[Robotgroup] YAWS (was Fwd: [fai] Forum for AI, Mon)

[Bryan Bishop]

On Tuesday 19 August 2008, Vern Graner wrote:
> Bryan Bishop wrote:
>  > Raw organic natural language content on the wiki is ok since the
>  > majority of people will be adding that anyway, but let's also try
>  > out a formal file format to represent calendar events. I'm
>  > thinking of doing it in YAML since it makes it ridiculously
>  > easy to write <snip>
>
> <cynicism>
> Though I am excited by your enthusiasm, I would recommend you prepare
> to be one of the few (or the only) ones to make any changes to any
> new site you create.

Right. I've found this on my own for the past decade with various online 
community website initatives, mostly centered around gaming [my games] 
which, you'd think, would incite more responsiveness among members. 
Nope.

> -The front page of TheRobotGroup.org is a Wordpress site. I think the
> consensus is that Wordpress is "ridiculously easy" to maintain.

Usually it involves some user registration and some weird submission 
process that I haven't bothered to look into. Instead I just submit 
files directly from my RSS reader to my blog via flatfiles on an rsync 
schedule to the server. CTRL+X for immediate exportation ;-) don't have 
to worry about anything after that. I'm ... high volume. Consequently, 
my blog is overflowing with content.

> -We also have a WIKI-based portion of the our web site where *any*
> member can make a page and maintain useful info about themselves and
> their projects.
>
> -In addition, we have the MEETUP.COM site that has a group calendar
> and a place to add photos from events.

To be fair, you have to click around on meetup.com to use those 
features. If I had a penny for each proprietary calendar interface ..

> Sadly, with all these "ridiculously easy" places to input useful and
> recent data, even with some 60-odd (pun intended) "official" group
> members, there is very little activity. For example, our
> wordpress-based web site hasn't been updated in 5 months.

For those of us who /are/ interested, however, take a look at what I'm 
up against:

http://heybryan.org/mailing_lists.html
http://heybryan.org/forums.html

That's about 160~ mailing lists now, and over 80 different forums, and 
don't get me started on the RSS. I'll be damned if I'm going to go to 
each and every one of the wikis that I know about to deposit my 
content. There has to be a better way -- like apt-get for content 
updates. Maybe I'll start hosting content updates or something, and 
then everyone who is interested can download them and install 
automatically, because I simply can't keep this up otherwise. I don't 
even really like browsers to boot.

> It would appear that "YAWS" (yet another web site) won't lead to a
> flood of helpful TRG member bloggers making our online presence
> interesting, dynamic and fresh.

I agree.

I'm not interested in forcing everyone to use a silly format. I'm just 
making it easier for me to manage this high volume data, and I'm 
confident that everyone else will like the tools as well, maybe to the 
point of adoption in the future. And if not, it doesn't matter since I 
still need to do calendaring for /myself/ regardless. ;-)

- Bryan
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