feed'd front page ready

[Karsten 'quaid' Wade]

On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 11:34 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Mar 2008, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
> 
> > This weekend I worked with the RSS bits that Ricky committed last week
> > and put together a 100% functional feed-enabled front page:
> >
> 
> I know its a bit late for this but can we not do this on our front page?

Glad you weighed in, I've been wanting to counter the "But look at
Gooooogle!  It's so slick and bare and minimum and cooool!  Why would we
want more on a page than a search box?" meme that gets tossed around. :)

> Exactly what are we trying to accomplish and is putting this feed on the
> very first thing people see when people look for Fedora accomplishing
> that?

We are providing a view into:

* Community vibrancy
* Community content
* Community events and announcements

Let's check how popular they are compared to other parts of the Fedora
front page by watching the traffic they attract.  There is not universal
agreement that "bare minimum" is enough for our front page.  There seems
to be a trend for, "pare to bare minimum, then slowly increase and see
where that gets us."  This is part of that philosophy.

> I certainly don't have veto powers over the website or anything like that
> but I've fought 3 fights already to keep stuff off of the main page.  I
> missed this one or I would have fought it too. 

This has your comments:

https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/357

Note that the original request came, iirc, from a discussion you and I
had at FUDCon.  I don't recall any invoking of the Great Google God of
UI Design at that time.

>  I say again:
> 
> There's a reason http://www.google.com/ is king and http://www.yahoo.com/
> isn't.  If google can exist at the size it is with the simple home page it
> has and we can't, we've done something wrong.

Mike, when Fedora is a search engine, then your argument will make
sense.  We are instead a vibrant community trying to attract
contributors, developers, and a few users.  Where that is more important
to Google, their pages are richer[1].

Giving those people the bare minimum ... well, is it working?  Is it not
working?  How do we know?

Do you read the emails that come in to webmaster@ and askfedora@ about
what people can and cannot find on our websites?  Sure, no one has said,
"Where is your news feed?" but how will they even know if we don't show
them that it exists.  A feed does this:

* Shows the existence of something useful
* Does something useful (link to the feed source, link to article,
direct RSS feed link, etc.)

As opposed to a dead link that just hints at something useful.

To put this another way, I'd TOTALLY REPLACE the links to
"Documentation" and "Release Notes" on fp.org and start.fp.org with a
cool feed like this:

Docs/Kbase
 Latest kbase entry 1
 Latest kbase entry 2
 Latest FAQ entry 1
 Latest Doc updated

... with 'Docs' a link to docs.fp.o and 'kbase' a link to (the
fictional) kbase.fp.o.

Now, you can argue that "Docs" and "Kbase" as pure links are good
enough.  Sure.  If you know what you are looking for and that it is
contained in "Docs" or "Kbase".  What if I want to know how to join
Fedora?  Do I know if "Docs" is or is not going to help me with just the
word "Docs"?  OK, so now we've added "Join".  etc.  Non-dynamic links
are not always the best way to link to information.

So, let's agree that minimalistic has its advantages, and recognize that
it has to be tuned to the situation.  Fedora's pages need the right
balance, and "look like Google" just ain't it.

- Karsten

[1] Richer Google pages:

http://gmail.com
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/ 
http://docs.google.com/

They have one, big purpose on their front page (search) that ties into
all these other, niche purposes.  If our only purpose was to distribute
Fedora, we could do "Get Fedora" and have a search box, and that's it.
But it unfortunately is not our only goal, so overly minimalistic design
fails us.
-- 
Karsten Wade, Sr. Developer Community Mgr.
Dev Fu : http://developer.redhatmagazine.com
Fedora : http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
gpg key : AD0E0C41
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