Subject: VOLUNTEER REQUEST

From: Steve Freitas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 11:52:50 -0700

Hi all,

We're going to need to construct a new homepage for Netatalk in the very 
near future. It will be intended for the average Netatalk user, offering 
access to documentation, the FAQ, news, downloads, links, and so on. 

That will require the skills of design, webmastering, possibly a little 
PHP, etc.

If you would like to volunteer to do this, please respond privately to 
this email, and include an example of a site or three that you've done.

Also, if you'd like to volunteer to do part of the site, for example just 
the design, or just the PHP, or just the webmastering/admin/maintenance, 
feel free to sign up for one of those responsibilities. Many hands make 
light work and all that...

Thanks!

Steve

---

From: Harry Zink/Netatalk List <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2000 13:01:51 -0700

Maybe we should contact Anders to see if we can 'rip off' his page, as I
find it to be one of the nicest done pages out there in terms of both
design, and information.

Harry
-- 
CAN'T SEE MAC IN CHOOSER UNDER RedHat 6.2: If you get errors starting
AppleTalk under RedHat 6.2 and Mandrake 7.1, you need to manually add "alias
net-pf-5 appletalk" to your /etc/conf.modules file.

---

From: John L Grantham <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 11:54:03 +0200

>light work and all that...

I might be of some help. Here are some sites I've done:

http://www.penguinppc.org/
http://www.openal.org/
http://www.linuxppc.com/
http://www.maclinux.de/
http://www.lokigames.com/
http://www.easi.de/

These are all ones I've done in the past six months or so. I can do 
screen design as well as PHP and some basic database stuff (MySQL). I 
can't promise that I'll have all that much time, but I can certainly 
lend a hand with the design/programming/admin.

If someone else can take care of the day-to-day updates, that would 
be great. My PHP skills are decent, but it would also be nice to have 
others helping on that score. As I said, my main worry is time -- I 
do websites professionally, and like to do the occasional volunteer 
work to have a little fun. But I'm chronically short on time. :-/

The more people, though, the merrier. ;-)

cya

John
-- 

John Grantham | Dipl.-Designer (FH)
               | Homepage http://design.macnews.de/
               | Linux for PPC: http://linuxppc.org/

---

From: Harry Zink/Netatalk List <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 09:53:14 -0700

> http://www.lokigames.com/

Wow, those are certainly some nice sites - which begs the question, what
kind of graphical look do we want to impart onto netatalk - obviously the
ubiquitous penguin should be there, but we ought to have some sort of
recognizable logo for the actual project as well...

Harry

---

From: bryan stalcup <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 12:53:33 -0400

no sites to point to (primarily intranet development), but i've done quite a
bit of database-backed web site programming, would love to help. can help with
PHP, MySQL, some javascript (primarily forms validation), database design and
administration. same issues with time, but would love to help.

bryan stalcup

John L Grantham wrote:

> I can do

---

From: John L Grantham <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 19:23:35 +0200

At 9:53 am -0700 10/8/00, Harry Zink/Netatalk List wrote:
>Wow, those are certainly some nice sites -

Thanks. :-)

>which begs the question, what

Well, I guess the logo should have something to do with apples, given 
the obvious connection. I do know that Apple is pretty picky about 
using "their" apple, though. Or the other option is to use some 
common Mac icon -- AFAIK Apple doesn't worry about that as much. But 
one of my clients, www.macnews.de, got really shat on about using the 
Apple logo in their logo...

I would say these are the obvious symbols to draw on:

apple of some kind
mounted volume icon
opposing arrows (a la Ethernet)

The "penguin munching on apple" bit has been done to death, 
though...besides, netatalk isn't just for Linux anyway. Maybe have an 
orgy of BSD demons and penguins munching on apples while sitting in 
the Sun...nah. ;-)

So I would suggest the following sequence of events:

- Logo designs
   Possibly with an open vote on which logo to take
- Screen design for site
   Again with open vote on which design to take
- Vote on which backend to take (though the consensus semes to 
already be PHP/MySQL, which I'm happy with)
- Assemble and edit content
- Decide on content structure of site (what goes where)
- Build site with new content
- Pop open a brew (I suggest Guinness)

One other question, which sounds silly, but what the hey: Generally 
people write "netatalk", but I've seen people use "NetATalk", 
"NetAtalk" and so on. ISTR that the official name is "netatalk" (all 
lower case), correct?

What are we going to do about content? Someone mentioned Anders' (I 
think that's his name) website, which has a fair amount of info. What 
about the old umich site? And threepio? Some kind of new FAQ-O-Matic 
would be nice (since the old one seems to be offline...?). Maybe have 
a developer's section as well, with info about the code and current 
developments.

I assume the site would also be hosted by Sourceforge, right?

Questions upon questions... ;-)

cya

John
--

---

From: John L Grantham <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 19:26:43 +0200

>administration. same issues with time, but would love to help.

Personally, I'd say we should stay away from JavaScript, mainly 
because a lot of people use Lynx (I know I do) when in the shell, or 
they use non-JS "alternative" browsers like Konqueror or whatnot. 
Best not to make the site JS-dependent.

I generally do form validation within PHP anyway, so that wouldn't be needed.

The MySQL/PHP bit sounds great, though. I've barely wet my ankles 
with MySQL. So again, the more, the merrier. :-)

cya

John

--

---

From: "Michael J. Flynn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 13:42:06 -0400 (EDT)

> opposing arrows (a la Ethernet)

When talk of a logo first came up, I was thinking along those lines. My
thoughts were more toward an icon, since that's what most people will see
when they mount a netatalk volume.

The icon I was thinking of would be curved opposing arrows on the mounted
volume. (You know get that swoosh kinda thing going as it's all the rage
in logo design.) Course that doesn't really cover and of the unix origins
of netatalk.

Laters

mike flynn - [email-masked]
The Company Store - http://www.magpage.com/~flynnmj/tcs.html

          Brought to you by <B>Team SPAM!</B> where we believe:
                   <I>"Information in the noise!"</I>

---

From: BWS - Offwhite <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 13:41:13 -0500 (CDT)

I do not necessarily think this project should tie itself so closely to
the Penguin as it was developed for Unix in general and is not really
Linux specific.

As much as the use of Linux is growing, so is the use of other Open Source
systems.  I have personally set up Netatalk on several Unix systems,
including FreeBSD and Solaris.  And some day there may even be a Win32
port of Netatalk, not that I ever use MS operating systems. 

:)

Brennan Stehling - web developer and sys admin
projects: www.greasydaemon.com | www.onmilwaukee.com | www.sncalumni.com

---

From: Harry Zink/Netatalk List <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 13:25:29 -0700

> in logo design.) Course that doesn't really cover and of the unix origins

Maybe going with an approach that is platform and origin agnostic might be
the best idea - a variation of the ethernet icon/mounted server icon that
AppleTalk uses, with a nice, 'swooshie' design...

Harry

---

From: Aaron Levitt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 14:12:10 -0700

I would just like to point out.. that I really liked the cheerleader idea that came up earlier in the list when the idea of the new logo first came out.  

Just my $.02 worth.

-Aaron

>>>>====--------====<<<<>>>>====--------====<<<<
Aaron Levitt		1616 Franklin Street
Systems Administrator	Oakland, CA  94612
Navis LLC		Tel:  510-763-5715
http://www.navis.com	Fax:  510-763-2516
>>>>====--------====<<<<>>>>====--------====<<<<

---

From: Magnus Stenman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 23:15:13 +0200

> That will require the skills of design, webmastering, possibly a little 

Would it not be better to have a mostly static website
to make mirroring, etc easier? Possibly generated by something
from source files and/or databases.

Search stuff, chat, etc, can have fully qualified links, and be
hosted on a main site.

/magnus

-- 
 Magnus Stenman   mailto:[email-masked]   http://www.hkust.se

 Get it up, keep it up.  Linux -- Viagra for your PC

---

From: Harry Zink/Netatalk List <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 14:59:48 -0700

> from source files and/or databases.

Chalk my vote up for something static and easy to mirror - bear in mind, it
doesn't need much. A bit of history, a FAQ, links to downloads, and some
HOWTOs, and some explanations/docs.

No need for fancy dynamic stuff.

Harry

---

From: BWS - Offwhite <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 17:14:25 -0500 (CDT)

A cheerleader idea is cool, but hard for a logo.  Back in college when I
was in my graphic art class we did logos and were told that a good logo
should look good as a neon light.  (just lines)

Great logos are the Nike swoosh or Apple's basic apple.  They are easy to
create and you instantly know them when you see them.

I suppose a UMich cheerleader could be the site mascot.  BSD uses the
Daemon and Linux uses the Penguin.

I personally like any idea which would include any tie to two ethernet
lines coming together.  If an apple reference can be embedded that would
be great too, but not absolutely necessary in light of the fact that Apple
is touchy about that kinda thing.

If I come up with an idea, I will create an image for the list and get a
vote on it.

---

From: BWS - Offwhite <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 17:25:16 -0500 (CDT)

I like the idea of making it easily mirrored, at least the
documentation.  It should have absolute links back to the main site for
the most up to date info.

I know some sites are very dynamic, but are very hard to update due to the
complex nature of the publishing system.

Here is my idea...

Parts of the site could be dynamic with new content, such as the homepage
posting recent news on Netatalk.  From time to time, perhaps once a week,
that site would be copied to alternative virtual host, like
static.netatalk.com and the dynamic pages would replaced with good static
pages which make better sense in case a mirror only updates montly.

At least the main website could then be updated with a database back
office while the static site is simply static documents.

As for PHP, Perl or whatever, it would be great if that could be
hidden.  I do this site...

http://www.onmilwaukee.com/

I try my best to hide all scripts.  All dynamic content is included via
SSI's and made fast with mod_perl, yet the documents all say
xyz.html.  That way any site which mirrors the main site does not have to
worry about it.  They can display html documents already, and do not need
to worry about setting up .php or .ehtml pages.

I could help set this up.  I do this kind of work for a living.

---

From: John L Grantham <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 00:47:20 +0200

>I could help set this up.  I do this kind of work for a living.

Some comments:

The sites I do basically rely on PHP to do dynamic content for the 
main reason of supporting as many browsers directly as possible. This 
means that, instead of using lowest-common-denominator HTML, we can 
use scalable HTML that reacts to the remote client according to its 
HTTP_USER_AGENT and other environment variables.

For example, setting font sizes and families works well this way, 
because we can therefore use CSS in those browsers that support it 
while using other tags (<FONT></FONT> for example) in those that 
don't. This also makes for cleaner HTML for each and every browser, 
without junk that the particular browser doesn't understand.

I know some people will holler that fonts aren't important or that 
they override the settings anyway, but for the vast majority of 
users, font settings can help quite a lot in making the page more 
legible (for example, don't use Times -- other sans-serif fonts are 
more legible on the screen and don't look so broken -- but Times is 
nearly always the default, which is why I always try to set another 
font).

Further, the sites I build are constructed in such a way that the 
central template(s) are separated from the content, allowing the 
content to be reused or regenerated in another format pretty easily.

It would be possible, though, to write a PHP-based HTML parser such 
that the PHP engine reads a normal, plain-vanilla HTML file (i.e. 
nothing but straight <P></P> and <Hn></Hn> tags, perhaps also <B></B> 
and <I></I>) and converts it to the template on-the-fly. Thus one 
could easily mirror the HTML version while keeping a dynamic version 
at the ready. Another option would be to have the content in some 
standard format, like XML or DocBook, and parse that instead.

It also depends on how you intend to mirror the pages. A mirror via 
HTTP requests would work even with PHP-based dynamic content, so long 
as there is a 1:1 relationship between PHP pages and "real" URL pages 
(i.e. don't use query strings and database-controlled content).

The further concern I have about straight HTML is that it's all too 
easy for plain HTML pages to go haywire over time, especially once 
people start trying to edit them using [insert WYSIWYG editor name 
here]. Some people's idea of HTML is radically different from others, 
which results in crappy HTML over time (raising the risk of 
bad-looking or buggy pages later). For example, some people like to 
omit </P>, </TR> or </TD> tags, since they in theory aren't needed, 
but that causes problems with many browsers. Using a standardized 
template solves that by having a unified way of making pages.

Hope that all makes sense,

John
--

---

From: Ron Chmara <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 19:48:44 -0700

> No need for fancy dynamic stuff.

When ah was a kid, sonny, we had green TEXT on BLACK screens, and we LIKED it.
None of this fancy colored-linked-picture-on-backgrounds stuff.

Sheesh. Now folks wan't feature request lists, FAQ databases, and quick
content changes. They want web pages that aren't dragged down by purely
static content....

er...
:-)

Working on some dynamic sites with 34 dynamic mirrors (all PHP and MySQL
code), really, it's no big deal. All you need is the same code interpreter
at each site (be it Perl, PHP, whatever) and the same backend (MySQL,
Postgres, BerkelyDB). You pull a freeze of the master, and drop it to
the rsync area. The clients rsync, and fire up. Repeat as often as needed.

-Bop

--
Brought to you from iBop the iMac, a MacOS, Win95, Win98, LinuxPPC machine,
which is currently in MacOS land.  Your bopping may vary.

---

From: BWS - Offwhite <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 22:39:46 -0500 (CDT)

[ this is simply an idea up for suggestion ]

I agree that the data should be structured and even stored in a
database.  That way we can use templates to display the content.  An FAQ
may constist of the following structure.

- psuedo sql
TABLE faqinfo,
id int primary key,
question text,
answer text,
category int,
rank int

Then a nice FAQ could be built dynamically with a script which accesses
the database.  If there are only 20 questions in the system, they would
appear on the same page.  If it gets to be much longer, it could display
20 per page.  And then we can organize questions by category: file server,
print server, installing, and trouble shooting.

Other content could be organized in much the same way.  The way I have
built the OnMilwaukee.com site, I allow basic html in the articles
system.  If the author wants to bold some text or make a link she can do
that.  If she wants to embed a table she can do that too, she just has to
understand html.  All I require is that they put a start and ending <P>
tag around all paragraphs.

If the documentation is to be organized into a sort of book-like structure
with chapters and sections, we could then design the database to handle
that.  A page would be assigned to a chapter and then a section of that
chapter.  I would not go so far as too partition out sub-sections.

Then a doc page would be recorded as...

TABLE docpage
id int primary key,
chapter int,
section int,
title varchar(100),
credits varchar(255), (optional)
page text,
keywords varchar(200)

Then the table contents would be automatically built along with a nice
index with all of the keywords linking to the related sections.

As for fonts and such, I have decided to let style sheets do all of the
work.  I define the font and size for the <P> tag and other tags and place
globs of text inside with a font tag... <font class=normal>.  That way I
can classify the normal/default font that I wont on the entire site and if
the given browser does not support CSS, that is fine, they simply get the
default browser font.  But these days only Lynx and very old browsers
don't do the nice CSS enhancements.  The CSS markup is nice, but not
totally necessary.

There are other gobs of data which would also go on this site, like a list
of developers, documentation admins, webmin developers and such and a
database for those names could be created as well.

After all these databases are created a back office could be created with
a web interface to edit all of the data.  I do this all of the time and
would be happy to help.  I use perl and mysql to do this.  I am not sure
how easy it is for PHP to do this same thing, but I find the CGI module in
perl helps me insert content into forms seamlessly.

Then as far as the display goes, it can work in just about any form.  It
could be outputted inside a site template for normal display and print
display.  The documentation and FAQ can be displayed as multiple pages or
as one very long page so it can be downloaded for home reference.  Someone
could also create a script which generates all these pages in static form
based on a template and run that nightly.  That way the site is dynamic
and static, easy to mirror.

There are just so many options with a database and a couple creative
scripters.

I would love to be involved in developing this.

---

From: Bob Rogers <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 00:17:39 -0400 (EDT)

From: BWS - Offwhite <[email-masked]>
   Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 22:39:46 -0500 (CDT)

   I agree that the data should be structured and even stored in a
   database.  That way we can use templates to display the content.  An FAQ
   may consist of the following structure . . .

   print server, installing, and trouble shooting . . .

   scripters . . .

I would like to make a point that is perhaps obvious, but seems to be at
risk of getting lost in the shuffle:

   I consider it very helpful to have some kind of user-visible absolute
identifier for FAQ items, so that you can respond to a user's query with
"Please see FAQ item XYZ."  These identifiers should never change, so
that archived responses to queries aren't made meaningless by subsequent
FAQ updates.  Organizing by category, as in "Please see FAQ item 7.2",
certainly helps the update problem, since it's easy to add a new
question and answer to the end of the category.

   Given all that, I fail to see the advantage of a DBMS implementation
vs. old-fashioned static HTML, except perhaps in the initial entry phase
with multiple distributed authorship.  Perhaps this creativity could be
better applied elsewhere?

   Just a peep from the peanut gallery . . .

					-- Bob Rogers

---

From: BWS - Offwhite <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 23:44:52 -0500 (CDT)

We can have long term numbers assigned to each FAQ item, but I am not sure
how that would logically work as the FAQ will likely have to change over
time as things change.  Perhaps there will be an FAQ for each major
version release of Netatalk.

There is talk of many changes with Netatalk and if we commit to leaving a
question at 7.2 where section 7 refers something like the afpd config
files.  If question 2 refers to a specific config option which does not
exist in a later version the FAQ will need to change.

What I like about all the info being in the database is that you can
easily search for matching questions and answers with simple keywords.

If we keep it managed as a large static document it will likely limit the
questions to a smaller number.  It would be nice if the FAQ could grow
organically as the questions have answers.  We can even make this system
smarter as it goes and allow people to rank the quality of the
answer.  Over time we can determine if certain questions need better
answers.

Of course this system does not have to be used only for the Netatalk
site.  The software/data structure used for this site could be shared with
other sites, like the Samba site.  That way we will have more people
working on the scripts to make this work better.

---

From: Frank Swasey <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 08:33:37 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, Harry Zink/Netatalk List wrote:

> ubiquitous penguin should be there,

Why should the "ubiquitous penguin" be there?  Will the new netatalk run
on only Linux and no longer on any other flavor of unix?????

-- 
Frank Swasey                             |\      _,,,---,,_
Systems Programmer                 ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_
University of Vermont                   |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'
http://www.uvm.edu/~fcs                '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)

---

From: Hauke Fath <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 14:39:16 +0200

>on only Linux and no longer on any other flavor of unix?????

Looks like it.

"We are Linux of Borg."  How quickly some have learned...

         hauke

--
Hauke Fath                        Tangro Software Components GmbH
                                         D-69115 Heidelberg
[email-masked]                       Ruf +49-6221-13336-35, Fax -21

---

From: "Radar O'Reilly" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 09:17:36 -0400 (EDT)

> "We are Linux of Borg."  How quickly some have learned...

I know it was a joke, but I liked the image of demons and pengiuns munching on
apples. Or else eyeing something on an appleshare server...maybe both sitting
on one, even. This excludes some unices, but I think it gets the idea across.

 __________/| Nathan "Radar" Willard MC '00     | "A Sucking Chest Wound is
(_|__|_____\|________      PO Box 203927        |   nature's way of telling 
     |_|_____________)- New Haven, CT 06520     |     you to slow down."

---

From: Tim Carlson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 07:52:27 -0600 (MDT)

On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, Radar O'Reilly wrote:

> I know it was a joke, but I liked the image of demons and penguins munching on

How hard would it be to have system dependent logos? I mean right now when
I mount a share from my solaris server I get a nice Sun logo. You could
have one ubiquitous logo for Netatalk in general and another for machine
specific shares..

Tim

Tim Carlson                                  Voice:    (505) 984-8800x255
Director of Computing: Santa Fe Institute    Fax:      (505) 982-0565
WWW: http://www.santafe.edu/~tim             Email:   [email-masked]

---

From: Chip Mefford <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 10:30:25 -0400

Faq-o-matic

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jonh/ff-serve/cache/1.html

>    Just a peep from the peanut gallery . . .

--------------------------------------
I labour to posses my soul

            -Izaak Walton
--------------------------------------

---

From: BWS - Offwhite <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 10:05:34 -0500 (CDT)

Yes, this may be something we can use.  If I have time I will try it out.

---

From: Bob Rogers <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 23:56:18 -0400 (EDT)

From: BWS - Offwhite <[email-masked]>
   Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 23:44:52 -0500 (CDT)

   We can have long term numbers assigned to each FAQ item, but I am not
   sure how that would logically work as the FAQ will likely have to
   change over time as things change.  Perhaps there will be an FAQ for
   each major version release of Netatalk.

Granted, it's harder to keep a consistent numbering scheme when things
are changing rapidly; I only wanted to be sure that this consideration
wasn't left out of the schema.

But:

   1.  Since not everyone can or will upgrade immediately when a new
version comes out, it may help to retain obsolete FAQ items, rewording
them appropriately.

   2.  If the FAQ item does need to be retired, that doesn't necessarily
mean the others need to be renumbered to close ranks.  Which amounts to
"rewording" the FAQ to "Obsolete since Release xyz."

   For what it's worth, I've looked at the Faq-O-Matic site, and find it
interesting, but perhaps too volatile to be considered a FAQ, more like
a bulletin board, e.g. like

	http://www.arsdigita.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=21&topic=web%2fdb

but with fancier formatting.  My idea of a FAQ involves something more
static.  I prefer something more like the LDP style.  At least I can use
my favorite search engine -- the emacs incremental search command!

   But that's not to say there isn't value in something more dynamic.
Only maybe it should be called a bulletin board, and the FAQ should be
something different, perhaps distilled in part from the bboard.

					-- Bob Rogers