(re)building A New Web

[koan]

Hi Guys,

I'm really happy that OESF forums are now back online and once again we have a focus point for our community. Sometimes you need somewhere to get advice or help, or to bounce ideas around. More importantly, as a community we can tackle bigger projects that would not be feasible for one person to do by themselves or, at least, by themselves quickly.

One problem that we have is that if you do a search online you quickly run into old web pages with link rot. I mean, there are a lot of results that are web pages that haven't been updated in several years, have links that lead to nowhere and there are missing source and packages. I'm guilty too, some of the links on my own site are no longer working. New or returning users to Zaurus will be put off or find it very tough to know how to get started.

To improve this situation I would like to make the following suggestions:

• If you have a website or blog, please check your links and update or remove dead links.
• Post something new online: a blog post, a new web page, a Google+ update publicly shared. If you don't know what to write, say something about your Zaurus and what you use it for. Let's make a whole bunch of new stuff for search engines to index.
• There are a lot of old websites that have clearly not been updated in forever and they have important source or tools that would not be easy to remake. We need to find some storage somewhere, maybe Google Drive or Dropbox. Between us we should work on identifying and backing up these files. Ultimately, making them available by some central hub.
• I was looking at Meanie's site the other day and he had a very decent comparison of the available ROMs of the day. It would be awesome if we could put together a new comparison.
• As the OESF Wiki is offline, I have started to gather together useful information in my own Wiki [edit: see post below for link] - I have only just started so it's very bare at the moment. I don't intend to go through every subject that was in the old wiki, there is way too much that I never used so I need a bit of help with this. If you can write a detailed up to date article on something useful, PM me the link or the article and I can add it.
• If you are lurking and haven't posted anything, please post a hi to some appropriate thread. If you spot a Zaurus related article online post a link. At the moment I can see about 50 users online but I guess at least half of those are bots.

I also made a new ipkg How To and uploaded the relevant scripts.

[Varti]

Hi koan,

thanks a lot koan for all your work on the wiki! I have been missing it, as it's has always been a great reference for everything the Z. As I have mentioned on the  forum's portal, we can decide to move it to the server here, or keep it on your server. Another idea would be to put it back online and check what info is still usefull and which one is outdated, and integrate all the new pages you have published. For now, I'll update the links at the top of the forum's page, and add your Wiki URL.
For the files storage idea, we can for now store them all locally and make them accessible via a simple download page. I'm also worried that all the files stored elsewhere will be lost, I have done a local backup of the Cacko and Trisoft pages, we might take a look at the remaining feeds too and store them in a single place.
An updated ROM comparison would be nice to have, too, to be placed in the Wiki.

Most of the users online are usually bots. I have done a search on the latest posts, there have been 18 users since last September who have posted at least once, which is not bad.

Varti

[koan]

Hi Varti,

I didn't see your post about the forum news before I posted here.

My wiki is not the best solution because it is not designed for collaboration on the internet, only the intranet. It would be better to have a wiki that several people can edit. If you get the original wiki online again then it is probably the best option, even though it needs a lot of work.

[greguu]

Hi Varti,

I didn't see your post about the forum news before I posted here.

My wiki is not the best solution because it is not designed for collaboration on the internet, only the intranet. It would be better to have a wiki that several people can edit. If you get the original wiki online again then it is probably the best option, even though it needs a lot of work.

What about just using a GitHub Wiki ? Eg. for the Arch forum etc ?

https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-wikis/

[koan]

Hi greguu,

Thanks for the suggestion. I have moved my wiki to https://github.com/mukoan/zaurus-info/wiki
If anyone wants to collaborate, just send me a request on github or whatever and we'll sort it out.

[greguu]

Hi greguu,

Thanks for the suggestion. I have moved my wiki to https://github.com/mukoan/zaurus-info/wiki
If anyone wants to collaborate, just send me a request on github or whatever and we'll sort it out.

Great koan, I hope to find some time soon to contribute some content. It would be good to digest all the important stuff from this forum into the wiki for future reference. Cheers!