Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Progress report on the Frontier site

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:8/30/1999; 7:55:52 AM
Topic:M10K
Msg #:10228 (In response to 10226)
Prev/Next:10227 / 10229

p.s. I like the way the Frontier Site is coming along.

Thank you. That is so important! I have been having fun with the new site. I saw how the Frontier site could be like Scripting News, but better. That I could have fun with it, and that it could become a discussion group like this one, *and* that it could have a functional hierarchy.

The thing you may not be able to see right now is that eventually the flow of new stories will settle down to 2-3 a day (more when we're releasing a new version). The chance to comment on these stories while they're in development will help us move faster, both as implementors and as a community. We really want to get all the information on the Frontier site, in the search engine, and eventually in the hierarchy.

One of the breakthrus for me came in a meeting I had with Dale Dougherty from O'Reilly last week in Monterey. We were talking about categorization for RSS channels. This is a big topic and, until now, an unsolved problem. Once you have hundreds of channels updating frequently (we already have hundreds of channels but many of them are dormant) how do you sort them out? The O'Reilly solution is very neat. They already have a categorization, a taxonomy -- their books! So the webmaster of a weblog would attach their RSS file to an ORA book. Excellent! Schwinnng!

OK, so driving home from Monterey, I figured out that we have a taxonomy too, but we weren't using it. The What is Frontier? section of the old site got rave reviews. People loved it. But then using the rest of the site was like falling off a cliff. All of a sudden you had to piece the whole thing together for yourself.

That's when I figured it out. Move the taxonomy up one level, and make sure that it covers the totality of what Frontier can do. This has two benefits. First, we get a table of contents for the Frontier site that really explains what Frontier is about. And the second benefit is that when we add a new feature it will have to appear in the taxonomy, the hierarchy, if it isn't in there, no one will find it.

I'm glad I got a chance to explain this. It's important that we have the support of Frontier people here. And it's important to speak up when you like it. People only tend to talk about what they don't like, and that tends to be a bummer from my POV! (Not surprising?) I'm only finding out now that some people liked the old tree browser. When it was the only way to browse the site all I heard were complaints, some of them quite rude. This colors my opinion, I want people to be pleased with our site, and the negative comments had a lot to do with it being de-emphasized and eventually it will be removed. This is a lesson for the community -- please be sure positive feedback is registered. When you see someone trash a feature that you like on one of the mail lists, be sure we know that *you* like it and would miss it if it went away. In this world, the website is closely related to the software.

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:52:15 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.