Re: tradgirl becomes wiki

* Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@xxxxxxxxx>:
Alex Chiang <alex@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
* Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@xxxxxxxxx>:

Yuck. If you were going to do that, you should have left it
alone.

Well Thor, if you want to state a reason for your assertion, I'm all
ears.

It was fine how it was, the new format doesn't make the old content
any easier to use and it does make the whole business considerably
uglier.

Ok, I see your point. You're coming at it from a reader's perspective.
Fine.

My motivation was to make it easier from the *maintainer's* perspective.
The old pages were a bit unwieldy. Lots of embedded font stuff,
difficult to add new categories easily, etc. The overhead of adding new
content was a non-trivial component of me not adding new stuff.

The wiki does two things:

1. It lets the maintainer focus on content with minimal worry
about style. This makes adding content at *least* an order of
magnitude easier.

2. It allows for many maintainers, and lowers the barriers to
entry to becoming a maintainer. People who want to help don't
have to grok a complex table-based layout. I don't have to give
out ssh/sftp access for people to upload updated files.

And I would tend to think the likelihood of attracting new content by
this change is quite low.

I can spend a few minutes between compiles, trolling for useful,
amusing, interesting information and copy/paste it into the wiki with
trivial effort.

I can't (and won't) spend 2 grueling weeks redesigning the entire site
to something that's easier to maintain (but non-wiki). Hell, I even
tried once, but the motivation/energy simply wasn't there. Sorry.

Anyhow, I've asked for help on rc.com and here, and already, my new best
intarweb friends have done more in the past week than I could do in two
years.

In the end, I suspect no one *really* cares that much, but I hated
having my name attached to something that was clearly neglected. At a
minimum, I don't have to feel bad every time I open my inbox and see
more mail asking me to update some portion of the (old) site.

Oh well. Wasted enough electrons on this thread than I intended.

cheers,

/ac


.

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