[dundee] New TayLUG website

[Rick Moynihan]

2009/7/1 gordon dunlop <astrozubenel at googlemail.com>:
>
>
> 2009/7/1 gordon dunlop <astrozubenel at googlemail.com>
>>
>>
>> 2009/7/1 Rick Moynihan <rick.moynihan at gmail.com>
>>>
>>> My only comment is that the use of IFrames for including the
>>> mail-archives/blog embedded under the wiki is bad idea
>>
>> This was done deliberately as the wiki is under the main apache directory
>> in /var/www, and the database,blog & cloud are separate standalone programs
>> in /usr/local/var/www directory being linked to apache using mod_wsgi and
>> using wgscript  aliases and include configurations. If you were in the wiki
>> and went to their respective standalone pages the only way a user can get
>> back to the wiki is via the back button in the browser (which can be a pain
>> if you are doing a lot of things in these programs) or by modifying the
>> address bar. I have tested this out and is unsatisfactory especially to
>> inexperienced users. By being embedded in the wiki the user is just one
>> click away, e.g. clicking on the home tag in the navigation bar to getting
>> back to the wiki. This also gives confidence to inexperienced users knowing
>> that they can get out if they get stuck in using any of these standalone
>> programs. I have asked this question to inexperienced computer users within
>> my family, the adage is that your if your granny prefers it then that's
>> best.
>

I agree with the sentiment but i/frames almost always introduce more
usability problems than they solve.  Because of these inherent
problems they are seldom used on public facing websites.

If you ask Granny to browse a thread in the archives and then send the
link to a friend, she'll be annoyed that the link sent wasn't actually
to the conversation but to the surrounding frame, i.e. the
conversation will have vanished when the link is followed.  The same
problem applies to bookmarking.

Given that frames are also often problematic for screen-readers and
search engines, there is little to recommend them for this kind of
task...  A far better solution is to rely on the back-button, and if
we want to make things nicer, then we should tweak the HTML for the
various components to provide this navigation on the page.

Also the Granny argument feels slightly moot as our existing users are
tech savy... iframes are an inconvenience to these users which
represent our actual community.

>  I should have pointed to you to the real page of the database:
> http://www.dundeelug.org.uk/lurker
>
> and let people try this for themselves and tell me what you all prefer.

+1 on separate URL's.

Another minor point is that the URL is better named something like
/mail-archive or /archives as /lurker doesn't describe what the
resource is.  Naming it something descriptive of the resource rather
than the implementation has two benefits:

1) It improves discoverability in search engines like Google

2) It's more memorable (/lurker doesn't mean anything to our users)

3) If at some point we change from lurker to another
indexing/archiving program then we won't have to change the URL, as
the URL describes the function not the implementation.  Maintaining
stability in URL's is important.


Anyway, great work getting this all in place Gordon!  It's good to see
things coming together!

R.