[CoLoCo] new t-shirt / help idea

[Alex Comer]

Thanks for the links, Neal.

I did see one nice thing among them that caught my attention: The drupal
based Ohio coloco site http://ohio.ubuntu-us.org/

To me, apart from the CMS platform, the interesting things about this site
are:
0. Happy smiling faces
1. The law of 3 breaks its down to just the few most important and very
simple easy to understand common use cases (in this instance: What is
Ubuntu?, About Ohio CoLoCo, Getting support, Download Now,... ok thats 4) so
there's no feeling from the user of "ok I'm here - what now?"
2. Note that most of the secondary links across the top of the page link to
external sites, such as launchpad, the forums on ubuntuforums.org, the
launchpad wiki, and of course ubuntu.com. Thus most of the complexity of
managing those aspects is delegated to existing resources better equipped to
do so.
3. The only other page elements are a "donate now" button, which surely
every coloco could use :)
4. The only real functionality hosted on the site (apart from being a
friendly landing page) is a support request system, which in their case is
just a form they can fill out to get a call back, which would suffice I'm
sure. We could go a step further an install a case tracking
system<http://drupal.org/project/casetracker>
.

A site (or at least a page) like this would be much better as the
destination for the URL on the shirt than the coloco site as it exists now.
In my eyes, a low maintenance site (or at least a landing page) like this
works well without demanding much effort to maintain or administer. Even if
it is only a landing page on the existing site, I think we really need
something like this before we start wearing shirts around town.

I bet we could even get the guys at the Ohio coloco to send us their very
ubuntu-ish Drupal theme :)

Alex



On 10/11/07, Neal McBurnett <neal at bcn.boulder.co.us> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Oct 11, 2007 at 10:39:47PM -0600, Alex Comer wrote:
> > I do agree that _any_ web site does take a certain degree of
> maintenance,
> > however. But, if we KISS (Keep It Simple...), avoid re-inventing the
> wheel, and
> > essentially create a simple, consumer oriented, user friendly portal to
> other
> > resources (pages on the official ubuntu site, videos on youtube, helpful
> > resources, etc) perhaps we can likewise keep maintenance to a minimum.
>
> The playing field moves so fast, I don't think a low-maintenance
> approach will be worth much.
>
> > I'll wear a shirt, but I personally don't have the patience or the time
> to
> > physically walk users through installs and provide user tech support.
> I'm a
> > developer, and not much of a people person (though I'm trying to improve
> that).
>
> Before we launch the project, I think it would help to find out who
> really would be willing to put in the time to make it work.  I'm also
> in the category "sounds good but I don't have the time to do more than
> help with some advice and infrastructure".
>
> > I'm a firm believer that folks should play their "long suit", which in
> my case
> > at least is development. If I can't help in this way, perhaps I'll look
> at
> > contributing to the Ubuntu code base in some way. I was attempting to
> figure
> > out how I could best help the effort, and since drupal web development
> is one
> > of my specialties, I thought it might be a good way to get involved
> locally.
>
> Thanks!  Whether or not we take this project on onw, my sense is that
> a drupal-based site is the way most locos are now going and I guess
> it would offer us more flexibility.  [Or django, my favorite - in
> python!!]  Perhaps you could look at the drupal configs that other
> locos are using and contrast it with what we've got and suggest some
> more concrete pros and cons?
>
>     https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCreatingWebsite
>
> And now (or soon?) we can give all coloco members automatic logins
> by using openids from the launchpad site.  E.g. check out this comment
> from https://launchpad.net/~jamesh I spotted at joey's blog:
>
>
> http://joey.ubuntu-rocks.org/blog/2007/08/31/exaile-from-trac-to-launchpad/#comments
>
> and this bug for openid support:
> https://launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/1169
>
> Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/
>
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-- 
Alex Comer
alex at platinumcode.com
720-883-5493
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