[Webcom] Planet.Osgeo in home page [was: Website Redesign]

[Jason Birch]

I agree with almost everything below (sorry), except removing the author
names.  I think it's important to give the OSGeo foundation a
personality.

One of the most annoying attitudes I come across is when people say
something like "why can't OSGeo just do ..." without realizing that
OSGeo is really just a bunch of people, primarily volunteers.
Counteracting this is a large part of why I was in favour of the
spotlights, and am now in favour of the blog listing.

The use of an OSGeo-specific feed is encouraged for people submitting to
Planet OSGeo, but I don't believe that it's required. 

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: webcom-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:webcom-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Jeroen Ticheler
Sent: January-13-09 12:13 AM
To: Web committee discussions
Subject: Re: [Webcom] Planet.Osgeo in home page [was: Website Redesign]

Hi All,
First of all I indeed think it is a good idea that Spotlight was  
removed in favor of the OSGeo Planet. I have some points for  
improvement too:
- When resizing to a narrow window, the planet and upcoming events  
jump down, leaving a wide white space next to the News section.
- The blog posts open in the same page as the OSGeo pages, so we lose  
the visitors instantly when they hit a blog post. I feel blog posts  
should be opened in a new window.
- I would suggest to remove the name of the blog writer. It means  
something to a very small community, but takes a lot of space that  
detracts from the actual subject.
- The titles / layout of the four main sections on the home page may  
benefit from a consistent layout and consistent dividers between the  
blocks.
- Last thing is something I can't check now, but you may know: blog  
posts that end up on the OSGeo homepage should relate to the subject  
matter we deal with. So we should not see personal blog entries of new  
borns and so on end up there (even though those are incredibly  
important to the blogger and her/his friends!! :-) ). Do we filter the  
blog entries on an OSGeo tag? I think we should and it should be a  
guideline for bloggers to use the osgeo tag in case they want their  
stuff to end up on the OSGeo homepage.

Hope this is useful, ciao,
Jeroen

On Jan 13, 2009, at 7:19 AM, Jason Birch wrote: