[ubuntu-uk] The Open Source Web

[TheVeech]

On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 11:56 +0100, John Levin wrote:

> > It'd help to see the new users coming along from different backgrounds
> > using their fresh eyeballs, too, to examine even more than this - things
> > we may have overlooked for years. 
> 
> Absolutely. Just watch someone with little experience of the text
> editors you get with Joomla or suchlike, and the process for making a
> link is really difficult. (I don't use Joomla's editor, prefering to
> write html, tags and all. It's quicker, and once you've learnt quite a
> small vocabulary, you can get things done.)

Sod that.  Let's write a book: 'Getting Nothing Done and Loving IT' :)

The thing about Drupal for me was that I wanted to play around with it
to see what it could do.  I think you're right, that trying to master
HTML is the thing to aim for, but it helps if we're aware of some of
these tools as wells.


> If people
> can't play music, watch videos on youtube, ad nauseum, they're not going
> to switch. The OS may be fine for what they do locally, but it's useless
> if it can't partake in the internet, which is a social network writ
> large, with all their friends, family on it. And you can't even begin to
> think that someone should change all these social links!

I think it's related with so many things.  Whenever we close a gap or
innovate, we're making the job easier for when people do things like
shows, distribute media, etc.  It's like the beauty of being able to
promote Linux by having a popular app like Firefox to point to.


> There are a lot of good, free tools (meaning web apps and services) out
> there; the difficulty is finding them, amidst the large numbers of 
> unsupported, beta and plain crap apps.
> Joomla and Wordpress are well-known, and have taglines at the bottom of 
> most installs, but what of the good but unknown? I remember it taking a 
> very long time to find a good, simple web-based email-announcement 
> system (and I found a very good one, Dadamail: http://mojo.skazat.com/ ) 
> and am currently trying to find a decent web-based cataloguing system. t 
> should be as simple as searching synaptic or gnome files 
> http://www.gnomefiles.org/

I don't know about things like that - never had the need - but for
planning a site (or just playing around in the sandpit), I've found the
combination of:

Bluefish - http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html
Screem - http://www.screem.org/
FileZilla - http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/
Nautilus - http://www.gnome.org/projects/nautilus/
Vym - http://www.insilmaril.de/vym/
Zim - http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus/projects/zim/
GIMP - http://www.gimp.org/
and
Inkscape - http://www.inkscape.org/

a lot of fun.  It makes the whole process enjoyable (it'll still be a
shite site, but at least I'm going to enjoy the ride and learn more
about the options!).  If you can recommend any other tools, all the
better.


> Right now, I think we have to start small, and simply co-ordinate
> amongst ourselves before building vast edifices. That's the way of 
> building up the crucial quality of trust that you rightly emphasize.

Right.  I think, as well, that some things we dream of have to wait for
the circumstances to make them more realistic and viable.