Account Created + Our Agenda

Hi all!

OK, so Mr. Engelschall gave me an account on the machine hosting the
http://thewml.org/ domain, and I can now ssh and everything there, and
change whatever I'd like.

A Subversion repository was set up there, and it will be used to manage
the code of the site, and in the future perhaps the code of the WML core.

The way I see it, the items on our agenda are:

1. Prepare a list of all the things on the site that do not function. Anyone
who can point to some dysfunctionality is welcome to post it here. I will
collect them in a text file, and post it occasionally.

What I have so far is:

<<<
1. http://thewml.org/example/refs.html generates an error upon the form
submission. Looking at the code it seems that the CGI handler is borked with
some obscure contents. I don't know how it's happened. We'll have to
re-implement it, unless someone can produce an older copy. (That's why you
_must_ use version control for sites as well.)
>>>

Not much, eh? Well, I thought that maybe someone should go over the
entire site and note everything that is wrong. The site is not that large, so
it shouldn't be a problem.

2. Fix the bugs in the site.

2.1. Add a Stop-e-Patents in Europe thing similar to what present in:

http://shlomif.il.eu.org/

Should we do it? What do Ralf and Denis think of it? What do everybody else
think about it? The Patent vote is coming soon.

(I'm not really an anti-Capitalistic type. I don't have anything against the
concept of patents as a concept. I also think that some software patents
(such as the RSA patent or the Google PageRank one) are valid. However, I
think that the European patent scene has the potential of becoming the same
mess in the U.S. where everybody are hurt. It is obvious that the European
patent office workers lack common sense as much as their American
peers.)

3. Start marketing WML as a tool for everyday web-designers. We have a golden
opportunity now that many web-designers are switching to Mac OS X and Linux.
Web-designers may not be as intelligent as the resident
Perl/Python/C/C++/Assembler/LISP/Scheme/Haskell/etc. guru, but they are still
smart people who are still able to learn Web Meta Language.

We can also really use a native Win32 port, or at least a cygwin port. Last
time I tried building it on cygwin, though (WinXP Home) I received some
obscure
error.

4. I am maintaining several web-sites using WML. Most of them have very
similar functionality. I think it would be a good idea for me to create a
content management system that will abstract this duplicate functionality,
and to release it as open-source. Using themes and skins and stuff, it could
make the entry barrier for WML much lower, and writing modular WML code much
easier.

Right now, I often have to update a site to a newer design manually, in all
the sites I maintain.

5. Think about what should be added/removed/modified in the site. One thing
I feel is that the navigation menu may have too many images, (all of them
small, but together they add to a lot) which on a slow link can cause the page
to take a long time to load. Can we replace it with a nice stylized text?

It would also be nice to expand the menu with sub-menus as well, which is what
most site do. And relevant Mozilla <link rel='s would be nice.

These are all relatively minor issues. I really like the site as it is. But
we may wish to change it, just for the sake of change.

6. Make WML emit better warnings and errors. Right now, lots of things are
uneven. Plus, temporary files are immediately deleted, instead of being left
somewhere for the user to inspect.

7. Create a nice API for generating RSS, which is becoming more and more
important.

8. Set up a web-forum on the site. (we might need something that supports
UTF-8 really well.) I can also RTFM on how to reserve an IRC channel on
FreeNode, and perhaps a Wiki would be nice. But naturally, we need to modify
the site to reflect these new resources.

-------------

That's all I can think of for now. Let me know if you can think of more. And
please voice your opinion on this.

Regards,

    Shlomi Fish


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email protected]
Home Page:         http://shlomif.il.eu.org/

- "Sometimes two bugs cancel each other."
- "It wasn't a bug - it was a sanity check!"
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