Page 3 - Thoughts on idea for developer site

PS Sepodati - is your homepage down or is it me!?!

I'm personally not a fan of any of the CMS systems out right now. They tend to be top heavy and have a really 'cheap' feel to them (since they are all the same). I pretty much figured we'd just do it all from scratch and then perhaps release the source code for it (assuming that we feel its secure enough). But our primary goal is to get an interactive site that's designed specifically for the content of the site. Constant development of the site shouldn't really be necessary. I can see adding features as we get ideas, but devoting a staff to improvements is not something that should be to high a priority assuming we do it right the first time.

As for what AlCapone said, I agree 90% with what he had to say. But open source-esque sites shouldn't need anymore then the few core people be to constant contributors. Part of the community idea is that people can help out when they want, or not at all if they don't. Enforcing a strict corporate hierarchy of people and putting pressure on people to develop content makes for a mad community and rushed tutorials, but letting everything go anarchy-style will lead to poor quality content and random update patterns (if any at all). We need to just settle somewhere in the middle.

And of course, any money that might be made (though anything beyond covering the cost of the server is not in the plan -- and even that is on down the road) would be shared with the community either in the format of money to contributors, or some other way to benefit the whole community instead of just a few people.

This site will certainly have somewhat strict rules as to how good a tutorial has to be before it gets posted. We can't be giving bad or inconsistent advice to people.

Oh yeah, and perhaps we shouldn't blatantly rip off devshed's name ;p. Let's try to think of something else.

devgarage.com ???

JD

About the name of the site, I'm proposing these:

learn2dev.com
devtut.com
dev3lopers.com

and the one I like the most:

develoVers.com

I think develovers.com is a good name, easy to remember and with an implicit meaning: this site is made by and for people who (I hope) love to develope code. Also, it has a pronuntiation similar to "developers".

I will be posting some more in a while :-)


Have a nice day!
P.S.: no, it's not mandatory the name has the "dev" substring in it. :P

Hmm I don't think we should include the word "devshed" in the name - it's too likely to annoy DevShed and get us into trouble. I'm not sure we need to carry the origins of the site in the name either. To me it simpl needs to imply as many of the following things about the site:

* For developers/hackers
* Free financially & in terms of code reuse etc.
* Community led
* Open submission

Something like the "Open Developer House" would imply mose of those, but it's not very catchy. It's tricky because any catchy name leaves most of the implications out : / CodeAide? lol

And I agree with JonLed... I don't think we should use a blog for the site, and you don't need a rigid heirachy to develop such a project. Given a few core developers, the project will progress quite smoothly.

Because I do a lot of Windows development, one of the sites I like to go to is www.codeproject.com. The reason I bring it to your attention is that I really like the layout of the site and its content.

http://www.codeproject.com/shell/namespcextguide1.asp
At this link for example you have an article, a source download, a binary download, a table of contents, screen shots and a forum about the article at the bottom of the page.

Here's a few things I like about the site:

• It has a general forum like DevShed (The Lounge, Question Time).
• They have a good newsletter sent out on a regular basis.
• The ads aren't intrusive and deal heavily with programming stuff (ie: no casinos).
• Very good guidelines for users to submit articles: http://www.codeproject.com/info/submit.asp
• Most importantly - tons of useful content especially the articles.

The downside is it is heavily weighted towards the Microsoft world. If you could create a site like this for Open Source, I think it would be very popular. If you go to the "About" link, you can see that this site is run by 4 guys using 4 machines.

Darryl

Yeah...it expired and i never reregistered it. It was too hard to spell out to people everytime i wanted to give out my email address.

I'm just working with GeekPal.com now.

---John Holmes...

On the CMS issue- I really like the everything engine that runs www.perlmonks.org. It does alot, runs in mod_perl and is really good for helping people share source code and tutorials. It has a really cool and flexible moderation system, and has beacoup user customization features.

I personally think a premade discussion/bulletin board system is the wrong choice- a lot of customization would need to be done to get it to the point where it was functional as a developers tool of real worth.

And stay away from phpnuke. Have you ever looked at that code? It's terrible, both for security and efficiency.

Just an idea on names, but how about something like:
www.opendev.com
www.opendevelopment.com
www.devsource.com
www.openwebsource.com
www.opendevsource.com

And a question:
Do you plan on storing the code in a cvs-type library?

I'm sort of rethinking about making this a sourceforge site. This has grown beyond what I had envisioned in the first place for the site (as far as how much everybody is willing and wanting to work on the project).

Code project does have a nice layout for the site (how things flow). Its at the very least a good place to start getting ideas.

I like telex4's idea of something along the lines of "Open Developer House". If anybody can think of a domain to go with it that's shorter then opendeveloperhouse.com ;p, feel free to mention it.

The CMS perlmonk thing wont even be an option if we use sourceforge because they wouldn't let us run anything mod_perl.

Of the domains Onslaught listed, only these two are actually available:
www.openwebsource.com
www.opendevsource.com

And they are my least favorite of the 5 he listed ;p.


That's what I meant by 'top heavy' . It even make me sick to listen to a p2 200mhz development machine i used to use try to load phpnuke. You could actually hear all 53 inefficient mysql queries crunch (and that's not an joke, there were actually 53 queries done for the front page to load)


I don't think it would be to hard to sync it with the site's user database (so the rest of the site is interactive). Developing one of those from scratch would add about 400% to what would be needed to develop the base site ;p.

If we do it on sourceforge I'd imagine so. It really wouldn't be worth setting up cvs if we're on a private server because code development beyond the initial roll out of the site would probably be pretty slow.

sourcewares.com

ok, forum is cool and all that, but what do you say if we make a get-together on msn, aim or irc at the same time to discuss things in 'real life'? May be even today... say around 13:00 GMT? I am flexible, who has free time and when?

As in hosting it with sourceforge to let people work on the code base, and then moving the "live" site to your own servers, or still on sourceforge?

Mind if I interject here?

My name is Randy Cosby. I founded DevShed in 1997. I would like to address a couple of the comments that have been made here about DevShed.

First, I need to apologize for not being more involved here. I am not only an owner in Developer Shed, I also help run InfoWest, and ISP (my paying job). I take care of much of the "business" side of DevShed as well as working to get ad/sponsorship money to keep us afloat. As you can imagine in today's market, this is not an easy thing to do. DevShed has one full time employee right now (Lucas) who handles everything from site development to customer web development, system admin, etc. A year ago we had 6.

I'm also Vice President of InfoWest, a regional ISP. DevShed spun off from InfoWest in 1999. InfoWest is my paying job.

I'll try to participate more in the day-to-day of DevShed.

First, a few comments about our articles and content.

1. We pay for most of our articles. We're only able to pay a couple hundred bucks each at the most. I wish we could pay more. Our budgets have been cut way back as revenues have shrunk. We purchase as many good articles as we can.

2. Good programmers are not always good writers (nor am I). I get at least one email inquiry a week from a potential author. I'm blown away when it's obvious that many can't even spell. We don't have the resources to edit, spell check, revise, etc. The authors we do publish take care of that before we get the articles.

3. Good authors and programmers are very busy. They need to take whatever paying job comes along, and article writing doesn't pay very well. Of the proposed new articles we agree to purchase, over half are never completed. Most of the remainder are not completed on time.

What about free content?

Good quality, interesting free content is welcome. If you want to offer some, please email me. I'll work harder to get back to you and communicate better. Please spell check your email before you send it to me.

Why are you doing this?

I love it or I'm crazy. I have no fantasies of doing an IPO, selling out for millions of dollars, or getting rich off this. I'm losing a lot of money on this, and expect it will stay that way for a long time. I want to be able to provide good jobs for talented people in my community through the companies I own, stay debt free, and help support open source development.


Why don't you add _____ to your site?

We'd love to add all kinds of things like a code repository, documentation library, list archives and more. We're limited in our time, money and other resources. We'll try to do better. If you have something to contribute, let us know.

Why should I support DevShed? What's in it for me?

We've paid to develop this site, bring in good quality ariticles and authors, keep ugly advertising to the minimum all while struggling through this poor economy. We've never asked for donations or subscription fees. We've paid for our own bandwith, ad serving, etc. The support and participation in the site has been great, and that's all we ask. If you have something more to give, I'm greatful. I wish I had more to give in return.

Why don't you make all this open source

We use as much open source as we can, but we do have to pay our bills. Our authors and employees have families too, and deserve to be paid for the work they do. If you're willing to contribute something to DevShed under an open source license, we're willing to work with you. We don't intend to be a charity, nor expect you to give anything.

I give up on DevShed. Goodbye

I hope we could be of some help. We'll try to be here and do the best we can for as long as we can. Thanks for you what you have done.

Take care, have a great new year. I appreciate your frank feedback.

I do not think anyone here was going to join that new developing team because they do not like DevShed. Guys just want to have new experience, something to add to their portfolio, something to point and say "yep, I helped create it".

DevShed has been, still is, and, odds are, will be, g-r-e-a-t source of information.

Nobody is kissing goodbye to this place (I know I am not), and if you want to read 'frank' feedbacks read thousand-something positive posts about the place, rather then few where we discuss how its possible to improve such community.

Randy, in other words, if someone will send you well writen article about web developing and up to date, your team will publish it, is that correct?