[volunteers] Installfest in March, April, May

[Margaret Wendall]

Rick,

Thank you for doing this. I've made a copy to put in my binder. I have a
couple of comments, which are interspersed with this text.

Message: 3
> Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2009 12:11:48 -0700
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> Subject: Re: [volunteers] Installfest in March, April, May
> To: Margaret Wendall <mwendall at gmail.com>
> Cc: volunteers at lists.svlug.org
> Message-ID: <20090314191147.GW24345 at linuxmafia.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> Quoting Andrew Fife:
>
> > Lets go ahead and finalize this decision to hold SVLUG Installfests on
> > the 4th Saturday of the month as guests of CABAL for March, April &
> > May unless we hear constructive feedback otherwise by the end of the
> > day.
>
> This is now written up on our Web pages (front page and installfest
> page), including stressing the temporary change to date/time/venue.
>
>
> Also done last night:
>
>
> 1.  As I mentioned, I got the Allison Randal June 2009 lecture info onto
> meetings.php.  You'll note that I wrote the talk description and "More
> about the speaker" paragraph myself, based on information from
> Wikipedia, Allison's personal site, and various O'Reilly pages.  Also,
> note that book titles are in <em> tags, and that there are hyperlinks to
> things that are useful to link to:  Alison's personal page, OSCON,
> O'Reilly Media, and the various books' pages.  Also, I made a point of
> making the HTML be really clean, properly indented, etc., to show how
> best to do it.  (I'm hoping anyone who might want to help maintain the
> site can use it as a model.)
>
> That work took only about 10 minutes with vi and a Web browser, honest.
>

I had a chance to meet Akkana Peck last night. She not only answered my
nagging question of how to draw a straight line between two points (use the
shift key!), but I had the impression that she truly *wants* to speak at our
meeting. There are a lot of people who use GIMP, and I think all of them
would learn from Akkana.

>
> 2.  It was long past time to work over the "SVLUG News" column on the
> front page, so I did so.  Just to review how it works (and this is also
> covered, like everything else, on the Web Team page (front page ->
> Projects -> Web Team):
>
> As it says on the Web Team page, all you do is edit svlug-news.txt .
> Here's an example entry:
>
> category=svlug-meeting
> posted=20061212
> expires=20200630
> title=Ewa Matejska's slides have been posted
> Talk Slides:  December 2006 speaker Ewa Matejska has provided a set of her
> <a
> href="http://www.svlug.org/prev/2006dec/ewa-eclipse_presentation.ppt
> ">PowerPoint
> slides</a>.
>
> It's important to follow the required format (and there are instructions
> at the top of the file), because this file is input to a _parser_,
> WebFetch, which generates from it _two_ HTML things for the site:
>
> o  The SVLUG News box on the left side of the front page.  This
>   box, by intention, applies the "expires" date to determine whether
>   or not the item will be still displayed.
> o  The separate SVLUG News _page_ (front page -> News) lists all
>   news items back to the founding of the Web site, in reverse
>   date order, with the "posted" dates above them.
>
> So, the main thing is:  You adjust the "expires" date to tweak whether
> or not a particular item will be still displayed.  It is _not_
> desirable to expire out an item merely because the associated event's
> already occurred.  The relevant question is whether the group still
> wishes it to be shown or not.
>
> Example:  Other members of the Web Team[1] have tended to say "Oh, Ewa
> Matejska's news item was about a _2006_ SVLUG talk.  That's old; we
> should lose it."  But that misses the point:
>
> (a) The item about Ewa's talk was to provide _slides_ for her talk,
> which remain of interest long, long after the lecture.
>
> (b) We want the left-side "SVLUG News" column to have _stuff_ in it,
> and not be a big stretch of blank whitespace.  The aim is to visually
> balance out the right-side "Events" column.  So, now, please do _not_
> expire out news items for no better reason than their having been
> posted a few years ago.
>
> I note, to my particular pleasure, that Lisa Corsetti seems to have
> fixed, on the Linode site, the WebFetch script that automatically
> generates the two HTML things, every time one updates svlug-news.txt.
> Outstanding!  That was broken for years on the legacy site.
>
> That's one of three things I need to update on the Web Team
> page:  It says one must run the WebFetch script manually after editing
> svlug-news.txt -- which is no longer the case.  And it says we use
> RCS for version control, which on the Linode site has been replaced
> with svn.  And it says we use Apache httpd 1.3 with mod_perl.  Of
> course, on Linode, we use Lighttpd with PHP.
>
>
> 2a.  Since the Reiber administration, "SVLUG News" has included this
> news item:
>
>  Our Internet site was offline for two days. If such things happen
>  again, you'll find news at our Google Group. [link to
>  http://http://groups.google.com/group/sv_lug]
>
> Unfortunately, as discussed here previously, Reiber's Google Group
> remains (1) not administerable by anybody but him, and (not
> coincidentally) overwhelmed by spam, on account of a stupid non-member
> posting policy.
>
> Thus, it has never been a useful place to recommend to anyone (although
> Paul's idea of an out-of-band emergency discussion forum is a good one).
> Accordingly, as an exception to our general policy that we don't
> _remove_ SVLUG News items, I have yanked that item.
>
> If anyone actually thinks we should retain this blunder as historically
> meaningful, I can put it back and expire it, so it remains on the
> separate SVLUG News _page_ of all news items ever, but not on the
> front-page column.  But I think it's misleading to suggest SVLUG members
> use that Google Group, as it's an administrative disaster.


When I last looked at "our" Google Group it looked somewhat like my spam
list. I didn't think it spoke well of or about SVLUG, and it's better to be
rid of it.  This doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea, just one that wasn't
handled well.

>
>
> By contrast, there's an obvious alternative:  Since we collaborate with
> NYLUG (e.g., we do their DNS, they do ours), we can each furnish a
> mailing list for the other, for use when our respective sites are down.
> They're amenable to this.
>
>
>
> 2b.  As you'll see from looking at the front page, I've added almost all
> the upcoming local conferences with Linux relevance.
>
> Please note that SVLUG News items should be _as brief as possible_.
> Don't write a paragraph about something.  Link to data elsewhere.  Our
> news item should have the minimal at-a-glance details on the news item.
>
>
> 2c.  The "SVLUG Kernel Walkthrough" news item had been a bit half-assed,
> linking to only the _first_ walkthrough video clip (out of seven).  I've
> fixed it to link tersely to all seven, taking up, really, no more room.
>
>
>
> 3.  Not intending to nag, but we're two weeks from the April general
> meeting.  (April and May remain "TBA".)
>
>
>
> [1] Well, let me be blunt:  I'm talking about Heather, when she decided,
> a couple of years back, to go delete entirely news items that thanked
> Ian Kluft for his past talks and provide his slides, and at the same
> time expired out a bunch of other items, justifying the entire course of
> action on grounds that they were "old", and citing on the Web Team
> mailing list wording on the Web Team page as proving that there was
> supposedly a "policy" of deleting old news -- which citation was pretty
> much bullshit.


This LUG *needs* to let visitors know about our history. We have serious
cachet, being here in Silicon Valley, and our history follows closely the
history of the open source movement here.  We've been an often-noisy
footnote to the big picture, such as our protests against the Microsoft
"tax" and Ian Kluft's speeches and photos.

>
>
> (At the time, I quietly undid the damage to our site, and then posted to
> Web Team saying that, no, it's never been our policy to delete SVLUG
> News items just because they're in the past, and doing that would be
> strongly against our interest and would defeat the purpose of the
> cumulative front page -> SVLUG News page entirely.)
>
>
-- 
Margaret Wendall
mwendall-at-gmail-dot-com
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" - Juvenal
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