[Wylug-announce] New WYLUG Website

[Dave Fisher]

Dear All,

---------------------------------------------------------------
Notice: Please address any discussion to the wylug-discuss list
---------------------------------------------------------------

After months of mind-numbing hard slog, I can finally announce the
re-launch of the WYLUG website.[1]

You can find it at the traditional URL: http://www.wylug.org.uk

In future, all significant announcements will be made on both the site
and this mailing list.

Although it is nothing much to look at, and there are still plenty of
known problems supporting all the old URLs, the new site should serve us
much better than the one it replaces.

In particular, because it now has web GUI content management interface,
it should be possible for individual members to become site authors,
submitting content and uploading files.

If you would like to contribute content, just email me with a suggested
username and contact details (telephone), and I'll get back to you
with a password for an author's account.

In particular, I would encourage prospective speakers to consider
preparing talk slides with web publication in mind.

Although we can publish slides in any format, their content would be
vastly more findable, searchable and usuable if authors could write them
in simple, valid and semantic HTML.  

In particular, I'd recommend writing in the simplest form of S5 [2]

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S5_file_format

And testing your HTML/CSS in a (fairly reliable) validator, e.g.

  http://validator.w3.org/

Failing something like that, PDF exports from OpenOffice.org 2.2 or
greater are preferrable to the dreadful XHTML + CSS exported by OO.
PDFs may be read-only, but at least they won't screw up the rest of the
site's HTML/CSS.

If anyone fancies having a go at converting the (almost) stock Wordpress
page styles into something a bit more interesting and relevent, please
send me sample/prototype CSS.

Dave

[1] It has taken literally months to convert the mess of tag soup on the
old site into something vaguely like valid and consistent HTML. N.B. I
make no crticism of past authors individually (other than myself). The
mess was mostly down to a history of ad hoc writing and no
editorial/style controls. The time taken was mostly down to my refusal
to throw away old content that might still be useful (if only for
historical record) and the impossibility of converting all the crap HTML
automagically.

[2] Please avoid using CSS which could have side-effects on the site's
own templated styles.  You could do this by attaching a unique id to
your body element, then defining all your CSS selectors using descent,
e.g.

#mytalkid .slide
#mytalkid h2
#mytalkid p
#mytalkid>ul>li