[Gimp-web] Re: Re: anyone try the news out?

[Raphaël Quinet]

On Tue, 1 Apr 2003 09:49:37 -0500, Carol Spears <carol@gimp.org> wrote:
> apparently no one will try the news site out.
[...]
> how about if we bundle up what we have done and put it all on ebay? i
> would consider sending news of the sites closing to this nice working
> news interface, but i don't think anyone comes here.

Well, well, well...  You seem to give up a bit too quickly.  :-)

Because of other constraints, I had unfortunately very little time
left for GIMP-related stuff in the last weeks, including dealing with
Bugzilla, maintaining the old web site and checking what is going on
with the new site (and the new developers' site, for which I should do
something someday).  So I did not test the news interface, sorry.  I
only had a quick look at it but I did not try to submit any news.


If you really want some comments, I have some general comments about
the new site, not only the news interface.  I should really write a
longer mail about this because the brief comments that I am about to
make will probably be misinterpreted.  Please do not take them as
negative criticism but as suggestions for improvements.  We should
have had a discussion about the requirements for the new web site a
long time ago, but this discussion died (my fault, probably).  Maybe I
will be able to write a better message next week.  Or maybe I will
start with these first comments and see how the discussion evolves
now.  Anyway, I think that there are a few things that should be
improved before the new site can replace www.gimp.org:

- First, the new site is broken when viewed in Netscape 4.x (and some
  other browsers, but Netscape 4.x is probably the only one that is
  still used by a significant number of GIMP users).  I had a quick
  look at the logs of the current server for www.gimp.org, and I see
  that there are several dozens of unique visitors per day that are
  still using Netscape 4.x (the majority is using MSIE, of course).
  We should not have a site that is unusable with this browser,
  regardless of what we may think about how broken this browser is.
  There are some IRIX and Solaris GIMP users that may not be able to
  upgrade to a newer browser easily.  It is acceptable to have pages
  that are not looking as nice in Netscape 4 as in the modern
  browsers, but at least they should work and the user should be able
  to navigate the site.  Among other things, this means that we
  should probably use tables instead of CSS positioning (but CSS can
  and should be used for everything else, of course).

- Dynamic pages should be avoided.  I recommend disabling server-side
  includes for the whole site and having only a few scripts providing
  dynamic pages for the limited number of cases in which this cannot
  be avoided.  The home page should be a single static HTML page.  Of
  course, the static pages can be built from several parts (templates
  + contents) and re-generated when these parts have to be updated,
  but the result should be a static HTML page stored on disk without
  server-side includes.  Besides the additional load that they put on
  the server, the dynamic pages cannot be cached in the same way by
  client caches and caching proxies (or they can be cached, but not
  re-validated by the conditional HTTP requests).  I had the
  opportunity to test the difference between static pages and pages
  with server-side includes on a site serving about 1 Terabyte per day
  and the difference is quite big.  So I think that static pages are
  the best option for the new www.gimp.org.

- If possible, the script(s) that convert the templates and contents
  into static HTML pages should also "sanitize" the contents.  Maybe
  by checking the code with HTML Tidy (at work, I added a call to
  "tidy" in a CVS commit script so that it refuses to commit any
  broken content).  It would also be nice to be able to replace some
  special variables in the HTML source code by their current value.
  This is used extensively in the "old" site for maintaining most of
  the links to the external sites, links to specific Bugzilla queries
  and even some relative links to local pages that are referenced by
  their purpose instead of using the actual file names.

- I would like the home page to contain a bit more than the news in
  the "main" part.  Although the important links are included in the
  menu, it would be nice to have a short section before the news
  containing a few comments about what is the GIMP.  A couple of lines
  with links to the relevant parts of the site would be enough.

- There should be more screenshots and pretty images.  ;-)  This is
  usually the first thing that random visitors will be looking for
  (i.e., people who are not already using the GIMP and who want to see
  quickly how it looks like compared to Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop).

I like the new design very much and I will try to support the
transition to the new design as much as I can.  It is unlikely that I
will be able to do much before Easter, but I will do my best after
that.

-Raphaël

P.S.: If you want to discuss these issues, please make sure that you
      reply to the list, not to me.  I prefer public and archived
      discussions and I tend to forget many of the mails that are
      sent directly to me.  ;-)  Oh, and feel free to change the
      subject line to something more relevant.