Web site issues

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 25 September 2009 00:19:47 pl...@pi... wrote:
> Allin Cottrell wrote:

> > <survey>
> > 
> > (1) Google search: "free plotting program"
> > www.gnuplot.info = #2
> > gnuplot sf page not on first 2 google pages

Yeah, but that's because there are so many free-but-crap plotting programs
for Windows :-)
If you search on "free plotting program linux" then the
first several hits are summaries that list gnuplot near the top.

> > (2) Google search: "open source plotting program"
> > www.gnuplot.info = #3
> > gnuplot sf page not on first 2 google pages
[same for several other search queries]

That is a bit misleading. The Google search has folded the
two sites into a single hit.  If you hit "show similar" on 
any of these search hits you will see that both sites are there.
I don't know how it decides which one of the equivalent sites to
use as the representative.

> > (1) I would say, if we're interested in proselytizing [...]
> >     we should also include the term "graphing". 

I can't explain the search results, but I note that "gnuplot" is the
largest category in the Google directory of page ranks under
    http://www.google.com/Top/Science/Math/Software/Graphing/
It's one of only 4 programs that rate their own category.

I have added the term "graphing" to the web page anyhow, but I doubt that it
will make a difference.  To my understanding, the critical thing would be
to get the word "graphing" to appear nearby in text of the _linking_ pages.

> > (2) This is more speculative, but IMO google page rank is quite
> > dynamic, not necessarily strongly bound by history.  That is, I
> > think that _if_ the gnuplot developers (and I don't count myself
> > as one, I'm just an interested spectator) were to choose to make
> > gnuplot.sf.net the canonical site, then the ranking would fairly
> > quickly adjust to favour gnuplot.sf.net.

When I checked yesterday, both www.gnuplot.info and gnuplot.sourceforge.net
had page ranks of 7.  So I think that page rank per se is a non-issue.


Anyhoo..............

I'm much more concerned about the lack of an assigned maintainer for either
the web site or the FAQ.  Both could use a thorough updating, and that will
be even more true shortly, when the release version switches to 4.4 and the
CVS version switches to 4.5   These numbers appear all over the place.

Any volunteers to make a pass over the web pages and/or FAQ?
You don't need to be listed as a developer;  just download the page source
using wget or the like, edit locally, and then upload the revised pages to
the Patches tracker.  Or, if you prefer, there is (I think) a mechanism to
give separate mainainer access to the web pages.


	Ethan (sfeam)