Thanks for joining us at use Perl. This is an open beta of our new site, which will combine the news from Perl News with other cool stuff. There may be some broken links or other problems. Don't worry about it, but feel free to submit problems to us. Also, we will likely be changing the design from what it is now, but I ain't no designer, and I just wanted to get it to look reasonably good for now. And yes, we need new icons for the different topics; feel free to contribute icons to us. Thanks, and let us know how to make this site the best gosh-darn site we can make it!
F1rst P0st!
pudge on 2000-04-04T18:34:47
Wooooo!
Thoughts
pudge on 2000-04-04T21:25:19
Someone asked me for a statement of purpose about this site. Well, it is for disseimination of information about what is going on in the world of Perl, and discussion about said information. That is about it so far. I welcome suggestions on refinement of that statement.
:-)
Oh, I also turned off anonymous coward postings. This is open to debate, but I frankly don't like anonymous cowards, and would prefer that accountability play a role in keeping this site civil and fun instead of the pit of despair that Slashdot can sometimes turn into.
Beta Hook
dha on 2000-04-04T22:17:48
Looks good. Keep it up!
I'll heckle more later when I've got more free time.
:-)
Tiny, tiny, tiny letters.
Abigail on 2000-04-04T23:27:43
I've noticed a generous use of FONT SIZE = "1" in the various pages, and not for legal stuff that noone is really interested in.
If you're going to write lots of stuff that you don't want people to read, why bother putting it on the page at all? FONT SIZE = "1" is just an alias for "UNREADABLE".
-- Abigail
Re:Tiny, tiny, tiny letters.
Abigail on 2000-04-04T23:34:46
Hmmm, the previous posting was submitted with "HTML Formatted", but it didn't use the HTML tags.
-- Abigail
What about PRE?
Abigail on 2000-04-04T23:53:43
If this is to be a discussion site about Perl, one would expect code to be posted here every now and then. Or at least, I would. (They still do that on Usenet - remember Usenet? It's like a big pile of webpages glued together.)
However, the list of allowed HTML doesn't allow PRE. But I guess we could (mis)use UL for indented code.
-- Abigail
Re:Tiny, tiny, tiny letters.
pudge on 2000-04-04T23:54:57
We can change that, but it is part of the default Slash design, and I have not changed the default design (much). It would be a big job to change, and I ain't gonna do it right now. Help is welcome.
If you want to discuss the merits of this as the default design, well, we have
a whole site devoted to the Slash code that you can go to.
And which tags did you have that didn't get used? FONT tags are not allowed, if that is what you tried.
Re:Tiny, tiny, tiny letters.
Abigail on 2000-04-05T00:19:04
And which tags did you have that didn't get used? FONT tags are not allowed, if that is what you tried.
All I used were simple P tags.
-- Abigail
Re:What about PRE?
pudge on 2000-04-05T00:38:00
Actually,
indents just work when not using HTML formatted.
And if you use extrans, you can even use < and > and & without manually encoding them.
I wonder if maybe using Extrans should automatically wrap the post in <TT>, so it will be monospaced? What do you think?
Re:Tiny, tiny, tiny letters.
pudge on 2000-04-05T00:39:17
P tags appear to work fine for me, using HTML Formatted.
*shrug*
Re:Tiny, tiny, tiny letters.
pudge on 2000-04-05T00:41:21
Actually, P tags seem to be failing if there is anything else in the tag, like <P ALIGN="CENTER"> or something.
On my list of fixes.
Blah, testing, blah, testing...
jzawodn on 2000-04-05T02:36:02
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
Yeay! It works.
:-)
Hmmm - nice!
I like the design - it's clean and simple. From a cosmetic point of view I could live without the slashdot candy (pointless polls, the 'from the xxx department taglines', the 'this page generated by xxx' line).
However, the slashboxes for perlmonth and perl.com are very good, as is the CPAN and site searches (well, assuming they work they're good - I've not tried).
Groovy.
Top level icons
MeerCat on 2000-04-05T09:13:13
Site looks good (and the slashdot-isms are fine with me).
Have you thought of providing a
/favicon.ico file for IE5 users ? When IE5 bookmarks a site, it silently asks for a
/favicon.ico file to use to decorate the link in the menus/links bar/desktop (you can point to a different icon by adding a <link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="..."> tag in the HEAD section.
.ico is the old microsoft icon file format (holds 32 by 32 and/or 16 by 16 images).
Adding a favicon.ico doesn't hurt non-IE5 users, but makes shortcuts etc. much more distinctive (have a look at the logs and see how many refused requests you've got) - a small pearl, or a camel maybe...
Cheers
Tim
Re:Hmmm - nice!
pudge on 2000-04-05T10:13:31
Well, the poll and dept. lines could actually be useful. At the least, they don't hurt. The generated by xxx line is kinda silly, and might be removed.
Module discussions?
KM on 2000-04-05T17:03:37
Will there be a place to discuss/show modules people are working on to get comments?
Re:Module discussions?
pudge on 2000-04-05T17:21:16
I wasn't planning on it. I dunno, thoughts from the peanut gallery?
Re:Tiny, tiny, tiny letters.
Abigail on 2000-04-05T17:45:46
We can change that, but it is part of the default Slash design, and I have not changed the default design (much).
The odd thing is, when I go to slashdot.org, I don't see the tiny letters all over like I see here. But maybe they don't use the same code as they released....
Another thing. If you go to a page with comments, on the top, at the right, there are two boxes one with a link to your preferences, the other to "related links". The font is way to small to be useful, but what is far worse, those two boxes take up an entire column by their own, all the way to the bottom, wasting about 25% of the available real estate, making that you have to scroll a lot more. But if you hit the "change" button, the boxes are gone, and all the real estate is used by the comments. More efficient use of space, but it needs an extra download. And since the site does its utter best to not have the important pages stored in a cache, the extra invocation of "back" you need to get back to the main page means a third download of the same page. That's ok if you only have a few comments. But if this site ever comes popular, it'll be a major drawback.
-- Abigail
Re:Tiny, tiny, tiny letters.
pudge on 2000-04-05T18:02:41
Well, Slashdot does not use the same Perl code exactly (that is being changed soon), but that is not the difference; it uses a different HTML design.
The Related Links box is only shown when the story is shown. When you click "Change", the article disappears, only showing comments. Hence, no box. Is it a waste of real estate? I dunno, maybe. We could consider putting the Related Links box under the story instead of next to it. Or we could get rid of it entirely.
As to caching, yeah, I am not sure what to do about that. I could easily remove the "Pragma: no-cache" directive. But I am not sure if that is best. I'd have to ask CmdrTaco why it is there before I remove it, because maybe he has a good reason I don't know about.
:-)
Re:Tiny, tiny, tiny letters.
pudge on 2000-04-05T18:51:30
Fixed. Thanks.
Re:Module discussions?
clintp on 2000-04-05T19:28:56
Slashdot has a section for things like Book Reviews which remain persistant as a right-side box. Module discussions could be put in there if there aren't too many of them.
However, the slashdot model isn't really well suited for long running discussions anyway. Once things fall off the front page, no-one cares.
Re:Module discussions?
pudge on 2000-04-05T19:50:33
Yes, this is the Slash concept of "sections", where we can have stuff that goes onto only one section, or show up in separate sections AND the main index page.
As to long-running discussions, well, that is sometimes true, but the separate sections helps with that because, like you said, we can have a separate box for each section that is on the side. We can have home page links to anything we want. I think the fact that most Slashdot users do not care about those "old" discussions says more about the users than it does the "Slashdot model".
Re:Module discussions?
ziggy on 2000-04-05T23:29:47
This sounds like a very good idea.
use Perl; seems like the most obvious
place to centralize a lot of these discussions.
It's better than subscribing to 5-20 different
developer lists for things like Event, LWP, etc.
just because you have a passing interest.
Of course, that begs the question, do we need
yet another freshmeat? Does the module discussion
area simply become "CGI.pm v2.87 released; discuss" type area?
Re:Module discussions?
jns on 2000-04-06T12:28:13
Of course, that begs the question, do we need yet another freshmeat? Does the module discussion area simply become "CGI.pm v2.87 released; discuss" type area?
Or even indeed do we need another comp.lang.perl.modules ? The list of recent module releases is nice but is it pertinent to have discussion about modules on a forum which the authors of those might not read ?
/J\
Re:Module discussions?
pudge on 2000-04-06T16:31:33
Why does it matter if module authors don't read it?
How many module authors read clp.modules? I sure don't.
Re:Module discussions?
However, the slashdot model isn't really well suited for long running discussions anyway. Once things fall off the front page, no-one cares.
If I ever get the chance, I would like to fix this problem. Something like a "10 Most Active Stories Not on the Mainpage" slashbox or something like that, so that older discussions that go on for a while are not penalized for not being visible.
Re:Module discussions?
ziggy on 2000-04-07T03:26:41
Something like a "10 Most Active Stories Not on the Mainpage"
slashbox or something like that, so that older discussions that go on for a while are not
penalized for not being visible.
As long as we're talking about feature requests, how about a responses-since-last-login type feature to show you only the new posts that you haven't seen in a particular thread?
Of course, this could get resource intensive, but at least it's a semi-productive use of CPU cycles. :-)
Re:Module discussions?
pudge on 2000-04-07T11:24:51
Yeah, I have been pondering the best way to do that, and I don't know what it is. Each post has a unique key of sid (story ID) and cid (comment ID). I suppose we could have a big ol' delimited string that notes which stories you've seen.
But then that needs to get cleaned out, too, which can suck for large user databases going into the hundreds of thousands. I suppose one thing we could do is clean out this string when it is called for; so you view a page, and as it is checking to see which posts you've seen and adding in keys you are seeing now, it deletes any keys that are old.
And it would not have to NOT show old posts, it could just color new posts differently or something.
Thoughts?
