Hey, here's a neat app I just discovered five minutes ago via POTD: http://potd.redsymbol.net/?p=dog Cool! It's working for me already :)
On Wednesday 05 July 2006 02:46 pm, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: > the bottom of the p.d.o pages provide a variety of links, some of > which actually go upstream, and that's probably where the real use > is. [snip] MAybe there's a way to grep the > p.d.o pages for useful links if they occur? just thought. That's a really good idea. I could make it so that a script would scrape the p.d.o page for the new package each hour. Andrew, can you point out a p.d.o page or pages that contain links like that? The few I looked at did not really contain any ([2], for example) I think one way to generalize the issue is, how can I (as the POTD visitor/user) learn or experience more about this package that intrigues me? It's a little tricky because the answer to that question depends on (a) the package and (b) the user. Take the package "dog", above, as an example. (It's like cat, but can fetch a file via http and do other tricks.) I read the description, and immediately understood what it could do for me. I really didn't need any more background information. Compare this with the ethereal package, whose description I'll paste here: "Ethereal is a network traffic analyzer, or "sniffer", for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. A sniffer is a tool used to capture packets off the wire. Ethereal decodes numerous protocols" Imagine I'm a user who sees this, has never used packet sniffers, but is technically inclined in a way that I'm curious about them. I might want to know about what sorts of things you can do by looking at network traffic, what protocols are used in what situations, how hard or easy it is to get up to speed on using this tool, what similar network analysis tools might exist. Or maybe I just have a general sense that this tool is part of a subject I would like to know more about. Interestingly, the Wikipedia web page for ethereal [1] is just about perfect for all that. In particular, most of the jargon words have links to whole pages elaborating on them. Many popular apps will have such WP pages; I have no idea what fraction of less-than-famous packages will. The ideal, I think, would be if I could put a "Learn more..." link below the package description, which would magically take the user somewhere that s/he could learn about the wider context and connections of the package. Perhaps I could make POTD discover any Wikipedia page for the app, and use that as the link. Thoughts, anyone? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereal_%28software%29 [2] http://packages.debian.org/stable/web/drupal -- Peace, Aaron Maxwell - http://redsymbol.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
