Re: Hello and some questions

Robert,

> Like maintaining the list of hosting providers? Or the list of support
> companies? Or researching and updating missing/broken articles? Or
> adding new articles and links? Maybe those types of things aren't sexy
> enough for you though?

I didn't know that you were doing that ... it's not really visible from the
main page, and I've not been getting any of the e-mail. So, by the
principles of Volunteerocracy, you are now in charge. What do *you* want to
do with Techdocs?

> Early on I tried to get some kind of revision system set up by getting
> the code into CVS, to allow anyone to get access to enable contributing,
> only to have folks bypass CVS and/or complain that CVS wasn't an
> acceptable form on managing content, so I acquiesced.

Hmmm ... I recall saying that CVS was not adequate as a CMS but was better
than flat HTML. Who else did you get oppostion from? Justin?

> Help me out 'cause I don't see all of these articles you are referring
> to. Unless you're referring to the different sections of each issue of
> General Bits (?) which Elaine writes herself (which are pruned from the
> mailing lists...)

http://www.varlena.com/varlena/GeneralBits/Tidbits/index.php
... but you're right, it's more like 1 per week.

> But I certainly can't find the "two new articles a
> week" of the caliber you find on techdocs (Set Returning Functions, Full
> Text Indexing, Adventures In PostgreSQL, etc..)

> Don't get me wrong,
> there are some good articles on the General Bits site, like the recent
> article you co-authored on performance tuning, but given that Elein
> doesn't use a fancy CMS nor were you refused help with putting your
> articles up on techdocs, I don't see how her site's architecture has any
> bearing on getting articles written. IMHO it's too bad she doesn't use
> her persistence to help improve the situation with the community sites
> rather than splintering things further on her own (something I have
> mentioned to her before).

She's been led to believe, by some former members of our community, that there
is some kind of secret cabal running our Web presence and that she is not
welcome. I've been working on disabusing her of that notion. Offering to
put her "in charge" of Techdocs seemed like a good move in that regard.
There's also the issue of her advertising revenue, but that should be
surmountable.

Funny you should bring up the Indexing articles, though ... you know why there
was never a third or forth one? Because I got bogged down doing the markup,
and trying to revise the 1st two articles which are already marked up ....
so really, my emphasis on a CMS is all about *me*. *I* don't want to do
manual HTML markup on everything I write; the magazines I submit articles do
don't require me to format them (heck, they don't *want* me to format them),
and overall I've found that it took me as long to markup Indexing II as it
took me to write it. Nor do I want you doing the markup, I want you working
on other stuff for the community.

I happen to believe that there are other potential authors ... Stephan Szabo,
Robert Bernier, Joe Conway, etc, ... who would write for our web sites if
they had a clearer and easier access path to do so.

> You know though, I see a pattern here... take the jobs.postgresql.org
> site, which is still not updated with the text that I suggested close to
> two weeks ago. While several people keep kicking back and forth ideas on
> what would be the ideal solution for a jobs site,

As far as I'm concerned, the discussion is secondary to the effort. My
company will be contributing *complete* code from our specification becuase
it is of indirect commercial benefit to us. Nobody from the www group needs
to waste time on it until somebody is ready to add features.

Also, I think you should get used to the fact that in OSS projects there are 6
people on mailing lists arguing about stuff for every 1 person who actually
does anything. Heck, 1 of 7 is pretty good in comparison to OpenOffice.org,
where it's more like 1 of 150.

> Marc has quietly
> implemented a solution (the jobs mailing list) that offers the majority
> of functionality that most people would want, yet outside of myself
> there has been virtually no support given for that idea, I guess since
> people didn't think it was good enough... ?

It's not good enough for my company, which is why we're working on a
replacement. Until our replacement is ready, though, I think that we
definitely need to get the text and references to the mailing list up.
What' the holdup on this? Does anyone know where jobs.postgresql.org is
stored?

> Actually thats not totally fair to Andreas and Co., since there is
> nothing stopping you all from installing bric and moving content into
> it...

Yes, there is, but that's completely tangental to Andreas' effort. We've a
huge job creating all of the templates for Bric. Once those templates are
created, it's easy, but until then ....

And I just worked the PR for 7.4, and then lost my office, so I've been a
little distracted. Nobody's paying me to work on the community full time
any more than you.

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco