[Smaug] Smaug meeting tonight

[Rick Moen]

Quoting cerise at armory.com (cerise at armory.com):

[snip]
> But I agree that your character is far too unimportant to waste
> further bandwidth over.

Hypocrisy noted in passing, without further comment.  Where's the bit
where you get back to Smaug business?

> > I'd say that's worth a shot.  But, once you cease pretending I'd said
> > otherwise, maybe you can get around to addressing my point about the
> > obvious inappropriateness for user groups' main Web presence of Drupal's
> > default (and in practice universal, as far I've seen) Slashdot-style
> > news/comment/blog format, and my hopes that Smaug's online presence
> > doesn't devolve to that.
> 
>    Actually, you _did_ say otherwise, Rick.  Time for you to grep the
>    archives.

I'm sorry to hear about your reading problem:  To reiterate, I was
saying that the problem with Drupal is its characteristic layout, which 
seems (from available evidence) to resist change through customisation.
I invited examples of where that default tendency had been overcome.

I'm unclear on why you'd think I would invite those examples if I
weren't interested in seeing them.  


> Funny, if it's so obviously inappropriate, there's no shortage of LUGs
> using it.

The fact that some LUGs use it doesn't prevent its apparently
intractible default layout from being inappropriate for such usage.  But
let's see:

>  Here's a few examples:
>    http://www.lug.corvallis.or.us
>    http://www.mvlug.org/
>    http://www.eglug.org/
>    http://www.ilug-cal.org

Alas, every single one of those illustrates my point.  I wish that they
didn't, and _still_ am interested in any examples people find that
don't.

>    You've never said _why_ you believe it to be inappropriate. 

Quoting my recent reply to Rob Beckett:

  Well, certainly, but that's because they're oriented around news items /
  comments / blogs.  The main Web presence of a user group, in my
  experience, tends to get most reasonably expressed as an ordered tree of
  pages, rather than a Drupal-style vertical list of date-ordered
  news-like items (with or without comments).

  Now, what can be really cool is a CMS or wiki _attached_ to a regular
  ordered tree of pages that occupies the top level.  We at BayLISA have
  recently started doing this, specifically in order to offer
  participatory access to the members.  Jennifer Davis, our president,
  chose to implement that part of the site in, yes, Drupal.

  The main, older site is the top-level http://www.baylisa.org/ tree, and
  the Drupal portion will be reachable from
  http://www.baylisa.org/members/ when activated.  (At least, that was
  Jennifer's plan when last I heard.)


> And besides -- what happened to your promise to walk away from the web
> stuff?

I stepped aside so that you could find out for yourself what a bad idea 
Anthony's proposal as originally described was.  (I'm trying to be 
fair to Anthony, here.  I hope and expect that he'll be an asset to 
the historically understaffed site maintenance effort, regardless of
where it's hosted.)

And then, as noted, nothing happened, not even your raising a finger to 
add Anthony to the project roster (which, you'll note from my doing so, 
takes on the order of 30 seconds).  For a _week_.  So, I concluded that
your announced intentions were bullshit, and that nothing was going to
occur.  The necessary point having been made, and the requirement that 
_somebody_ maintain Smaug's pages having not gone away, I resumed
updates.

>    But, y'know, I can't bring myself to care the slightest bit about most
> anything you have to say.

And yet, you feel obliged to go out of your way to send me personal
abuse both in public and private, _and_ misrepresent pretty much every
thing I say.  

Meanwhile, one of us is trying to take care of Smaug business, and it
sure ain't you, guy.