Ruby Visual Identity Team

[Ezra Zygmuntowicz]

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I would like to offer my help with any design work that people agree
upon for any of these Ruby related sites. Whomever makes these types
of decision can contact me on or off list. I'd love to give back to
this great community that I have been lurking in and soaking up
knowledge from for a while now.

So please if i can be of any use then I would be honored to spend some
serious time working on this project with whomever else gets involved.

http://www.yakima-herald.com/
http://heartofwashington.com/
http://www.livingglassworks.com/news.php

-Ezra Zygmuntowicz
Yakima Herald-Republic
WebMaster
509-577-7732
(e-mail address removed)

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[Yukihiro Matsumoto]

Hi,

In message "Re: Ruby Visual Identity Team"

|Sure. By the way, who should I contact to get my access issues
|staightened out?

Contact www-admin _at_ ruby-lang.org with your crypted htpasswd.

matz.

 

[John W. Long]

Thanks for the volunteer summary, I will be sure to add those to the project
as soon as its been created.

What is the project name? Let us know so we can join it when it has been
created.

 

[Curt Hibbs]

What is the project name? Let us know so we can join it when it has been
created.

Its "vit" (for Visual Identity Team), and I've already added you. Most of
the other people who expressed interest have not registered for a RubyForge
account. It doesn't matter, though, since most interaction will be through
the mailing list, and you don't need to register with RubyForge to subscribe
to the mailing list.

If you don't mind (at least for now), I'll make you an administrator on this
RubyForge project. I feel more comfortable when there is more than one
person who can go in do needed administrative stuff (which doesn't really
happen too often, anyway).

I've initiated the creation of the mailing list "vit-discuss", but it takes
6-24 hours to actually get created, so its not yet ready.

I've got some thoughts on how to proceed (at least organizationally), but
I'll save that for my initial post to the ML. I'll let you know when its
ready.

Curt

 

[Masayoshi Takahashi]

Hello,

Here is what I would like to propose. Let's form a Ruby Visual Identity
Team, similar to the one formed for the launch of Mozilla Firefox
[1][2]. Our first project: to redesign ruby-lang.org. After that we
could offer our services for other projects. The Ruby documentation site
for instance [3]. Perhaps even get around to implementing a couple of
nice templates for RDoc [4].

I would suggest that the team be formed from people who have strong
design skills. _Why has been flirting with an idea for ruby-lang.org
[5]. I nominate him to be part of the team. I've also done my share of
design work for Web sites [6][7] and wouldn't mind being involved. Are
there others who can come forward and show evidence of there skills and
enthusiasm for this project? It would also be cool to have people with
strong coding skills, i.e. experience with pure CSS layout and XHTML.

Nihon Ruby no Kai (Japan Ruby Group) launched a project
for revising ruby-lang.org last month.

Now we are collecting feedback on www.ruby-lang.org[1]. We will
make a report and/or a plan of renewal of Ruby's site to
www-admin team.

We may not have enough skill of graphical design and coding,
but we can focus usability of the site.
I hope to collaborate with Ruby Visual Identity Team.


Regards,

 

[Curt Hibbs]

There is general agreement that Ruby web site is in need of improvement.
After encouragement from Matz, we created a RubyForge project and mailing
list to collaborate on making this a reality.

If you want to participate, please subscribe to the mailing list:

http://rubyforge.org/mail/?group_id=556

Also, we just found out that there is a group in Japan who also started a
project to work on this last month. We hope to collaborate with them so
that, between us, we can put the best possible face on Ruby.

After a day of getting the subscriptions in place we can talk about how to
proceed.

Curt

 

[James G. Britt]

I misunderstood your post. from the context I thought you were proposing
this as possible ruby-lang.org front page.

I think it is a lot nicer than current ruby-lang front-page, but missing
a few useful links, those above.

Sorry; I read the post too fast. The ads I'm accountable for are on
ruby-doc, not ruby-lang. They help cover some costs. Got $100 for
2004; Thanks, Google!

This is the first I've heard of ads on ruby-lang (shows how often I
vist the site, eh?)

Yes, ads on a Ruby site for P* stuff is odd, but no big deal. Sort of amusing.

James

 

[Douglas Livingstone]

nuke the ads, why do we need ads on ruby-lang.org?

Again, just my opinion, but going to ruby-lang.org and seeing a slew of
perl & python ads down the side yesterday (mustve been triggered by
association of ruby with "scripting language", today there is only one
other scripting language, and three asian translation links,) was weird.

??

Where are the ads on ruby-lang? I don't see any!

Douglas

 

[James G. Britt]

"most" doesn't say which should or should not work. If those links are
not intended to be working yet, thats cool, if they are thought to work
by you, just letting you know they don't work for me.

Thanks, and I agree that I wasn't all that specifc about what does or
does not work.

Everything takes longer than expected, even taking into account
Hofstadter's Law. But given the nature of the discussion I wanted to
at least show something.



James

 

[Zach Dennis]

I'd be willing to volunteer to assist wherever I could for this David,
Chad and James. If you are interested in my volunteering efforts just
contact me off list.

Zach

 

[Phrogz]

One thing I would like to see:
Design a single uber navigation bar that links between ruby-lang.org,
ruby-doc, raa, rubyforge, and any other 'key' players. Get every site
to put this bar at the top of every page (or at least at the top of the
home page), allowing newbs to the language a quick way to discover all
the major sites, and jump between them.

 

[Sam Roberts]

Quoteing (e-mail address removed), on Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 06:08:38AM +0900:

??

Where are the ads on ruby-lang? I don't see any!

Really? Maybe you have a blocker?

Right hand side of http://ruby-lang.org/en/.

Sam

 

[James Britt]

James Britt ha scritto:

Each box shows resources culled from links posted to del.icio.us.
Clicking the resource name just loads that page. Clicking the little
'i' next to a resource shows you what people have posted it and their
extended comments. A modern browser is required. Haven't tested in
older browsers (or even many current ones), so field reports are
welcome so that it degrades nicely

(my two cents)
the button is interesting, but It is not that obvious to me what it
does, I wonder if there is a way of making it more clear :/

Good question. The intent was to provide a way to render some metadata
about each link; link title themselves are not always properly
descriptive, yet people should not have to go click a link and load
another page just to see that it isn't what they thought.

The tricky part is providing enough information to a new user as to what
that little icon is for without that same information just getting in
the way once a user is no longer new. Maybe mouse-over pop-up help.
Something, anyway.

Also, the boxes have too many elements, imo. Once you provided a nice
search/faceted browsing interface, you should not need all those
articles in the home.

Hm. Partly I wanted to have a set of boxes that showed either the 10
top-rated (e.g. most mentioned on delicious, or whatever the criteria
is) or the 10 newest. Maybe 5 or 7 is better. Browsing by tag/topic is
done from the 'browse' page; each box would have a browse link as well
that took you to that browse page, preloading the search criteria for
tags that map to that category.

But the matter of clutter is certainly something to watch for; part of
me thinks that simple links to predefined facet browsing might be
better. (With sufficient JavaScript the boxes could be collapsible as
well, I suppose, by default showing only topic titles linking to a full
browsing page.)

Btw, I'd globally prefer listing some latest link (like in current
ruby-doc) and provide browsing links based on the (meta)tags

That's an option, but that could also be obtained via an RSS feed. I
might be wrong, but I think fewer and fewer people are getting news and
site updates by actually going to the site in question.

James

 

[James Britt]

Hear, hear. I think that the problem with Ruby's online presence is not
a matter of visual appeal or the lack of nice logo. The problem with
Ruby's online presence is much more about functionality. For example,
when I look at ruby-lang.org my first thought is not that the site has
the wrong colors or fonts, but that the last post to the front page was
in December ... which would make a newcomer think that Ruby is sleepy
little language, and nothing of interest has happened to it in the last
two months.

This isn't meant as a criticism of James or whoever runs ruby-lang.org,
just a suggestion that if you're not already involved and are looking to
help out, it might be more helpful to 1) put more Ruby-related content
on your own blog or 2) volunteer to help out with existing sites to help
add or debug more features.

Indeed. There are several issues here, one of them being aesthetics and
"identity", but another is the behavior and services of each site. It
is easier (relatively) to offer new colors and layouts for a site than
to completely rethink its reason for being.

So James, are you planning on moving away from the current blog-style
front page, with individual dated posts? Personally I think that's the
thing people want to see when they come to a front page: Plenty of
activity.

Yes, I'm moving the news blog off the main page; I just don't see that
as main service of the site. I believe more people are getting such
news and updates from RSS feeds. It's become too much work to manually
track each new Ruby doc resource, and there is very little report
concerning either the documentation project or documentation tools
(which is pretty much the original purpose of the site).

I believe that people have two main issues with Ruby documentation:
either it just doesn't exist, or they can't find it (or don't even know
about it). Yet there is a boatload of information out there. Not just
formal API docs, how-tos, or articles, but blogs and wikis and
whathaveyou. Ruby-doc can best serve users by helping connect
developers to docs; the news blog stuff is now pretty incidental.

I also don't see the site as being driven by novelty; it's a more of
service or tool.

This can be done outside of a given web page, using the Tasty bookmarklet:

http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2004/07/tasty-redux

Ah, quite nice. This presumes, though, that the data will always come
from, or only come from, a given source. You also have to have a given
browser and install an extension to use this.

Personally I'm not too hot about embedding these sorts of tools in the
web page itself.

The goal is condense/filter resource metadata to help users make better
choices. People are free to ignore it.

Cool. You might find Topic Maps useful for this, or maybe that's too
heavyweight. I'm quite sure your not the only person trying to harvest
good taxonomies out of a folksonomy like del.icio.us.

Topic maps might be a bit to heavy-weight. I've been working with XFML
(XTM-lite, so to speak), and there will likely be an XFML feed from
ruby-doc. Among the goals is to offer data feeds that others can use to
help drive their own Ruby applications.

I very much agree. And I hope my comments above don't come across as
suggestions, not really criticism: I use ruby-doc almost every day and
am already pretty happy with it. Thanks, James!

You're welcome. I appreciate the comments.

And thanks to the increasing number of people writing about Ruby.

James

 

[Francis Hwang]

I'm moving the news blog off the main page; I just don't see that as
main service of the site. I believe more people are getting such news
and updates from RSS feeds. It's become too much work to manually
track each new Ruby doc resource, and there is very little report
concerning either the documentation project or documentation tools
(which is pretty much the original purpose of the site).

I believe that people have two main issues with Ruby documentation:
either it just doesn't exist, or they can't find it (or don't even
know about it). Yet there is a boatload of information out there.
Not just formal API docs, how-tos, or articles, but blogs and wikis
and whathaveyou. Ruby-doc can best serve users by helping connect
developers to docs; the news blog stuff is now pretty incidental.

I also don't see the site as being driven by novelty; it's a more of
service or tool.

Makes sense. I guess if you want a Ruby-wide news feed you can
subscribe to the Artima Ruby Buzz feed, or the del.icio.us ruby tag or
whatever.

Ah, quite nice. This presumes, though, that the data will always come
from, or only come from, a given source. You also have to have a
given browser and install an extension to use this.

I don't think it's browser-specific; I use Safari and just dragged the
link into my bookmarks bar. (Along with bookmarklets pointing to
Ping-o-matic, Technorati, del.icio.us itself, etc.) But you do have to
be aware of it and how bookmarklets work, which I'll readily concede is
pretty obscure stuff.

Oh, one other thing: Personally, I think iframes look pretty awful,
unless you can guarantee that they'll never scroll. Trying to do what
you're doing, going without will take more work -- you'd probably end
up parsing del.icio.us's info directly in Javascript, I think -- so
maybe it's not really worth it to make it pretty.

Thanks again for offering ruby-doc,

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/

 

[James Britt]

Francis Hwang wrote:
...

Oh, one other thing: Personally, I think iframes look pretty awful,
unless you can guarantee that they'll never scroll. Trying to do what
you're doing, going without will take more work -- you'd probably end up
parsing del.icio.us's info directly in Javascript, I think -- so maybe
it's not really worth it to make it pretty.

There are no frames. This is CSS + XHTML + JavaScript.

The data comes from a MySQL instance on the ruby-doc server; I fetch RSS
from del.icio.us every few hours or so. The page uses XmlHttpRequest
to make calls back to the server

Having the data local gives far more flexibility. Plus it avoids
burdening the del.icio.us site.

Thanks again for offering ruby-doc,

My pleasure!


James

 

[Francis Hwang]

Ah, my bad. I wasn't looking carefully at the code. Though it's the
scrolling I'm reacting to, so it's still the same ... of course, others
may feel different.

Are you aware, BTW, of Paul Duncan's del.icio.us lib for Ruby? I use it
myself, it's pretty stable right now. Though I suppose if you've
already done the RSS parsing you might need this anyway.

http://pablotron.org/software/rubilicious/

Francis Hwang wrote:
...

There are no frames. This is CSS + XHTML + JavaScript.

The data comes from a MySQL instance on the ruby-doc server; I fetch
RSS from del.icio.us every few hours or so. The page uses
XmlHttpRequest to make calls back to the server

Having the data local gives far more flexibility. Plus it avoids
burdening the del.icio.us site.




My pleasure!


James

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/

 

[James Britt]

Ah, my bad. I wasn't looking carefully at the code. Though it's the
scrolling I'm reacting to, so it's still the same ... of course, others
may feel different.

Are you aware, BTW, of Paul Duncan's del.icio.us lib for Ruby? I use it
myself, it's pretty stable right now. Though I suppose if you've already
done the RSS parsing you might need this anyway.

Yes, though truthfully I think it entirely slipped my mind when writing
my feed-fetcher.

Go figure.

I basically just use a cron job to call wget or something and write the
data to disk, and then a small script using the built-in RSS libs to
insert records into the DB reading from the local disk files.

The main code has no idea where the data originally came from. It just
calls into a local Web service to get stuff. If del.icio.us suddenly
goes away or stops people from snarfing RSS feeds the app wouldn't care.


James

 

[gabriele renzi]

James Britt ha scritto:

James Britt ha scritto:

Each box shows resources culled from links posted to del.icio.us.
Clicking the resource name just loads that page. Clicking the little
'i' next to a resource shows you what people have posted it and their
extended comments. A modern browser is required. Haven't tested in
older browsers (or even many current ones), so field reports are
welcome so that it degrades nicely

(my two cents)
the button is interesting, but It is not that obvious to me what
it does, I wonder if there is a way of making it more clear :/

Good question. The intent was to provide a way to render some metadata
about each link; link title themselves are not always properly
descriptive, yet people should not have to go click a link and load
another page just to see that it isn't what they thought.

The tricky part is providing enough information to a new user as to what
that little icon is for without that same information just getting in
the way once a user is no longer new. Maybe mouse-over pop-up help.
Something, anyway.

I'd just add a tiny box on the right with "link info" on top and
initially filled with "click on the for more info on each link".
IMO this is
- self explanatory on usage
- does not steal space, since it uses the same of the actual approach,but..
- ..it is clear that you can get more informations, since you know there
is an info box
- it is not something that will slow successive visits

Actually, I think mouse-overing is better than icon clicking, but since
you're using xmlhttprequest it would probably be too much overhead.

But the matter of clutter is certainly something to watch for; part of
me thinks that simple links to predefined facet browsing might be
better. (With sufficient JavaScript the boxes could be collapsible as
well, I suppose, by default showing only topic titles linking to a full
browsing page.)

this would be wonderful and would bump up the coolness-factor

 

[James Britt]

James Britt ha scritto: ...

The tricky part is providing enough information to a new user as to
what that little icon is for without that same information just
getting in the way once a user is no longer new. Maybe mouse-over
pop-up help. Something, anyway.

I'd just add a tiny box on the right with "link info" on top and
initially filled with "click on the for more info on each link".

Good thought.

IMO this is
- self explanatory on usage
- does not steal space, since it uses the same of the actual approach,but..
- ..it is clear that you can get more informations, since you know there
is an info box
- it is not something that will slow successive visits

Actually, I think mouse-overing is better than icon clicking, but since
you're using xmlhttprequest it would probably be too much overhead.

I've considered mouse-overing, but I don't think the response time is
fast enough, and if you're gliding over several items you'll end up
making a fair number of requests that are just discarded after the data
is returned.

this would be wonderful and would bump up the coolness-factor

I'm seriously considering it. It would leave more room and reduce the
clutter. Easier on the eye, and easier to direct attention to the
important features.

(I've also given thought to how one could create a customized page, with
just those categories of resources one prefers. Sort of like how /.
lets you select among a thousand different sidebar boxes. )


James