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Projects to revitalize Grex.
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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?
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response 3 of 109:
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Jul 20 15:41 UTC 2008 |
Here's another: Here's an idea for what I think Grex should be:
Grex should be a container for a set of communities. It occurred to me
the other day that, really, there's nothing preventing something like
Grex and something like M-Net running on the exact same machine. Except
the limitations of the software that we have built. That is, there's
exactly one BBS instance, exactly one party instance, etc. However, we
can generalize the software so that we have multiple of both,
effectively leading to multiple communities.
Think about it: we already do something similar. The vast, vast
majority of users who login to grex never use BBS or party or anything
similar. They are, in effect, in another community; we just don't
formalize this because they don't use the tools that the Grex founders
intended them to use. But why *not* formalize it? Why *not* provide
them tools to create new, totally separate communities? Technically,
this isn't that hard, when you get down to it.
Basically, I'd think that the big challenges would be simply to separate
instances of party, the BBS, backtalk, etc, and make them selectable
based on the user's preferences. This shouldn't be that hard, really.
Some other potential projects:
1. A new backtalk interface with key bindings and more AJAX'y type stuff
that allows for a swifter user experience. Wouldn't something like the
GMail interface for BBS be pretty cool?
2. A client/server version of the venerable party, with channels for
supporting different pools of users. Maybe we could just use IRC....
3. More services on the web. Wouldn't it be cool to have an AJAX
interface to party?
What do others think?
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response 5 of 109:
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Jul 20 16:59 UTC 2008 |
Basically, providing some mechanism whereby a user can create a
community; this community has its own BBS, its own party, etc. Then
oter users on the system can join said community.
Think of it as another level of abstraction on top of what we currently
have; Grex as we know it would become one community, but there would be
others on the system as well.
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