[web-team] Catching up (site maintenance)

[Rick Moen]

Hi, I've been kept busy and not attending to site maintenance.  Sorry
about that.  I note that http://www.svlug.org/installfest/ currently
has:

  The Regular Time

  Third Saturdays, every single month. 
  11 am 'til 4 pm 
  For the next few months, that will be:

  May 17, 2008


See, this is _exactly_ why that page should always list the next several 
upcoming dates -- and that's what I always have done.  Someone on the
Web Team recently (late April, early May) evidently decided otherwise,
which predictably landed us in the current situation.  Bad.  Does
everyone see why that's a bad idea?  I mentioned that fact on Volunteers
when I saw the change in April/May, but nobody fixed it, and so here we
are.  (Most recent edit per RCS was by Daniel.)

Changed to:

   The Regular Time

   Third Saturdays, every single month. 
   11 am 'til 4 pm 
   For the next few months, that will be:

   Sat., June 28th _(note one-time date change)_
   Sat., July 19th
   Sat., August 16th
   Sat., September 20th

("em" tags, here, are rendered as underscores.)

There's a tendency, in Web site maintenance, to forget to look at pages
other than the front page.  (E.g., our front page notes the installfest
one-time date change, but nobody checked the installfest page.)
'Course, if you have to concentrate your attention on just one page, the
front one is the right one ;->  , but part of the problem is that other
people link to sub-pages.  For example, on CABAL's posted schedule, I
have an item saying that CABAL is cancelling the meeting it would
normally have had on the 28th (4th Saturday), but you can attend SVLUG's
installfest, instead.  Hyperlink on that reference goes to
http://www.svlug.org/installfest/ -- which I happened to double-check,
and thus found that it was _wrong_.


(Following notes are written as I progress through the Previous Meetings
page, fixing entries going back to July 2007.)

Hmm, looking at http://www.svlug.org/prevmeet.php, I see _lots_ of 
unclosed "td" and "tr" tags, for the last few months.  I urge being
really careful with table tags, because slipping in that area can
turn the whole page into mush.  (This has happened in the past.)

For the same reason, it's extremely helpful to be systematic about 
indentation and proper use of whitespace.  I've gone back and re-edited
quite a few months' entries, to fix that -- back to last July.  That
includes re-flowing paragraph texts, introducing paragraph breaks
where they were badly needed, and correcting punctuation,
capitalisation (e.g., "WINE", not "Wine"), spelling, and grammar.
(Remember, these guys' corporate PR departments often write really bad
English.  We're not obliged to just reprint that stuff with errors
unfixed -- and we shouldn't.  It makes _us_ look bad.)


Hmm, looks like the entry for Nov. 7, 2007 (Dick Morris, Untangle) is
slightly fscked, in that there is no "More about the speaker" data for
Morris.  Instead, the paragraph from Ulrich Drepper's October 3, 2007
paragraph got re-used.

Internet Archive / Wayback Machine does not have that data.
Fortunately, the archive of the svlug-announce mailing list does -- so
I'm fixing the entry.


As it turns out, the _entire_ November 7, 2007 entry (Dick Morris,
Untangle -- with speaker data about Ulrich Drepper) was duplicated a
second time.  Removed the second instance.



The August 1, 2007 entry includes:

  the "DNS & BIND Cookbook". 

Sorry, we can't have unescaped ampersands within HTML.  You need to
replace such things with the appropriate character entity.  For
ampersands, that's "&".  (If you use an editor program with decent
syntax highlighting, such as vim, unescaped ampersands really stand out
-- a point I'll get back to, below.)



I should mention just in passing the _big_ problem:  No July 2nd
speaker.  We'll have to return to that point.




Front page, http://www.svlug.org/ has following in the Events column:

   Events

   Saturday, June 28, 2008 (not June 21) 
   SVLUG installfest

   Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 General Meeting 
   TBA 


That's not bad, but, herewith, a couple of fine points:

1.  When an event has a date change, it's good user psychology to have
entries for _both_ the old date _and_ the new date.  Entry on the old
date says the event has been moved.  New date's entry includes something
like ("one-time date change")

2.  For reasons noted concerning the installfest page, it's desirable to
have _multiple_ upcoming dates for recurring events.  Thus, we should
(IMO) always put in the Events column the next _two_ general meetings
and the next _two_ installfests.

This makes the page more forgiving of deferred maintenance (should that
happen, as it often does), -and- reminds people that these really _are_ 
recurring meetings, -and- better helps them plan.




SVLUG News column has:

   We've done a number of 
   KERNEL WALKTHRU sessions so 
   far; some are already on 
   YouTube [link] with more expected 
   soon. Session leaders bring
   particular perspectives and 
   insights, with SVLUG 
   members asking questions 
   and contributing their own 
   ideas. The Wikiversity [link]
   page and its discussion page 
   provide all the details you 
   might want.

I've deliberately not reflowed the text in order to emulate in ASCII 
how the entry looks in a typical browser display -- to point out the
fundamental problem:  That's _way too damned long_ for an SVLUG News
entry.  We need brevity here, folks.

Also, the phrase "kernel walkthru" (rendered above in caps, for 
ASCII-emulation purposes) is in "b" (bold") tags.  No.  Two things
wrong with that:

1.  One should never use "b" = bold (or, for that matter, "i" = italic)
in HTML except where the semantics of the contents require bolding or 
italicising, e.g., you're talking _about_ bolding or italicising.
Instead, you should leave physical presentation up to the user's 
browser software, and _semantically_ mark using logical rather than
physical tagging.

This is an HTML 101 issue that keeps cropping up.  It's been covered
time and time again, in beginner HTML tutorials, and yet people go
straight for the physical tags (i, b, u, big, font, etc.) every single
damn time.  

If you mean strong text (the sort of semantic very strong emphasis
usually indicated in written English using bolding), then use the
"strong" tag.  (This is awfully close to shouting in print.)

If you mean ordinary emphasis, then use the "em" tag (emphasised text).

If this is logical v. physical tag distinction is new to anyone, here's
one of those myriads of tutorials that try to set people straight:
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/logical.html


2.  There is no conceivable reason why the phrase "kernel walkthru" 
needs to be shouted at people, in the SVLUG News column.  That's just
wacked.  I'm losing that.  Also, we've _always_ in the past written 
it as "walkthrough", not "walkthru"  This isn't leet-speak or SMS.
We're trying to be terse, but not illiterate.

Also, the expire date for the news item was something like March 2008,
which is a bit silly, since we want that item to stick around.  I've 
moved that expire date way off to 2015, for now.

Revised item reads:

   Some kernel walkthroughs 
   are on YouTube; [link] more 
   expected soon. Wikiversity [link]
   has details and a discussion 
   page.


Getting back to the Events column (events.html), here's an example of
the formatting we try to use:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060714095247/http://www.svlug.org/

Notice the difference?  First of all, notice that each event is
flush-left beginning with the full datespec (Day, Date, Year).  
Notice that "July 5th" is rendered like this for legibility:

   July 5<font size=-1><sup>th</sup></font>,

(Yes, I know that's physical tagging, rather than logical.  We
compromise on that point.)



Hmm, .event.html.swp already existed.  Somebody lost an edit session and
never came back to clean up.

OK, done with that page, for now.  (Except, I'll be back to it in a
minute after adding the August meeting to meetings.php.)

I see from a comment by Mark in events.html that he (for one) didn't
realise that the commented-out section up at the top is intended as a
_template_.  Please use it as such.  Recent entries have been departing
from our standard format, e.g., someone wiped out the word "Topic:",
leaving behind the beginning and ending "strong" tags that had enclosed
it.  If you just copy and paste the template, then fill in the
event-specific details, that sort of mishap won't happen.


meetings.php:  Reading through back postings on Volunteers, I see that
Ani on June 2 posted to tell us that he's confirmed Adam L. Beberg as the
speaker for Wednesday, August 6th.  Accordingly, I'm creating an entry
on meetings.php -- which nobody had bothered to do following Ani's
posting.  Nothing yet about the topic.

Adam's personal page at Stanford turns out to be here:
http://www.stanford.edu/~beberg/  So, one can cobble together an "About
the Speaker" paragraph from that.

Thus, I end up opening meetings.php for editing, for the first time in a
while.  

Strong suggestion / plea:   Please, when you're editing one of these
pages, _particularly_ ones with complicated table markup that is easily
damaged, reload the page in your Web browser to check for errors
immediately after each time you save changes, and before you exit your 
editor program.

That is, I do this:

$ co -l meetings.php
$ vi meetings.php
   [do a bunch of editing]
   :w!  [save some changes]
   [reload page in Web browser.  Inspect for blunders.  If any blunders, 
   back out changes, re-save, reload page in browser, make sure errors 
   are gone.  I _do not_ exist the editor until the page is sane.  In 
   the unlikely event of not being able to fix my work, I could abandon
   the effort by just re-checking out the page again, overwriting my
   checked-out version, then checking it back in.]

Choose your poison, but I find vim particularly effective because of
syntax highlighting.


New entry for Beberg has, obviously, TBA for the topic fields, but you
always want to have at least a placeholder entry, even if you don't yet
know what the speaker will talk about.  My About the Speaker paragraph
is as follows:


<tr>
  <td colspan="3"><font face="arial,helvetica">
  <br><strong>MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER:</strong>
  <p>Adam is a specialist in storage networks and grid computing.
   He's been a software engineer at a variety of firms from 
   1992 to the present, and currently is serving as Chairman and
   CTO of software tools house Mithral Communications &amp; Design, 
   Inc., while completing his doctoral studies at Stanford.</p>
   <font>
  </td>
</tr>


OK, so, now, I save meetings.php, and check it back in with this
comment:

  Add August 2008 speaker details that are known so far.  Revert a couple
  of changes someone made:  1.  No, really, the horizontal rule is, I
  think, a good idea, to emphasise that the next-meeting header paragraph
  is distinct from the table that follows.  2.  No, really, the template
  for new table rows really does need to be down where it was, just below
  the top of the table, because one wants to be able to easily copy and
  paste it, to create new rows.

Now, back to events.html (the #include for the front page that provides
the Events column).  Revise the entry for August to include Adam L.
Beberg's name.