Open Uru Site Styling and Organization (was Wiki Main Page)

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Mac_Fife
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Re: Open Uru Site Styling and Organization (was Wiki Main Pa

Post by Mac_Fife »

Nalates wrote:You know I was teasing.
Oh, sure :D But seriously, it'd be something to think about for some fan sites, or even as a mini-site. Mobile accessible content could give a site "an edge", especially if it had content targeted at things like iMyst and iRiven.

What do you think JW? A mobile.openuru.org in the future?
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Re: Open Uru Site Styling and Organization (was Wiki Main Pa

Post by JWPlatt »

Funny how ideas evolve.

Mobile might make a lot more sense if we had a mobile product, such as an Uru client for the iPhone. :D

I happened to ask Christian Wallther about a web port of zik clock a few weeks ago. His project is open source. There are other web tools for portal predictors, but his is very nice. It has not been ported to the web yet and he's busy with other things. I put the web zik clock project on my personal list of things to do for OpenUru.org site development. Naturally, it would need it's own mobile page.

This could be a pilot project for mobile.OpenUru.org. Any volunteers?
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Re: Open Uru Site Styling and Organization (was Wiki Main Pa

Post by Mac_Fife »

After reading Nalates' earlier post, I read the article on the canonical link relation in Google's Webmaster Central. From my reading, I think the only way it'd really help us would be for the main site pages where it's possible that inbound links may be e.g. either http://www.openuru.org/index.php or http://openuru.org/index.php.

I don't expect many people, if any, will reference the forums using the root path rather than via the subdomain (since the former was never really advertised).

I'm slightly averse to using things that aren't covered by W3C recommendations or the accepted RFCs. While these may be things that help Google's indexing (undoubtedly the major search engine to satisfy), do these do much for other search engines? It's probably too difficult to assess what the relative value is, but I'm guessing we're getting "down into the noise" here :? .
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Re: Open Uru Site Styling and Organization (was Wiki Main Pa

Post by Nalates »

The large search engines have said they are using them. So, the big 3, Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing, and their less known dataservices are on board.

I suppose I did not make it clear enough that canonical REL's were page specific. Many of the others are for things like next and previous buttons.

White the primary search position booster is incoming links, the internal links are right behind them. One only has to consider how ell and how fast blogs rank to see where in the scale of things search ranking algorithmic rely on internal links and, what I'll call, atomization of content - using class and tags to identify content.

Forums and Wiki's use different linking strategies. Wiki's have subject-content in more of the links. Forums start out with a subject orient link and then links within the content tend to go random. The result is that search engines like Wiki's better. So, the category names, section titles, and other part of the wiki should use keywords as much as possible. That is probably easier to change than to add REL's, titles, and other attributes to the links.

I'll reemphasize that much of placement is from micro-efforts that eventually add up. Here, at OU, one can only spend so much time working with adding micro-efforts that require modification to the code to create them. I can't give you my sense of what is important and worth effort, nor can I always you tell the relative importance of each item. I'm hoping you can get the easy ones. If you see adding one of these as too complex, I understand and most likely agree.
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Re: Open Uru Site Styling and Organization (was Wiki Main Pa

Post by Mac_Fife »

Most of the changes I plan on doing (for now at least) are done. One thing I've found though is that the left side of the Development menu page is largely duplicating the contents of the Projects and Resources wiki page. I don't mind a bit of overlap, especially if it helps get people to their destinations quicker, but it does present a bit of a "trap" from the point of view of making sure that both pages stay in step. The bigger issue that right now there isn't a whole lot of reason to link to the P & R page from the Development menu, as we currently do. Maybe it just needs a bit more on the "resources" side to give that wiki page some purpose?
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Re: Open Uru Site Styling and Organization (was Wiki Main Pa

Post by Marten »

Now that my interest has been re-piqued, I have to say that I liked your original thought that the projects page should be merged into the main page. 8-)

And I just dropped that opinion on JW ;)
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Re: Open Uru Site Styling and Organization (was Wiki Main Pa

Post by JWPlatt »

Reply sent - before I read your post, above. :lol:
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Re: Wiki Main Page

Post by Mac_Fife »

From way back on page 1 of this thread:
Nalates wrote:To complicate things, OU has pretty good search placement on open source Uru (#2) and open source Myst (#8). The OSU page is: Success Sooner Than Expected: Open Source Uru. The OSM page is: Forum Board Index.
A quick check on Google shows that we're currently placing #3, #4 and #5 for open source Uru, outplayed by mystonline.com and warcry.com, and #4 for open source Myst. A new term that we couldn't use until the official announcement is Open Source CWE and we're #3 and #4 for that, behind mystonline.com again and an unrelated sourceforge project. On cyanworlds.com engine we're #1, #4 and #5, bracketing a couple of pages from the Writers' site.

I think we can safely say we've benefitting from Nalates advice, so a "thank you" is in order :) .
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Re: Open Uru Site Styling and Organization (was Wiki Main Pa

Post by Marten »

Yes, thank you Nalates!

Mac, here's something I threw at JW late last night. He asked that I quote it here.
the "Projects and Resources" page should be made into a redundancy; I think all of its content should be on the Main Page of the wiki itself, because (a) there's not that much content, and (b) this information constitutes the main purpose to the site existing at all. As presently organized, the Main Page is entirely meta-content, and it isn't at all clear where the real focus of the site is meant to be. If OpenUru were an encyclopedia (like Wikipedia, or MystLore) then I could understand keeping the front page so generic. But it isn't. OpenUru has a mission. I think the front wiki page should embrace that mission.


Which, is really just me stepping up and saying I think you had a good idea. :)
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Re: Open Uru Site Styling and Organization (was Wiki Main Pa

Post by Mac_Fife »

The Projects and Resources page hasn't had the same styling love that some of the more front-end pages have, but what I could look at doing is dressing it up more and then setting it up to be transcluded into the Main page: That saves on some copying and keeps any existing links to the Projects and Resources page valid.
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