[Edu-sig] re: Slighly OT: O'Reilly article [other resources for newbies?]

[Rob]

I've looked at PerlMonks before, although it's been a while.

As far as successfully automating Useless Python goes, I've got a few
general thoughts. My vision:

- Newbie (or non-newbie) decides to upload a source file and fills out a
form to do so. Form elements would be the author's name, a description of
the program (brief), and a field to browse their hard drive to select the
file. An administrative email is sent to the small team of volunteers who
approve/deny the submission. Denial would only occur in cases in which the
submission is wildly irrelevant (such as it not being a Python program in
any way).

- For browsing files to rummage through, which is currently done by clicking
on the numbered pages, I would like to add options. This could mean
searching for keywords or modules used in the source files, which might make
Useless Python a truly powerful repository. Alternatively, we could have a
database of general categories that source files fit into (such as "GUI",
"socket", etc., etc.), which is vastly more limited, but probably easy
enough to implement.

There appear to be a number of web hosting services available where we would
have access to any number of resources, and costs appear to be
non-prohibitive with some Python-friendly hosts.

Any thoughts?

Rob

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Danny Yoo [mailto:dyoo@hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu]
> Sent: Monday, October 21, 2002 5:03 PM
> To: Rob
> Cc: edu-sig@python.org
> Subject: RE: [Edu-sig] re: Slighly OT: O'Reilly article [other resources
> for newbies?]
>
>
>
>
> > I feel that navigation is the second weakest element of the site, and
> > have been giving a lot of thought to how to address the matter without
> > messing up the experience too much. The site's single greatest point of
> > weakness is that it lacks automation and is maintained manually by one
> > person. Automating the site could well be the means to resolving both
> > the navigation and management issues.
>
> I wish I knew more Zope to help out here; I'm still trying to get my head
> around it.  But from what I understand, perhaps Zopifying Useless Python
> may help with the content-management side of things!
>
>
>
> > The tricky part is that the original design concept was indeed for the
> > user to rummage through the randomly-ordered source files. This didn't
> > seem as problematic when there were only a few dozen source files, but
> > with the next major update the number should increase to well over 200.
> > At this size, I can certainly understand the frustrations expressed by a
> > few. (Fewer than half a dozen to date, including today's comments.)
>
> I know it's heretical to look at what the Perl folks are doing, but I
> can't help it.  *grin*
>
> The Perl folks have a site called http://www.perlmonks.org that combines
> aspects of both the Tutor mailing list and Useless Python.  It's a large
> repository for Perl knowledge.
>
> It might be nice to see what things perlmonks is doing right, and see if
> we can apply those things to Useless Python.
>
>