On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 2:31 PM, Rob Weir <robw...@apache.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Juergen Schmidt <jogischm...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Am Freitag, 23. November 2012 um 18:26 schrieb Rob Weir:
>>> Currently our website has a header, controlled by
>>> ooo-site/brand.mdtext, that we use to promote special events and
>>> announcements. This header shows up on every page on the website,
>>> except for wiki and other non-static web pages.
>>>
>>> This header is our single most effective way to promote things. It
>>> gets 750K+ views per day. This is far more than our blog, Twitter,
>>> mailing lists, Facebook, etc., combined.
>>>
>>> However, this position currently can carry only a single message at a
>>> time. So when we have several messages in quick succession, we need
>>> to halt the old announcement and replace it with a new one. For
>>> example, when I added the marketing volunteers, I had to stop the call
>>> for QA volunteers. Juergen has a call for translators coming, and
>>> that will likely cause us to halt the marketing call for volunteers.
>>> And we want to put up a FOSDEM call for papers soon as well.
>>>
>>> So the way we're using this it is all or nothing. A message either
>>> gets 750K views a day or it gets nothing.
>>>
>>> I think this is not optimal. It is natural for us to have several
>>> ongoing promotions, and it would be sufficient if we could more
>>> effectively share that space.
>>>
>>> One idea might be to not have a static message in brand.mdtext, but
>>> encode several messages in a Javascript file, a JSON object that lists
>>> all the current messages along with their weighting. Then we could
>>> have our website header show a random message, respecting the weights.
>>> A high weighted message would get more views than a lower weighted
>>> one. But even 10% of 750K is a lot more views that our blog will
>>> receive.
>>>
>>> Does this make sense?
>> for me it makes a lot of sense and we try to use the page hits in the most
>> efficient way.
>>>
>>> Any other ideas? Any ideas on how to implement this?
>>>
>>> Another idea is to allow graphical as well as the current text-only
>>> promotions. A banner graphic can be even more effective.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> no real idea how we can achieve it, the CMS is limited as far as I
>> understood but Joe is probably open for improvements. I am a poor web
>> developer ;-)
>>
>
> We don't have PHP at runtime, but we do have perl at page build time,
> e.g.,:
> https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/ooo/ooo-site/trunk/lib/view.pm
>
> But hard-coding at build time doesn't give us rotation, unless we have
> a cron job or something that marks all the files as dirty every 5
> minutes or so. I don't think we want that.
>
> It might be worth looking at how the ASF home page handles its
> "featured projects": http://www.apache.org/
>
> Or we can just do with Javascript. It is easy enough to make the
> experience for those without JS to be the same as what they see today,
> a single hard-coded message.
>
> -Rob
>
javascript with some random selection is certainly the path of least
resistence. And, how are folks downloading OpenOffice unless they use
JS? Well, they can, but I would bet more than 90% of users have JS
enabled.
I thought at first you mean like a continuously streaming banner which
you can do with a java applet, but that leads to other issues.
JS is good...it's uncomplicated for future maintenance as well.
>> Juergen
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> -Rob
>>
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MzK
“How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world
she wants, rather than to create it herself?”
-- Anais Nin
