Projects to revitalize Grex.

Jul 20 15:13 UTC 2008

I started looking at Grex's web pages the other day.

Wow.

You really get a sense of how neglected the system has become when you
starting look at the web site.  There are all sorts of crazy references
to things that had happened in the mid-90's like they were yesterday,
and many things have not been updated in a very, very long time.  The
HTML is old and non-conforming to current standards.  Content is
scattered all over the place and mixed with presentation in an awkward
way.

A couple of years ago, we had a contest to create a new web site with
updated content and presentation.  The prize was a one-year membership.
 Exactly one user submitted an entry, and won, but I don't recall
whether we ever added him as a user.  We certainly didn't use his final
product.  As far as I can tell, he no longer has an account, either. 
But I had saved his work, and spent some time yesterday massaging it
into Grex's setup.  The result can be seen by pointing your web browser
at http://www.grex.org or http://www.cyberspace.org.  About a week or
so ago, I also bought an SSL certificate for Grex from GoDaddy.com, so that
that annoying `This certificate is not valid... blah blah blah' error message
no longer appears when you try to navigate to an https link on Grex.  (You all
*do* use SSL when you type your password into backtalk, right?)

I also started making a stab at updating our "Staff Notes" pages to
reflect what Grex is now (our web site still says that Grex is running
on a Sun!  This hasn't been true for years now).

However, I am but one person, and I also am, shall we say, "graphic arts
challenged."  I need some help.  Naturally, I'd try and enlist our
webmasters, but they seem to have disappeared.  It looks like we need
new webmasters.

Can you help?  Yes, you.  No, really, you reading this right now.

I can do a lot of the grunt work of converting old HTML to XHTML,
putting in some style-sheet files and the like, but I need help updating
content and making things look pretty.

This is but one of several projects I think we need to embark upon to
revitalize Grex.  Aside from the one broken window of the website, there
are a number of other things we really need to do.  Among them:

1. Replace Picospan with something open source.  No, really; we need
   to do a system upgrade, for instance, and it's going to be
   challenging to get an updated Picospan since we don't have source.
   If we are going to keep using it, we need to get the source code
   from somewhere (I personally doubt anyone would care if we started
   passing it around), but I think that's really unlikely to happen.
   Thus, we need to replace it: either by fixing up fronttalk and
   removing the major remaining bugs, or by writing a new replacement.
2. Consolidate much of the administrative scripts and where
   they get their data from, and make sure these reflect reality.
3. Put a new face on the website (already mentioned).
4. A lot of general cleanup of old data that's floating around the
   system.
5. Mail.  Ugh.  Yeah.
6. More work on sandboxing new users.
7. Web server *configuration* changes: I really think we need to move
   to a model where we sandbox personal web sites like we do email,
   to prevent phishing sites, and we also need to start allowing images
   for users.
8. Some administrative tools making it easier to move users between
   "classes."
9. Really, we just need people to do the work....

Those are the big ones I can think of right now.

Can you help, or do you know someone who can?