First Presentation Posted to Why Ruby!

[Curt Hibbs]

Assaph Mehr just posted the first presentation to Why Ruby
(http://whyruby.rubyforge.org/). Its intended audience is software
developers. You can download it here:

http://whyruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Ruby_Presentations

A big thank you to Assaph!

Also, I know there's got to be many Ruby presentations floating around out
there, and if you'd like to share, we would love to have them. Remember, you
will be helping to promote the wider adoption of Ruby.

I want to make it as easy as possible. You can upload them yourself (see
instructions below), or you can email them to me (or email me a link).

Thanks, in advance, for your help.

Curt

PS
To upload them yourself,

1) Go to http://rubyforge.org/docman/?group_id=251 and click on "Submit New
Documentation".

2) If won't show up immediately (I have to approve it first).

3) Once I have approved and it shows up on the list, I will add a basic
description and link to our Presentations wiki page. You can the go edit
this page to embellish the description as you see fit.

 

[Phil Tomson]

Assaph Mehr just posted the first presentation to Why Ruby
(http://whyruby.rubyforge.org/). Its intended audience is software
developers. You can download it here:

http://whyruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Ruby_Presentations

A big thank you to Assaph!

Also, I know there's got to be many Ruby presentations floating around out
there, and if you'd like to share, we would love to have them. Remember, you
will be helping to promote the wider adoption of Ruby.

I want to make it as easy as possible. You can upload them yourself (see
instructions below), or you can email them to me (or email me a link).

Thanks, in advance, for your help.

Curt

Curt,

It's great that you've set this up and it's wonderful that people are
putting presentations there ( I need to put my OSCON presentation "Ruby
for Perl Programmers" there), so don't take the following as a criticism.

When you look at Ruby's web presence it seems very disconnected. There's:
*http://www.ruby-lang.org (I tend to view this as the official Ruby
site),
*RubyGarden (http://www.rubygarden.org) which has a large Wiki of
Rubystuff.
*Rubydoc (http://www.rubydoc.org) which is becoming a major source of
Ruby Documentation.
*RubyForge (http://www.rubyforge.org) which hosts a lot of Ruby projects
and WhyRuby?

....I'm sure there are others I have missed. Basically, we've got stuff
all over the place.

If I were a Ruby Newbie just coming into the language and community I
think I would find it a bit overwhelming. Where should I start? Is there
a single source for all of these links? Where should I go for a
'one-stop' source for all things Ruby?

Of course, the way we're doing things has it's advantages. If one of the
sites is down, others will probably still be up.

Is there any way we can present a more unified front even if in the
background things are really distributed among several websites?

Some ideas (not saying they're good ideas, but I'm trying to start a
discussion):

* What if all the Ruby sites linked each other, maybe like a webring?

* What if all the Ruby sites had a similar style so that when you move
from one to another it looks seamless, even though you're moving to
different sites?


Any others?
Is this really a problem at all?

Phil

 

[Stephen Steiner]

If I were a Ruby Newbie just coming into the language and community I

think I would find it a bit overwhelming. Where should I start? Is
there
a single source for all of these links? Where should I go for a
'one-stop' source for all things Ruby?

I _am_ a Ruby newbie and am experiencing some major disorientation not
knowing where to look for stuff.

I find the lack of a Ruby CPAN equivalent to be the most frustrating
issue.

Steve

 

[Ara.T.Howard]

I _am_ a Ruby newbie and am experiencing some major disorientation not
knowing where to look for stuff.

I find the lack of a Ruby CPAN equivalent to be the most frustrating
issue.
http://raa.ruby-lang.org



Steve

--
===============================================================================
| EMAIL :: Ara [dot] T [dot] Howard [at] noaa [dot] gov
| PHONE :: 303.497.6469
| ADDRESS :: E/GC2 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305-3328
| URL :: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/
| TRY :: for l in ruby perl;do $l -e "print \"\x3a\x2d\x29\x0a\"";done
===============================================================================

 

[James Britt]

It's great that you've set this up and it's wonderful that people are
putting presentations there ( I need to put my OSCON presentation "Ruby
for Perl Programmers" there), so don't take the following as a criticism.

When you look at Ruby's web presence it seems very disconnected. There's:
*http://www.ruby-lang.org (I tend to view this as the official Ruby
site),
*RubyGarden (http://www.rubygarden.org) which has a large Wiki of
Rubystuff.
*Rubydoc (http://www.rubydoc.org) which is becoming a major source of
Ruby Documentation.
*RubyForge (http://www.rubyforge.org) which hosts a lot of Ruby projects
and WhyRuby?

....I'm sure there are others I have missed. Basically, we've got stuff
all over the place.

True, but, then again, it's the Web.

If I were a Ruby Newbie just coming into the language and community I
think I would find it a bit overwhelming. Where should I start? Is there
a single source for all of these links? Where should I go for a
'one-stop' source for all things Ruby?

I would suggest one should go first to ruby-lang.org, which (ideally)
would give enough direction on where to go next based on a user's needs.

Whether the site does this well for enough people is open to discussion.

Of course, the way we're doing things has it's advantages. If one of the
sites is down, others will probably still be up.

It also means that control and management is distributed; there is no
core group of site masters responsible for content, design, access,
hosting fees, and so on.

For example, ruby-doc.org hosts some files, but largely points to
resources located elsewhere. Among my current projects is to improve
the indexing and classification of these resources so that finding
appropriate documents is easier. To be a better table of
contents/index/topic map/whatever.

Now, while I'm happy to host files on ruby-doc.org, doing so doesn't
really add any value, and may actually make it harder on people since
they have to go through me to get things up, get files changed or
deleted, and so on. Same goes for rubyxml.com . These sites act more as
metadata sites than content sites, though sometimes the content is on
the same server.

Is there any way we can present a more unified front even if in the
background things are really distributed among several websites?

Sure. For example, I would like to see a taxonomy of Ruby web sites,
something one could navigate as a faceted collection. (Adding such as
faceted collection is on my growing To Do list for ruby-doc.org.)

Some ideas (not saying they're good ideas, but I'm trying to start a
discussion):

* What if all the Ruby sites linked each other, maybe like a webring?

It might be simpler to link to common page stored in one (reliable)
place, something easy to keep up-to-date. Or have something rsync a
local copy from a common site.

(It would interesting if sites also published XFML feeds; other sites
could than, in theory, present aggregated, faceted lists of remote content.)

* What if all the Ruby sites had a similar style so that when you move
from one to another it looks seamless, even though you're moving to
different sites?

Evil. I might as well use Python if I'm going to have style dictated to
me.

Any others?

Site designers should make sure they put appropriate metadata into the
keyword and description meta tags to make the site more accessible to
search engines. Offering an RSS feed is helpful, too, as it makes it
easier (for me, at least ) to follow a site by adding it to my feed
aggregator (currently Bloglines).

Oh, and then add your site to Artima's Ruby Buzz, too.

http://www.artima.com/buzz/community.jsp?forum=123

Is this really a problem at all?

There may be issues with duplicate effort, but I can't think of any
examples offhand. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that.


James Britt
www.ruby-doc.org
www.rubyxml.com

 

[Joel VanderWerf]

There may be issues with duplicate effort, but I can't think of any
examples offhand. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that.

I don't think it's inherently a problem. One thing that would help is to
have a small panel of 6 or 8 links that appears on each ruby site. The
links would include the sites people have mentioned in this thread. It
would be available as an HTML snippet so that everyone could paste it
into their own pages. The basic look of this panel would be uniform, but
that wouldn't dictate the look of the sites.

Unfortunately, I'm a HTML doofus, so I can't even say if "panel" is the
right word, let alone produce some sample code

 

[Stephen Steiner]

Yes, raa is OK but the CPAN/cpan program integration with dependency
support is really handy.

Steve

I _am_ a Ruby newbie and am experiencing some major disorientation not
knowing where to look for stuff.

I find the lack of a Ruby CPAN equivalent to be the most frustrating
issue.
http://raa.ruby-lang.org



Steve

--
=======================================================================
========
| EMAIL :: Ara [dot] T [dot] Howard [at] noaa [dot] gov
| PHONE :: 303.497.6469
| ADDRESS :: E/GC2 325 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305-3328
| URL :: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/
| TRY :: for l in ruby perl;do $l -e "print
\"\x3a\x2d\x29\x0a\"";done
=======================================================================
========

 

[Gavin Sinclair]

I would suggest one should go first to ruby-lang.org, which (ideally)
would give enough direction on where to go next based on a user's needs.

Whether the site does this well for enough people is open to discussion.

It does a pretty good job, but not good enough. It contains quite a few
links, but they are shoehorned into the tDiary format, and in many cases,
the best resources are not displayed upfront.

Solving this is probably as simple as creating a new section in the left
sidebar called "Welcome User". Under that would exist two links: "Ruby
Web Resources" and "Community Resources". These would be purpose-written
articles to give the new (or old) user some context to their browsing.

I wrote a document (for the "Ruby Documentation Bundle") a long time ago
to suit this purpose, but didn't really advertise it. You can read it at
http://rubygarden.org/ruby?GavinSinclair/GettingStartedWithRuby. It is
now out of date, but not bad nonetheless. I would gladly revise and
reformat it if this approach were taken.

What it boils down to is this: there are lots of good Ruby web resources
now, and Phil is right to point out that it's all a bit confusing. A
well-known document that addresses this would help. ruby-lang.org should
be considered the home page, and every significant Ruby page should
(already) link there. Therefore, the "roadmap" document should be hosted,
and well promoted, on ruby-lang.org.

# Aside: every good project has a good FAQ. Ruby's FAQ should be better
# organised, readable as a single document, and better promoted.

Cheers,
Gavin

 

[Dave Burt]

Top work, contributers: Why Ruby! and the related more unified front thread
will
grow and strengthen the Ruby community and help people get paid to use it.

Regarding Why Ruby presentations, there's a link to SegPhault's post
ruby-talk:99964 on
http://whyruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Ruby_Language_Talk_By_Assaph_Mehr
but I consider that there's probably enough material in that post alone (not
to
mention its follow-ups by the same author) to justify its inclusion on
?Ruby_Presentations even in its present form. Agree/disagree?

Of course it'd be great if SegPhault would draw them together, as I believe
he
suggested he was doing.

Cheers,
Dave

----- Original Message -----
From: "Curt Hibbs" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
Sent: Friday, May 14, 2004 12:12 AM
Subject: First Presentation Posted to Why Ruby!

Assaph Mehr just posted the first presentation to Why Ruby
(http://whyruby.rubyforge.org/). Its intended audience is software
developers. You can download it here:

http://whyruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Ruby_Presentations

A big thank you to Assaph!

Also, I know there's got to be many Ruby presentations floating around out
there, and if you'd like to share, we would love to have them. Remember, you
will be helping to promote the wider adoption of Ruby.

<snip>

Assaph Mehr just posted the first presentation to Why Ruby
(http://whyruby.rubyforge.org/). Its intended audience is software
developers. You can download it here:

http://whyruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Ruby_Presentations

A big thank you to Assaph!

Also, I know there's got to be many Ruby presentations floating around out
there, and if you'd like to share, we would love to have them. Remember, you
will be helping to promote the wider adoption of Ruby.

<snip>

 

[gabriele renzi]

Assaph Mehr just posted the first presentation to Why Ruby
(http://whyruby.rubyforge.org/). Its intended audience is software
developers. You can download it here:

a little thing: could the wiki be switched to a ruby one before it
grows too large ?
Trying to say that ruby is wonderful from a perl cgi is somehow
strange :/

 

[Dave Burt]

And a Ruby web server?

a little thing: could the wiki be switched to a ruby one before it
grows too large ?
Trying to say that ruby is wonderful from a perl cgi is somehow
strange :/

 

[James Britt]

And a Ruby web server?

Well, that would be nice, but there is something to be said for eating
your own dog food.

James

 

[gabriele renzi]

And a Ruby web server?

well, RAA runs on webrick and works fine
And, did I say 'why is ruby-lang.org run from :
Written by (e-mail address removed)
Generated by tDiary version 1.5.6.20040315
Powered by Ruby version 1.6.7
'

1.6.7 ??

 

[Dave Burt]

See -- Ruby was even great back at version 1.6.7!