Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website
I do agree that we should limit the fractured nature of things as they have been. The LS 'scene' is so small now that it simply can't support having content spread all over the internet. Combining efforts into one location, or as few locations as possible, will help a little I think.
Sorry Jugg.. I've been so busy the last few weeks. I admit that I didn't even get a chance to read your entire email, so I hadn't responded.
You're right that we already have a lot of the content that needs to exist... it's just too spread out. There are so few new users coming to LS now.. we need to do whatever we can to make the small amount of information available easy to find for them.
As for the content request that was put out.. I guess I hadn't made it clear to the-golem that I was intending to write and combine a lot of the content for the site myself. Preferably I was going to get as much content onto the site as possible, and then others could feel free to edit or add as they see fit afterward. So, don't take the request for content negatively.. I think we're ok there, right now.
Reinventing the wheel is another thing that has produced a lot of nothing in the LiteStep community.
completely agree here. You and I have both seen past failures, and would rather not see them repeated. My thought was never to restart anything from scratch.. other than maybe the web site design that the-golem has been working on and other basic things like this forum. My idea was to combine as much of the existing community knowledge and existing content into one spot where users new and old can find it. Hopefully then this will help to spur new activity, even if it's at a very small level. I don't know what the future of LS is... it might be to die off sooner than later. But I really don't want to see it die off prematurely and due to unnecessary fracturing or stagnation (like having ls-themes, lsml, and other resources all disappearing as they did). So, all I want to do is try and counteract that.
I'm not sure what to do about the modules yet. It's definitely a requirement that a better site than modules.shellfront.org or ls.greywool.com exists, so we'll certainly need to create a new site for the modules. I think that we should make it a goal to sort through the modules and pull the ones out that we know don't work in XP or later, or the current LS. The module list is full of old modules that are unusable now, and this helps no one (they can always be placed into an 'archive' so they're still accessible). If anyone has suggestions for a system we can use where the module zips can be uploaded, managed, browsed, meta data like description, version, and release dates can be entered, etc... let us know.
Right now, we need to get the-golem's site moved to ls.info... or whatever .tld is being used. My preference is that we come up with a way for all of the sites (.com/.net/.info) to show the same web site.. using whatever method works for us, but obviously this relies on Jugg agreeing. Once the site is moved, we can start adding content. Light-weight/simple CMS options are being looked at, so we can easily add and edit content , but we may just use static files. It's not as if we're building a huge site here.
State of the Step 2011