.Our differentiation is first in having a wiki that is easy to reorganize and second having an open source application platform that is wiki  based.
   
  Our market is developers, simply because it is an application platform. We need to make it very easy for developers to use (even if they don't join the development effort) and attractive for their end users. And the latter is why graphics are important. We'll not succeed unles our web site and product look nice and are easy to use. And we'll also not succeed unless we can show how easy it is to develop to. That also means we need to create a team environment which is very supportive and friendly.
   
  I have not takes a good look at jotspot myself. But what excites me about it is that, because of jotspot we don't need to spend too much effort explaining what a wiki-based application server is, though ours will be very different.
   
  You will notice that most open source projects are copies, to a large degree, of commercial products. It is very difficult to have developers agree on a direction when the work is completely original. My experience to date is that it takes about 2 years of work on an original project just to develop a minimal community. So jotspot, a web service which charges for the extra features that everyone really needs, really opens the doors for us. Its ours now to loose. My feer is that the initial GUIs of AgileWiki3 are so bad that we're making a horrible first impression. So we need to emphasise that they are only there for testing while other aspects are being developed. And we need some nice looking web pages to show that not everything we do is ugly.
   
  Now I wouldn't trust the svn that came with your box. This product is under rapid development. So keep an eye on the version numbers. Also, as I mentioned earlier, I'm not sure what privileges you have at java.net. Can you access our svn files? Can you update?
   
  If you'll take a look at my latest blog, you'll see my ambitions for this weekend. http://laforge49.blogspot.com
   
  b

James S <jam...@gm...> wrote:
  Hi Bill,

I've been busy at my regular job and a little under the weather so it took me a while to get back with you.

1. I'm glad that we are going to focus on the java.net site. I downloaded the template and will work on it over the next couple of days. I was confused about all of the websites so focusing on the one will be good. 

2. I will take a good look at jotspot.com

3. I don't like the green in the logo either. I think that either gray or the blue is good. I've included both. The blue emphasises the Wiki part more if that is the goal, otherwise the gray reads easier. 

4. I've gotten subversion loaded at home on my Linux box--in fact it came with Fedora 5. I downloaded the manual which I plan on printing out today and reading it this weekend. I hope to get it installed on my Mac at work very soon. 

5. The weather on the bottom of my Firefox browser is called Forecastfox. It is a nice little plugin. You can find it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/398/ 

James



  On 5/4/06, Bill la Forge <laf...@ya...> wrote:      Hi James!
   
  I got the web page and it looks nice. I hope you don't mind a bunch of feedback...
   
  We've really got 4 web sites:
   
  1. www.java.net Has its own standards for conformance. This is a "normal" web site that supports normal HTML and all. The audience here is Java developers. The goal of this site, for us, is to get them interested in either working on AgileWiki3 or, eventually, writing applications for it. 
   
  If you go to https://java-enterprise.dev.java.net/ you will see a list of various projects there. These projects conform to the site requirements. And you'll note that the home page of each project is just a frame in the larger page, where the site provides the top and left frames. And they all use that ugly blue bar for navigation--required. 
   
  2. project web pages for www.sourceforge.net Currently I'm just doing a redirect to the project page in AgileWiki2 at agilewiki.org. But I'm also keeping some resources there like slides. Before AgileWiki2 became self hosting, I used to have a huge site there, built up layer on layer over a 2 year period. It was pretty horrible. 
   
  3. There is the AgileWiki2 self-hosting web site. The http://agilewiki.org/AgileWiki/index.html  page is probably the only "normal" page on the site. Here we can put a page like you designed and change the link from sourceforge to point to it. All the other pages are constrained by the limitations of the AgileWiki2 program, which serves up these pages. 
   
  This site is pretty badly messed up right now. The database died and I had not been taking backups, so I restored old content and then only updated the intentions page. This site will go off the air in 3 to 6 months.
   
  My current thinking is that this site serves only to demonstrate the prototype. Its a super wiki. But AgileWiki3 is (intended to be) both a wiki and an application server--like www.jotspot.com. Do take a look at this site, please. This site offers limited service for free but for things like access control (which even AgileWiki2 has), they charge. 
   
  4. The new web site, coming up any day now. Some pages will be normal html pages, others will be the strange looking ones produced by the early alpha version of AgileWiki3. 
   
   
  General comments
   
  First on the Logo. The green doesn't seem to fit. Perhaps make it blue to match the circle? That then ties to the color of the web page and it all fits nicely. (I really don't see adding extra words to the logo later.) Otherwise I think the logo is great.
   
  On the bottom I see the weather. Is that part of the page? Adjusted for the location of the viewer based on IP address? More curious than anything. 
   
  Last line I can't see too well. And its important. I like it there, but perhaps a little darker? 
   
  I don't want to dig into the content too much of the page you gave. Rather I'd first like to establish the context it is to serve in. It could not replace http://agilewiki.org/wiki/uuid/D3pUgh0M2Bk1HEzxa-4skWmN/_ as that is a page generated by the prototype. But it could replace http://agilewiki.org/AgileWiki/index.html and we could redirect the home page link at compstrm.sourceforge.net to point to it. Alternatively, we could have compstrm.sourceforge.net point to www.java.net so that we only have one web site for now. 
   
  I really want to de-emphasise the current agilewiki.org site as it is just the prototype and a bit out of date and messed up because of the last restore. I want to take the site (but not the URL) down as soon as possible. The new server will include the new (hardly working) code, as well as regular pages. 
   
  I could be clearer if it was clearer to me. Having 3 sites and a fourth coming up is a mess. I think for the moment its best just to focus on a nice page or 3 at www.java.net and perhaps have compstrm.sourceforge.net redirect you there for now.
   
  I'd also (and this addresses content) like to distinguish clearly between AgileWiki2 (a super wiki, but only a wiki, but still a prototype for AgileWiki3) and AgileWiki3 (a wiki-based application server).

     
  Bill 

    
  
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