Last October at ILC I foolishly volunteered, along with a bunch of#

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 22:42:27 +0000

Last October at ILC I foolishly volunteered, along with a bunch of other community-minded people, to do something about the state of the ALU web site. Since then, we've argued a little on the mailing list, agreed a plan of action (management types may wish to add "going forward" here), and then kinda sorta run out of momentum, as far as I can tell. Ah well.

So last week I proposed a change in project scope -

• The Official Site now becomes a site containing only Official Information (ALU board members, mailing list archives, constitution, minutes etc).

• The CLiki site that we were using internally to prototype the new site now becomes public. Because of this it won't contain the Official Information (see above), but will feature (new updated versions of) all of the incredibly useful but ever-so-slightly outdated information on the rest of the old ALU site.

This suggestion seems so far to have had more positive feedback (some) than negative (none, yet), which I am choosing to view as a mandate from the ALU to go ahead.

ALU.CLiki.net is the actually-not-new new site, which presently is both ugly and missing large chunks. But that can be fixed. Go and fix it.

Expected-to-be-FA Q #1: how does this relate to the official CLiki? CLiki is a place for "links to and resources for free software implemented in Common Lisp and available on Unix-like systems": the ALU site is for everything else. Clear? Some tolerable scheme for inter-cliki linking is on my TODO list, along with everything else.

Some of the existing CLiki content (documents, tutorials, lisp success stories, prospective de facto standard discussion, etc) is expected to be moved across as time allows.

On the general subject of CLiki, the TUNES project are now using it, and have hacked in some neat-looking features like a per-page edit history. Hope to get those changes marged back into baseline soon.