Re: looking to volunteer my services

On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Uri Guttman wrote:

> >>>>> "DR" == Dave Rolsky <[email protected]> writes:
>
>   DR> - A front page where we can list things like most recent reviews, most
>   DR> recently added books, most popular Perl books, most popular computer
>   DR> books, most popular general books, most prolific reviewers, etc.
>
> i like that. sorta headlines and stuff. but it means we need to keep it
> fresh and that takes work. every month/week/bi-week?

No, it'll be generated from the database!

> search by type, level of experience (newbie, etc.), topics,

type?  That would be category, as would topic.  At least I think so.
Maybe I"m confused.

> sort results by ranking, publisher, etc.

Yep, definitely.

> and we would want to be able to rank the rankers. :)
>
> seriously, my opinion (knowing books and perl well) should be more
> valuable than some moron kiddie who thinks dummies is just perfect.

Yeah, I was hoping we could use the friend/foe stuff from use Perl for
that.  If you like someone's reviews you'll add them to your friend list.
If you think they're a moron you'll remove them.  If I trust you maybe
I'll simply add your friend list to mine.

>   DR> - a form for submitting a new book
>
> good idea. we need some review board to approve new books. most any
> decent CS or popular book with the perl community would get in. of
> course any book with a minimum perl content would be in. we can find
> almost all of those by scanning amazon, etc. i had written a simple
> script to do that. it can be redone to integrate well with this. find
> books with perl content that are not already in the DB.

Like I've said before, I don't see any reason to limit this to just books
that mention Perl, or just books on computers.  For example, when Dan
Sugalski was talking about books he was reading in preparation for his
Perl 6 work, he mentioned a book about writing comic books.  I think it'd
be neat to have that in the system.

We might still need a set of reviews just to weed out duplicates and such.

> bios/credentials of the most well known reviewers?

Maybe.  If we are using use Perl's user info we can direct them to their
use Perl user page.

> book price searching? we could become an affiliate(s) with our cut going to
> perl.org or YAS. easy way to support the perl community.

That sounds like a good idea.

> keys to telling if a perl book is good? schwern had a couple of neat
> points he always checks for in the index. many perl books fail it. call
> this page, how to judge a perl book.

This sounds like some static content we could simply link of the top page.
Maybe an 'essays' section where we'd put that.  It certainly doesn't need
to be dynamic since we're unlikely to get a lot of submissions of that
sort and we can review them on a case by case basis.


-dave

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