My suggestions for fedorafaq.org

[foolish]

With the merging of fedorafaq and fedoraforum comes a great resource of support and references. We need to make the most of this. Here's my suggestions for fedorafaq and some minor ones for fedoraforum.

First of all, fedorafaq.org needs a bit of redesigning. Its a wonderful resource and we all love it, but it looks very temporary. Now that we have the new, great design for fedoraforum.org, how about a similar design for fedorafaq, making the two sites look similar will also strengthen the sense of collaboration, that these two sites really are connected.

To illustrate what I'm talking about I made a mock-up of how one can use the fedoraforum design on the f.a.q. See the atached picture. If they look too similar, a different colour scheme might do the trick. The mock-up is made with no consideration what so ever to whether any of it is even possible, I sure hope some of it is.

(BTW. I made the mock-up in gimp 2.0rc4, which is amazing)

I would also like to see an easier way for people to contribute to the f.a.q. Now you can mail the maintainer, and thats all good, but what about a section of the site with a little text explaining how and what to contribute, along with some directions on how to answer questions properly.

I would like to see buttons on all the fedora community sites linking to the other community sites. This way newbies will get around fairly easy. We have to have collaboration between the different sites to do this, fedoranews.org is already linking to fedoraforum. Lets return the favor. See my mock-up for a poor example of how this can be solved.

Make the simple urls visible in the sites. A lot of people visit the faq because someone directs them to the site either by mail or on #fedora. We need people to remember us.
Fedoraforum.org has "Fedoraforum" very visible, its about the first thing you see when you enter the page. We need the f.a.q.s easy url, www.fedorafaq.org, to be as visible so that people will remember it. Having "fedorafaq" visible in the index is smart and makes it easier for people to remember the url.

Making the example yum.conf and maybe even a sources.list very visible and easy for people to reach. A lot of users wonder how they can get software, and the f.a.q. answers this wonderfully and even provides us with a great yum.conf with everything thats needed already configured. Maybe we should get a sources.list for apt and a sources for up2date with instructions on how to use them on to the site as well, and make sure its visible for the user.

Hopefully some of these ramblings are somewhat good ideas, please take them into consideration.

[Ug]

OK, well I'd just like to point out first of all that FedoraFAQ is independent of FedoraForum and is owned by Avatraxiom. We at FedoraForum have no control over anything which is displayed or occurs at FedoraFAQ. Although there is a current merger occurring of the forums which existed at http://faq.artoo.net/ with FedoraForum. At the same time however, I'm sure that Avatraxiom is open to suggestions but he is the person to level such suggestions at.
First of all, fedorafaq.org needs a bit of redesigning. Its a wonderful resource and we all love it, but it looks very temporary. Again, this would have to be levelled at Avatraxiom but I am inclined to agree. Avatraxiom is a very busy individual (much busier than Tux).First of all, fedorafaq.org needs a bit of redesigning. Its a wonderful resource and we all love it, but it looks very temporary. Now that we have the new, great design for fedoraforum.org, how about a similar design for fedorafaq, making the two sites look similar will also strengthen the sense of collaboration, that these two sites really are connected. Now I'm not saying this is a bad idea, but from your logic does that mean that we'd have to try and enforce our design upon FedoraNEWS as well? It does seem a bit unreasonable when put like that. But I can see where you are coming from.I made a mock-up of how one can use the fedoraforum design on the f.a.q. Thats definately quite nice, but it obviously indicates too much free time on your part. ;) Shouldn't you be at school or something?I would also like to see an easier way for people to contribute to the f.a.q. Now you can mail the maintainer, and thats all good, but what about a section of the site with a little text explaining how and what to contribute, along with some directions on how to answer questions properly. Again see Avatraxiom, that is his department after all. But Avatraxiom is a very busy bloke and dosen't have a lot of spare time to himself to devote on these sorts of things as much as he would like.I would like to see buttons on all the fedora community sites linking to the other community sites. This way newbies will get around fairly easy. We have to have collaboration between the different sites to do this, fedoranews.org is already linking to fedoraforum. Lets return the favor. See my mock-up for a poor example of how this can be solved. I agree completely, and this will be something I'll get Tux to implement on his return from the UK. (Poor guy, never gets a break). I particularly like the tabbed idea, for the buttons, it definately would be a good way of doing it. Making it highly visible yet discreet and out of the way at the same time.Make the simple urls visible in the sites. A lot of people visit the faq because someone directs them to the site either by mail or on #fedora. We need people to remember us. I'm really not sure what you mean there, perhaps you could elaborate?Making the example yum.conf and maybe even a sources.list very visible and easy for people to reach. Now there's an idea, I know that people round here tend to have a preferance for YUM, but i'll definately sort out a sources.list and pass it on to Avatraxiom.

Well that's my views on your suggestions, i'm sure this discussion will keep rolling. But one thing it has highlighted is again this whole idea of collaboration. Which is a difficult issue to a certain degree. What needs to be thought about, is how we can collaborate and where. Then i'll see about taking these ideas around.

[Bana]

/me applauds this thread.
To illustrate what I'm talking about I made a mock-up of how one can use the fedoraforum design on the f.a.q. See the atached picture. If they look too similar, a different colour scheme might do the trick. The mock-up is made with no consideration what so ever to whether any of it is even possible, I sure hope some of it is.
I think this would be very innovative and would make the newbies feel like they are in command central (ie: the right place) rather than on some random non personal, non-GUI page (most linux initiates still use the (incorrect) thought process of GUI=friendly) If Avatraxiom agrees to this may I suggest a green scheme? Aqua-Green?
(BTW. I made the mock-up in gimp 2.0rc4, which is amazing)
Agreed, I can't wait till 2.0 final.
Thats definately quite nice, but it obviously indicates too much free time on your part. Shouldn't you be at school or something?
Perhaps we should volunteer him as Avatraxioms web page lapdog? :p
Now I'm not saying this is a bad idea, but from your logic does that mean that we'd have to try and enforce our design upon FedoraNEWS as well? It does seem a bit unreasonable when put like that. But I can see where you are coming from.
If phrased like that, yes it does seem unreasonable but if phrased this way: We are becoming what we are becoming and there is no sense in hiding our extended tentacles as being a part of the megalocentralized empire. Errr, in other words, we should use what we have and make that as good as we can. (don't give up before we begin (we shouldn't put ourselves down because we don't own everything, we should just make do with what we have)).... argh, that didn't come off right at all....:rolleyes: :confused:
I particularly like the tabbed idea, for the buttons, it definately would be a good way of doing it. Making it highly visible yet discreet and out of the way at the same time.
Yes, that tabbed browsing is instantly recognizable as a way to say to nebies: Hey look at all these other sites that are connected to us that you can freely browse that aren't outdated/not supported.
Making the example yum.conf and maybe even a sources.list very visible and easy for people to reach.
Perhaps we could expand on the way that Fedora.us wiki has their yum data by laying it out better and adding more info (they have all the necessary info: repos, mirrors, yum.conf setup; yet they are all on different pages)

I think this could see yet another (r)evolution of Fedorausers.org and inc.:cool:

[Avatraxiom]

foolish --

That mock-up is amazing. It's awesome. It blows my mind.

If it's possible, I'd love to do it. I'm not all that visually artistic (I write songs, but I can't really draw or paint), so I'd need some help, probably from you (foolish). :-)

If you can do me at least the header as "FedoraFAQ", that would be a good start. After that, I can take the style of fedoraforum.org very easily. Email it to me, or post it here, and I'll work on it when I've got the time.

I'd let somebody else do it, but only if they were as fussy as me about standards compliance. :-) (The FAQ is in Strict XHTML, and validates without any errors, not even any CSS warnings. :) )

Let's do it. :)

-M

[Avatraxiom]

Here's some more reply, and then I have to sleep a lot:

I would also like to see an easier way for people to contribute to the f.a.q. Now you can mail the maintainer, and thats all good, but what about a section of the site with a little text explaining how and what to contribute, along with some directions on how to answer questions properly.

I agree. I'll put this in my box of pending changes and do it next time I update the FAQ.

I would like to see buttons on all the fedora community sites linking to the other community sites.

This is a great idea. There is strength in the unity of our community. :)

Making the example yum.conf and maybe even a sources.list very visible and easy for people to reach.

Yeah, if you (foolish) or Ug wants to maintain a sources.list that's basically a duplicate of my yum.conf, I'd post it up there and give you credit for it. I'm not sure I'd also start answering all the yum questions twice for apt, too, but I'd at least get in a link somewhere to the sources.list, probably in the http://fedorafaq.org/faq/#APT question.

Hopefully some of these ramblings are somewhat good ideas, please take them into consideration.

These are all good ideas. I'm so glad to have some idea-help on the FAQ -- I'm so busy at work these days... Any help I can get with it is great. :)

Once I write up the explanation of how to contribute FAQ questions, hopefully I'll get a lot more activity in there. :) (The description is basically, "Ideally target your answers toward somebody who has never used Linux. Write it in a way that nobody could do it wrong." and then an expansion of that.)

[foolish]

It's great to see that my humble ideas are well recieved. I have some basic artistic skills, but I'm not really any good.

I know a little css and I'm pretty adept at html and so on. I would be more than happy to create at least some of the new fedorafaq site. What I lack in skill I can make up for with the amount of time on my hands, right?

I should get in touch with Tux about this, but he's in Britain as of now. I'll get in touch with him about the new design.

[Ug]

Avatraxiom - wait for Tux to get back from the UK. He should be able to provide you with all the relevant graphics and stuff for the header and footer. Which would enable you to focus on the actual content, and not duplicate work.

Plus i've suggested getting him to add the tabbed buttons so you would be able to grab that as well - to keep the same design.

[spectrumver1]

Well, I was talking to foolish for a couple hours on IRC today and we're planning an online tool to build yum.conf and sources.list files based on the visitors input. They're still gonna have to use the command line and such, so it's not a complete no brainer. We plan to implement this tool on one of the Fedora support pages. I'm also working with irc:shad0wDeath on the fedoradocs project. I'd like to use this page design for that page.

I think that a coalition of webpages, all maintained by separate people but with a common theme, even if the colors are different, and an indexed page with tabs to navigate between all of them would be outstanding, and a true statement in the distro world, and to RH that we've decided to step up and take on the responsibility/challenge of maintaining our distro.

I know that foolish would rather have mentioned our tool after we had something to show for it, but since I figured you guys are in the know, we could go to you for one thing:

We need the cities, provinces, countries, regions, and continents of mirrors and repositories for our database. I'm going to start compiling that list tonite when I get off of work, foolish is starting when he wakes up tomorrow, but it may take us a while to do it on our own. If you're interested in helping, even if you think we may have the info for a repository/mirror, don't be afraid to send it, as we may not know the city/state of said location.

But keep up the good work, everyone, and I mean that. I'll check in with you all later.

Hasta

[Ug]

Sounds like a good idea. ;)

There also exist very few Fedora sites on the internet worthy of note. Besides this one I can only really think of the FedoraFAQ and FedoraNEWS. Unless i'm missing something.

[spectrumver1]

FedoraFAQ, FedoraNews, FedoraForum, and FedoraDocs are the only ones I have on the docket for right now.

I'm gonna design the theme of the site around a Bluecurve type set up and package the files up in a Tarballs to distribute, in case someone is better at graphics than I.

Anyone who reads this and is good with The GIMP, if you can make take a Red Hat and color it grey instead of red, still with the black band on it, and turn the fedora project logo into a

FedoraUsers.net logo,

that'd be great,

hasta

[ewdi]

yeah, when you all done let me know, i'll add it to the site :)

[Ug]

Did we mention that Tux owns the domain FedoraUsers.org? :p

And please not the Red Hat hat in the logo, it looks tacky when applied that way.

[spectrumver1]

well, I'm just brainstorming. Things don't get done by asking questions constantly. Someone's gotta DO something and THEN take suggestions. As far as the Gray Hat, it's just an idea, and frankly I might like to see it in a Fedora icon theme, modified-bluecurve or something. It's just a thought, is all.

If no one likes what I'm doing, tell me now and I'll stop. It seems nobody thinks this is a good idea, per my chat with some of you earlier. That's fine, project terminated.

I'm not going to explain why I think these are good ideas. It seems everyone is too caught up in who'll get more hits and who won't. If that's the case, then the sense of community is already lost, and I should switch distros. For anyone interested in following up with this, I'll be at my usual places.

[Avatraxiom]

Still sounds good to me.

[spectrumver1]

okay, so there is SOME interest.

Although, I'm not sure about how XHTML strict compliant the site will be...since I know that's a big deal to you...you could probably help in that area. I know you're busy, but, yeah....heh....forgot what was supposed to be said here.

But that makes on site, anyways.

[Ug]

Originally posted by spectrumver1
well, I'm just brainstorming. Things don't get done by asking questions constantly. Someone's gotta DO something and THEN take suggestions. As far as the Gray Hat, it's just an idea, and frankly I might like to see it in a Fedora icon theme, modified-bluecurve or something. It's just a thought, is all.

If no one likes what I'm doing, tell me now and I'll stop. It seems nobody thinks this is a good idea, per my chat with some of you earlier. That's fine, project terminated.

I'm not going to explain why I think these are good ideas. It seems everyone is too caught up in who'll get more hits and who won't. If that's the case, then the sense of community is already lost, and I should switch distros. For anyone interested in following up with this, I'll be at my usual places. There is definite interest, I just don't like a converted picture of the red hat that's all!

And yes, strengthening the community by closer co-operation is one of the things we are particularly interested in. Why else would we merge with the Fedora Artoo FAQ forums?

[spectrumver1]

okay, maybe I misread the sentiments of those involved. I apologize for that.

I'm working on the theme for the site now. I was only gathering the modified red hat as a precaution. Better to have too many resources than not enough, right?

Tha fact is, once the site is complete, well, the theme anyways, I'm gonna post it on my webspace and take suggestions. That way any graphic or style point that you don't like can be changed to something everyone can agree on, well most, anyways.

The only thing I want to ensure is that no one will get upset about a potential lack of traffic, as this may generate MORE traffic for everyone.

Once again, I apologize for my curtness, but I felt I was getting more negative feedback than positive at the time.

Pues, hasta,

[Ug]

Post it when it appears.

[spectrumver1]

UPDATE: TOO MUCH WORK!!!

Got six websites that I've gotta build. Gotta maintain 3 that NEED to be rebuilt (which would make 8), plus I'm redoing my distro and building a BSD OS.

AAAHHHH!!!! How'm I gonna find the time to start my business, play M:TG and still watch my weekly dosage of pr0n!?!?!?!

This Linux thing will be the death of me.

I think I'm even missing court right now, heh....shouldn't have given me a speeding ticket inthe first place. There wasn't anyone else on the road. Dumb coppette.

Anyways, if anyone knows much about bugzilla, I'd really like your assistance in this site. Rather, if anyone has really played with the DBs stock with this forum design, I wanna use the forum interface for a bugzilla purpose. Have the forum thread, upon resolution, use a perl script to build a doc. It sounds complex...and it is. That's why I need help. I want all the docs, eventually, to be in DB form. Easier portability.

spectrum gots BIG plans

[Avatraxiom]

I'm pretty much a Bugzilla expert. PM me and I'll send you my email addy, or (even better) you can ask the mozilla-webtools mailing list/newsgroup that's up on http://www.bugzilla.org -- the developers hang out on that and are pretty good about answering questions.

-M