Wanted: Another Grex Webmaster

Sep 10 07:33 UTC 1995

Carl Miller has resigned as one of the webmasters on Grex.
This is because he cannot devote adequate time to maintaining the
official Web pages here. I am sorry that Grex will lose his services,
but we must face reality, and find a replacement.

I have been the other Webmaster here, but I have been acting more as a 
system administrator. I have exerted come influence over the hypertext
but mostly through conversations with Carl. I am willing to continue
as one of the Webmasters, but I think we could use a volunteer (or two)
who has some time to spend working on improving these. Html skills
are essential.

There have been others who have expressed interest in the past.
robh, kaplan and scg come to mind. I would be most pleased to 
hear what they or any other person thinks about the possibility of
being a Grex Webmaster.

In the interim, I am going to change the ownership of the files
from carl to srw, and make sure that they are all chgrp lynxadm.
lynxadm is a bit of a misnomer of a group. The group of people
there have expressed interest in lynx, the lynx shell, and Grex's
hypertext in general. Currently this is srw,robh,carl,scg,kaplan.

response 2 of 25:

Sep 10 15:45 UTC 1995

The Webmaster is the person who is in charge of the hypertext for that
site. We used lynxadm as a unix group to permit shared responsibility
for that. Lynxadm is a misnomer. Lynx is just another browser for the
hypertext. We could go and change the group name to make it be a better
name, but the answer to your question is the 2 differences listed below:

(1) There is a Webmaster@cyberspace.org mail alias. This is to meet the
requirement that any question about the hypertext at a site can
be sent to that address and find a human being. (Much like postmaster)

Currently that mail alias points to Carl and Me. Carl's mkhomepage
script generates automatic mail to that alias (which I largely ignore).

(2) Webmaster is a staff position. The candidate should be approved
as a staff member by the board.

--

So the current lynxadm folks, (robh, scg, kaplan) are the most natural
candidates. Of these, you, Rob, appear to be the most interested and
have some time to spend on this. Also, you are the only one who is currently 
already on the Grex staff. I see no reason to change scg and kaplan's
access to the pages. I very much want to foster cooperation in the
maintenance of these files, but I would like to recognize someone 
who will share with me the responsibility for these pages 
(which are mostly Carl's as of today).

Rob,

I was hoping you would be interested. You are a fine choice, in my opinion.
What will happen is that I will change the webmaster mail alias to point to
robh and srw (instead of carl and srw). 

I will wait for further public comment, or questions/clarifications, but
if there seem to be no problems with proceeding, we can do this whenever
we think it appropriate. If there are no objections from staff or board
members, then I don't think any formal proceedings (like a vote) are really
needed.

response 4 of 25:

Sep 10 20:49 UTC 1995

I'd be interested in CGI scripts.  Tried it once, and burned many hours
before realizing it just doesn't work on Grex.  :-)  (It'd be neat if 
httpd returned a "CGI Scripts Don't Work on Grex" error message, btw!)

response 6 of 25:

Sep 11 07:14 UTC 1995

I was figuring that we would need CGI to support a Web-based newuser,
and to support Webspan conferencing. CGI is very valuable, imo, and
important to me.

Our webmaster(s) must be willing to spend time on the web site.
Parts are in a sad state, because neither Carl nor I have had the time
to spend maintaining it. 

I appreciate your offer, scg, and would like to have you continue
as a "lynxadm" which means you can still make contributions to the
web site, but I would prefer to put the reins in the hands of 
someone who can afford the time to maintain things properly.

response 8 of 25:

Sep 12 06:02 UTC 1995

Thanks Jeff.

I guess it would be cool if our Webmaster(s) could farm out areas
of html that need work so that more people could be able to contribute,
but in the end it is best that the ultimate responsibility is not
divided to widely, lest the organization become paralyzed.

You are already a lynxadm, Jeff. This gives you the access you need
to work on Grex's web pages. We should probably meet and discuss
who should work on what. I need a person to share the webmaster mailing
list with me so I am not the only one getting it. I'd like to delegate
the html production and maintenance to someone or some people, because
I want to work on other web-related things (like WebSpan).

I supppose we'll discuss this at the staff meeting on Wednesday, too.
I'll admit I'm in favor of recommending robh to be Carl's replacement
as Webmaster. I am hoping that we can get more community involvement
in web page development than we had before, too.

response 10 of 25:

Sep 13 12:07 UTC 1995

I also have an interest.

response 12 of 25:

Nov 24 00:08 UTC 1995

From our main page, under "Tips on Using Lynx", we have a good
HTML tutorial available.

response 14 of 25:

Dec 2 17:57 UTC 1995

One would run the command "lynx", or access http://www.cyberspace.org/
to reach our Main Page.

And it's an HTML text, so you could view it directly on Grex,
but it wouldn't make much sense.  Unless you knew HTML.  In which
case, why do you need to read a tutorial?  >8)

response 16 of 25:

Dec 3 22:26 UTC 1995

It's not all that hard to get started with Lynx, and
"Tips on Using Lynx" is on the first page they see.
And there's also the "h" command, which gives new users
the basics of moving around.  "Tips..." is geared toward
folks who know the basics and want to learn something more.

response 18 of 25:

Dec 4 03:07 UTC 1995

Oh David, if only you knew the folks I've dealt with...

response 20 of 25:

Dec 4 15:44 UTC 1995

  I think Dave is onto someting.  There are going to be those who
are going to be a little timid before trying something new.  Whatever
help we can give them, in as many different forms would be a good
thing.

response 22 of 25:

Dec 5 03:43 UTC 1995

In all seriousness, I'd consider lynx a lot easier to figure
out than newuser.

response 24 of 25:

Dec 6 02:33 UTC 1995

Would it be worthwhile toarrange a get-together for all of
these folks, and I can be there to show them the various things?
(Partly I want to help, and partly I want to see just what
confuses people about using Lynx.)