Giving Something Back

[eob]

Hey,

While I know everyone involved in Puppy mostly majors on adapting the OS, I would, at some stage in the future (not now, mind you, loads of work) like to give something back to the world of Puppy by tackling some of the peripheral stuff surrounding the Puppy experience.

Namely, the website.

I know all the information is out there but I think that puppylinux.org is letting the side down in a huge way. I currently have (Thanks to the awesome EZpup program) an OS running on an old 400mhz IBM Aptiva that looks way better than Windows Vista, and runs faster

But the Puppy web experience doesn't exactly reflect this. Even with the forum, it's not entirely clear which forum you should be clicking on to get to the bulk of the Puppy discussion, and the URL of the forum is alien (http://murga-linux.com/?) to the PuppyLinux.com/.org domain names.

The design of PuppyLinux.org is appalling. It really doesn't sell Puppy to me at all.

But rather than complain I'd like to do something about it at some stage, with a few volunteers in the graphic department?

[Lobster]

contact puppian or raffy - I am sure they would welcome the input

help on the wiki too if you are so inclined
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/UsingThisWiki

[alienjeff]

The design of PuppyLinux.org is appalling.

One example of why.

-aj

[eob]

Don't worry too much about W3C validation for now, that's the easy part. Just wondering what structure/software you guys would think to be appropriate? I hand coded this:

www.octane.ie

And while it's far, far from finished, W3C is normally something I come along and do afterwards when I've ironed out all the kinks to make it inter-browser compatible.

The way I would see a puppy website progressing would be this:

1. I love this screenshot, whoever made it might be open to volunteer to do the graphics for Puppy web?
http://puppylinux.org/user/photogallery.php?photo=266

2. The following sections:
- Welcome
- About
- News
- Community
- Download
- Screenshots (Gallery)
- Manual (The Wiki)
- Contact

3. Wrap all the above in a similar design.

There is a couple of things I'm curious about, however:

1. The greatest Puppy theme of all, Vista Black, is a clear rip of Vista itself, would it be possible to do a Puppy theme for the OS that loads automatically that matches the theme of the website?

2. Does Puppy have its own unique standardised logo? The paw one looks good!

3. Is there anyone else out there who knows a bit about CSS/DHTML that can help a bit with the Puppy website?

[WhoDo]

1. The greatest Puppy theme of all, Vista Black, is a clear rip of Vista itself, would it be possible to do a Puppy theme for the OS that loads automatically that matches the theme of the website?

Yep. Especially with IceWM, or Enlightenment. Haven't seen much of JWM 2.0, so I don't know how themeable it is, and I know nothing of Xfce4. All are candidates, however.

2. Does Puppy have its own unique standardised logo? The paw one looks good!

Logo is at the top and bottom of this page, but with all due respect to Barry I believe the community can do much better. Perhaps a logo design competition, as they did at PCLinuxOS?

Loved your website, BTW, eob. Well done.

[eob]

I'd prefer to leave the seriously technical stuff to you guys but what I'd really like to see happening is for Puppy to become a very strong brand.

I don't mean brand in the traditional sense (ie. paying money for labels) I just mean that if you have everything tied up in a neat bundle, eg. the website looks like the OS, the website reflects the strengths of the OS (fast, light, dynamic, intuitive) and the same logo is repeated on everything to get it into peoples heads that Puppy is 'the daddy' of light Linux OS everywhere, then you start to make an impact.

At the moment (again, no disrespect) it looks like Puppy is... umm... like a PHPFreaks project page.

The website just doesn't reflect how frickin' good Puppy actually is.

WhoDo, thanks for your help in getting MY Puppy up and running

Who's with me?

[alienjeff]

Before too much planning goes on, it would be prudent to first contact Puppian and Raffy - both have put a lot of time into the existing site and the last thing the community needs right about now is another rift.

-aj

[raffy]

Well, I dont have to be contacted as am always around. Am already worried that the site could be targeted for disruption as it's not been actively maintained.

One particular script that should be watched closely is the wakka wiki, as this contains the labors of many people. Of course that CMS is phpfusion, which was chosen at the time (2005) based on its small footprint (the deeply nested tables come with it ).

Anyway, there should be a way to preserve data while changing or upgrading the scripts.

Perhaps WhoDo will be available to coordinate this? Thanks.

[WhoDo]

Well, I dont have to be contacted as am always around. Am already worried that the site could be targeted for disruption as it's not been actively maintained.

...[snip]...

Perhaps WhoDo will be available to coordinate this?

As always, I am certainly willing to help, Raffy. What has happened to puppian? Is he still around? I certainly wouldn't want to intrude if it would be perceived in that way.

[raffy]

We are all here to help, so it should not be a problem. Puppian generally confined his access to the phpfusion CMS plus the docs and bittorrent.

Barry set up the wakka wiki and actually hand-copied the pages from the old to the new site (as the new site's MySQL version was lower than the old one). That was about 18 months ago.

There is a mantis install there, but is not used, so I might remove it later.

I guess the new feature of Puppy, which is a simple basepup + sfs1 = coolpup; basepup + sfs2 = officepup, etc, will need to be emphasized in the new pages.

It might be good to start work in a separate directory and when it is ready, the index file will be redirected to it. This way, the old links will not be broken.

Thanks, WhoDo.

[Flash]

I'd just like to say that weird color combinations such as blue or red characters on a black or dark background are nearly impossible for me to read. I usually won't even try. If you are young you won't know what I'm talking about. You'll have to take my word for it until you get older. Stick with dark characters on a light background

[eob]

Can someone contact the person who made that Puppy screenshot posted above?

[Fossil]

Flash said

"I'd just like to say that weird color combinations such as blue or red characters on a black or dark background are nearly impossible for me to read. I usually won't even try. If you are young you won't know what I'm talking about. You'll have to take my word for it until you get older. Stick with dark characters on a light background."

I agree wholeheartedly with Flash. For those who suffer from any form of diminished vision, dark and closely hued colour schemes can be a nightmare to read. Clarity is paramount. Speaking as someone who until just a short while ago had cataracts in both eyes, believe me, I know!

[alienjeff]

I'd just like to say that weird color combinations such as blue or red characters on a black or dark background are nearly impossible for me to read.

Me three! When I am faced with such pages, my weapon of choice is elinks-0.11.1, which fortunately was available as a pupget through my Puppy v2.11 installation (elinks-0.11.1js1.5 is also available). It would be nice not to have to resort to that, though, and miss out on all the graphic wizardry that went into the page design.

So although my eyesight isn't what it used to be, I'm happy to report to you all that "the other two things" that eventually fail are both still working to spec.

-aj

[klu9]

I already moaned about this issue of Puppy's disorganized web presence in the comments thread of the infamous issue of DistroWatch Weekly.

It isn't just the puppylinux.org portal that's problematic. The wiki has little organization; navigation buttons (About, Beginners etc.) are on some pages but not others. The murga-linux.com forum could be more usefully divided. And there's puppyos.com to contend with. Or is that puppylinux.com?? The video demos are on rhinoweb.us, ISOs may or may not be hosted at puppyisos.org or puptrix.de or puppyfiles.us.

In short, it's a horrific mess.

It's great that so many people are willing to contribute in terms of offering hosting etc to Puppy. But it's still a horrific mess.

eob's octane site seems a huge improvement: even the forum is a unified part of the site, with the overall site look & site navigation not being lost.

Ideally, all the Puppy sites would be unified into one well-organized and updated site. ONE! That would mean Barry's (two) too.

I don't know if all that would ever be possible, but a man can dream, can't he?


PS I just remembered: the latest Puppy news is on Barry's blog, which has yet another look & feel, and completely separate navigation system. And a tendency to move, too.
---

on the issue of colours, I too hate those awful combinations. One of the reason's I love being an Opera fanboy: Shift + G ("User Mode") to see the page the way I can read it.

[klu9]

also you have to register separately for the forums & the wiki. A definite useability no-no.

And in my case I couldn't even use the same name , because that wiki wants a very specific format for the name.

[eob]

I can guarantee that if you guys sort out the web and make it more Google friendly, there's a huge chance you can double the uptake of Puppy. The only way I found this place was via Damn Small Linux!

[GuestToo]

a Google search for puppylinux finds http://www.puppylinux.org/ as the first hit ... at the top of the puppylinux.org page is a link to the forums

other hits on the same page: puppyos.com, puppylinux.com, goosee.com, wikipedia.org, distrowatch.com, pupweb.org, desktoplinux.com, puppyos.net, ibiblio.org, rhinoweb.us, murga-linux.com, lockergnome.com and even freshmeat.net

[GuestToo]

i notice it says on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppy_Linux

Puppy is based on ROX Desktop, a desktop environment.

Puppy does not use the Rox desktop environment, Puppy just uses ROX-Filer as a file manager (Rox also provides the desktop wallpaper and icons, but that is not the same thing as the ROX Desktop desktop environment, which is equivalent to JWM, Icewm, Gnome, KDE, etc etc)

there are other minor errors ... for example, "Puppy version 2.14 (86.5 MB) is the latest version of the distribution"

oh well, not really important

[Béèm]

I have mentioned it before.
The multi-lingual aspect is important and to make a web site and then have to translate is quite a job.

There is a framework which permits development of a website to support a product like this in a multi-lingual way.
Needed are translatators to translate the different documents/pages.

I do this for another product on a volontary base from French to English and Dutch.

The framework is: http://www.joomla.org, but anyone is free to do the appraoch he finds best.