Webadmin
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This brave band of techies and semi-techies maintains our public web site, http://www.freegeek.org . Membership is mostly based on willingness to learn and do the work.
Check out our web stats!
- Webhits over the past year
- Webhits archive
- Webserver stats (lists which words are searched to find us, operating systems used when browsing the site, etc.)
Our goals
- To make sure people can find the information they need about free geek
- To have an accessable website that reflects the organization
- To give people the opportunity to learn and try out web skills
How we're organized
If you want to take part in this, you should probably talk to current members first, so we can get a sense of who you are and what you know. Join the webadmin email list. This list receives email from the website (webadmin@freegeek.org, that's us) about broken links, confusing pages and - whatever else the public thinks should be seen by free geek's webmasters.
If you want to make a small update and you don't think anyone would be bothered, do so and be sure to let the rest of the group know with a quick email detailing what you did.
If you want to make a larger update, content or style-wise, i'd advise talking with as many of the group as you can, in person. See #New site thoughts, below, for more discussion about major changes.
Policy on controversial content
This policy was agreed to during the 12/7/06 Outreach meeting.
If a webadmin is thinking about posting content that they think may be controversial and to a member of the Free Geek community or a member of the community at large, they need to post a proposal to the Outreach email list. A consensus of 3 people is required for the content to be posted. The outreach committee should work to approve or deny the content within 3 days.
This policy should also be enacted for major, structural site chages.
Technologies we use
The nitty gritty, and where it's run.
- svn, aka subversion
- What we used to use CVS for: this is the versioning software that lets us keep track of changes and revert to older versions if necessary (avoid catastrophe). It also means we can see who did what (bwa ha ha). To use it, you will need an account on our subversion server. See Subversion for Coders for more information on using this. You will not be able to edit the website without it. The history of changes made to the website using svn can be found at http://svn.freegeek.org/projects/website/timeline. (run on the subversion server and on your computer)
- html
- Well, it's a website! We use very basic html. Please don't use a WYSIWYG editor if it will leave its fingerprints on our code, because we want it to be easily readable and maintainable. Also, please refrain from doing your formatting and layout in the html. That's what style sheets are for. The html is the framework, the style sheets take care of the decoration. (interpreted by the reader's browser)
- tidy
- A little command line tool that checks to make sure your html is good, and makes the indentation pretty. (run on your computer)
- css
- Style sheets! don't fear them. You won't have to write one; there's one for the whole website (check out http://freegeek.org/freegeek.css to see it). You just have to learn how to apply it, and how to extend it if that's necessary. (interpreted by the reader's browser)
- php
- php is a scripting language for making web-based applications. This sounds impressive, but your contact with it will be minimal. Our only use of php (currently) is includes, which make the layout and navigation on each of our web pages consistent, and allow us to update (for example) our open hours in multiple places at once. The includes have their own directory (
includes/, believe it or not), where you can see the header, footer, hours, and a few other includes. You will rarely have to edit these, and on top of that, most don't actually contain php. What does contain php is every other page on the site - just a little line for each include. Look for the % symbols, and steer clear of them, and everything will be cool.(run by the web server when the page is requested) - the Gimp
- If you're gonna put images on the site, the Gimp is the thing to use. (run on your computer)
We don't use:
- Flash or other fancy animation stuff that's not open source, accessable, and easy to edit.
- WYSIWYG html editors that mess with our pretty pretty code (and probably wouldn't be able to handle the includes)
- the blink tag
- Jelly
New site thoughts
See Website Changeover for all-a this stuff.