response 25 of 109:

Jul 22 09:11 UTC 2008

I generally am not very relevant in this discussion but I'm posting this
anyway.

CMSs are "certainly" not the way for Grex to go. Their functions only slightly
overlap with those of Grex's and despite what remmers says they are far from
being "easy to maintain." They are almost invitations for disaster because
they're too complex, often involve many "moving parts," and mostly hinge on
"shiny new technology" instead of "proven old ways."

A simple CMS package will need heavy server-side (e.g. PHP, Perl) and
client-side scripting, some sort of database (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL), and
"mods" for the web server (e.g. mod_php for Apache). These are obvious
performance drains and security threats. Grex is known (and loved for) being
simple and "old-skool." Some Grex users delibrately use very minimal setups and
view these same pages through lynx (or through bbs), with those "frills"
they'll be deterred. I like it when pagefuls of good talk is loaded over my
dial-up connection in under 15 seconds.

On the functional aspect, Grex offers a bundle: shell access, email,
webhosting, "and" community interaction. CMSs are focused only on collaborative
content creation which is not the sort of community interaction Grexers are
involved in. Grex isn't hosting some sort of "project" that needs
"collaboration," i.e. modification of the "same" content. Its community
interaction paradigm is very well described by the title it already has: bbs.
The refurbishment it needs in that respect is probably some new "light"
bulletin board software but I'd be skeptic to even deploy phpBB and the like
because all of them, like CMSs, depend on server-side scripting and DBMSs.

As for "standards compliance," as far as I know most "recent versions" of
standards have been specifically designed to be supersets of their previous
versions. So Grex is not non-standard if it still presents content in old HTML
instead of some blasted XHTML/DTHML 4.1-bloody-transitional. In fact, one has
to be proud to present a functional Grex using the smallest possible subset of
the pertinent standards. That's good minimalism.

I believe on a "frills-mostly-with-a-bit-of-content" Internet a good ol'
system's mission should be to keep up the good ol' ways. In case of Grex, that
could be accomplished by enriching the shell/remote access experience (for me
that boils down to port forwarding and running httptunnel ;-), expanding (or
total abandoning) of email services (to include IMAP, for example), relaxing
webhosting practice so that people can make diverse websites within reason (I
don't think people should be able to put up sites written in PHP on Grex,
though), and a more capable but still "text-oriented" bbs (a "multi-level
forum" structure instead of conferences, and a proper linkable archive).

Good luck to [put the hero's name here] who will revive Grex. Seriously though,
I'll be happy to help if there's something I can do for Grex over some
thousands of kilometers and a dial-up connection.

response 27 of 109:

Jul 23 15:01 UTC 2008

Re resp:25 - Hmm.  I'll need to educate myself better on CMS's before I
can agree or disagree with what you say.  As far as the underlying
plumbing is concerned - Perl and MySQL we already have, and intelligent
use of CSS and PHP could substantially improve the website.  I've found
that adding some light-weight CSS and PHP to my personal website has
significantly simplified maintenance tasks.  I'm in favor of reasonable
minimalism and avoiding technological overkill, but not to the point of
rejecting technologies that could be useful and make our jobs easier.

Re resp:26 - Adding mouse support to a tty interface is an interesting
concept, but probably not feasible (although xterm has limited support
for it, I think).  On the other hand, implementing a web interface that
looks and acts substantially like the tty interface, but also supports
"clicking", might have some appeal to the old guard.  Not that I'm
seriously suggesting that it be done.

response 29 of 109:

Jul 23 15:35 UTC 2008

Ah, gotcha - "selecting" might be a less confusing term than "clicking",
which suggested to me that you meant a real point-and-click device
(mouse).  Well, it's definitely feasible technically; stumbling block
would be, as usual, persuading someone with the necessary programming
skills to implement it.

response 31 of 109:

Jul 23 16:20 UTC 2008

resp:28 I'm not sure what the point would be....  Grex already has 
fronttalk that works with a TTY interface.  One of the ideas is to 
make the web interface more TTY like, but that's a separate issue.

response 33 of 109:

Jul 23 17:35 UTC 2008

I wouldn't mind a web interface to BBS which supports cellphone users.

response 35 of 109:

Jul 24 01:54 UTC 2008

The new page looks nice. A couple of typos: "frequently" needs an "l."
"Our home, Ann Arbor" needs a space.

response 37 of 109:

Jul 24 04:37 UTC 2008

Re #27:

I'm rather bewildered to hear Grex runs a SQL server. Are there any Grex
applications depdendent on it? Has it ever been load tested? Or is it just
"educational?"

As for Perl, mere availability of the interpreter is not enough. PerlCGI
modules must be added to both Perl and Apache (assuming Grex is served on
Apache) to provide the required CGI hooks. These hooks and the "possibility" of
remotely running malicious code through a misconfigured or buggy CGI interface
will make Grex vulnerable to a host of attacks. On the other hand, cgi-bin is
already there so perhaps there won't be much added vulnerability.

I've heard computer security experts have a saying that goes, "usability is
inversely proportional to security." I wonder if Grex isn't already "useful"
enough?.

response 39 of 109:

Jul 24 11:16 UTC 2008

resp:37 I've found it's not always true that security and usability 
are inversely proportional.  For instance, many networks become *more* 
usable when moving to, e.g., Kerberos for authentication because it 
suddenly becomes transparent to most users: instead of entering a 
password/passphrase for a variety of different services, the library 
just pulls it out of your credentials cache on your behalf.  Similarly 
with SSH public-key authentication.

Btw: Grex runs MySQL for a few different, administrative types of 
things.  We also already run mod_perl.

resp:38 Thanks!  That'd be great!  All of the HTML is 
in /var/www/htdocs; feel free to copy that to your directory and go to 
town making changes that you see fit.  I agree that the pages should 
have a consistent look and feel, but haven't had time to update most 
of them myself.

I *did* convert the HTML in the main directory to XHTML using tidy, 
but it's being servied up by Apache as text/html instead of the 
XML+XHTML combo that all the kids love.  That's largely a matter of 
fixing links.

response 41 of 109:

Jul 24 14:51 UTC 2008

It does.

Which is why I modified the Apache configuration to rewrite the MIME 
type to text/html for .xhtml documents if it detects that it is 
serving to Internet Explorer.  Similarly for Lynx.

For other browsers, we still want to serve as application/xml+xhtml.

response 43 of 109:

Jul 25 22:50 UTC 2008

And what happens when STeve finally logs in realizes things have
changed? Will he / can he revert back to the old and lock cross out? 
Only 1/2 joking..

response 45 of 109:

Jul 26 15:17 UTC 2008

Change the fucking colors!! It looks like diarrhea.....like someone
hershey-squirted all over the screen.

response 47 of 109:

Jul 27 18:21 UTC 2008

Shortest path to something useable would probably be Backtalk +
Fronttalk.  Backtalk works well, and fixing up Fronttalk would be a lot
less work than developing something new.

response 49 of 109:

Jul 28 01:50 UTC 2008

I'd be willing to help but I'm not literate in computer technology...