I think perhaps eventually we could move to something like this, but now is not the time. Though I have no way of verifying this, I would hypothesize that many more people come to the site to find out what sage is/what it can do for them than come to see "What's new with SAGE since last time I looked?" Our site is tailored very well towards the former, and I think that's where our emphasis should be for now. Its the one who aren't yet familiar with Sage whose attention we need to grab right away. When the latter becomes a more significant audience, then we should consider radically altering the main page, but for now I doubt we'd alienate many by having the latest news a click away. (Personally, I rarely visit the main page of sagemath.org--when I start typing "sage" in the browser bar "sagetrac" comes up first :-). I often send the sagemath.org link to others though.)
If anything, I think there should be fewer announcements on the front page. Right now the first "selling point" paragraph is over halfway down the main page because of all the one-liners. Because I can barely see them, my eye is not drawn to the attractive graphics and arguments below. I think the goal of the main site should be getting people to start reading starting with "Use SAGE for studying a huge range of mathematics..." and continuing all the way to the bottom 'till they leap out of their chair and exclaim "where can I get this NOW?" and we hit them with the download/public worksheet links. (Perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration, but hopefully you get my point.) Currently, we have SAGE: Open Source Mathematics Software <-- Perhaps "Open Source Mathematics Software" could be incorporated into the logo (on this page). This is also the title of the webpage, so I don't think much would be lost. "Building the Car Instead of Reinventing the Wheel" <-- one of my favorite quotes... Download Documentation <-- these certainly need to be prominent. Tutorial Support We are being slashdotted and being dugg! SAGE 2.8.15 has been released (December 3, 2007). SAGE Days 6 in Bristol, UK was a great success. ^^^ News is good, to tell people what's going on, and to give the (accurate) impression of an active and fast-moving project. However, if I don't yet know much about Sage (and I'm making a case that this should be the primary target audience of this page) it doesn't tell me much and slows me down (or even hijacks me) from reading the real meat below. Maybe one big announcement could be good, or maybe not even that (here). I would love for all this info to stay on the main page, just not get in the way of getting the message out of "what is Sage?". I can't believe I'm suggesting it, but perhaps we should consider adding some kind of a sidebar to the page? Of course, everything I'm saying here should be taken with a huge grain of salt, I am in no way a markiting expert and could be completely wrong about this. But I really think we should consider the audience of this front page. That being said, I think a blog is a great idea! Certainly subscribing to sage-devel to get an idea of what's going on with the Sage project is not for the casual user :-). - Robert On Dec 8, 2007, at 7:03 PM, Bobby Moretti wrote: > At the very least, I think it would be a good idea to use a content > management system for the website. > > The front page could be blog-like, containing mostly news, updates, > info, and releases. > > Then if someone has a personal blog entry that says something > interesting about Sage, we can just link to it from the front page as > a news story. This way everything would be archived, etc. > > -Bobby > > On Dec 8, 2007 6:59 PM, didier deshommes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> 2007/12/8, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >>> >>> Hi, >>> >>> My brother suggests that a "Sage blog" be somehow created (see >>> below). It's >>> a good idea. Any ideas about what this might entail? Weekly >>> developer >>> summaries? A "cool trick"? Little articles? Etc. I have >>> never blogged >> >> +1 >> This could also be good to announce new versions, improvements, >> papers >> written in Sage, etc. Developers blogging about Sage could be fun: it >> would expose how some other parts of the Sage code works (this would >> also help Bus Days). For example, when I wrote QDRF, I blogged about >> what one would need to do in order to implement (floating-point) >> fields in Sage since I had learned a great deal about this part of >> the >> code. >> >> Of course, the thing with blogging is time :) . If you're blogging, >> you're not writing code and sometimes you just can't afford that ;). >> >> didier >> >> >>> at all, but I know some of you (e.g., Martin Albrecht and Ondrej >>> Certik) >>> are old pros at blogging. Thoughts? >>> >>> >>> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- >>> From: Dennis Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>> Date: Dec 8, 2007 1:28 PM >>> Subject: blog and rss >>> To: William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>> >>> >>> William, >>> >>> Non-developer users of Sage might enjoy learning more about what is >>> going on in the Sage world. A blog would be a great way to do this. >>> You could post things like the AMS event, published articles, >>> news of >>> major changes in the software, upcoming cool new features, something >>> funny that is Sage related, a profile of someone who has >>> significantly >>> contributed to the software, a user profile, and so on. People >>> could >>> subscribe to it via email or RSS. You could use a free blog service >>> (webpress or blogspot or whatever) and use Google's free Feebburner >>> for the email subscription service for people to subscribe. >>> >>> http://www.mathworks.com/company/rss/index.html >>> >>> Google has a blog that they post to about once every three weeks >>> or so. >>> >>> Obviously making the software the best it can be is a bigger >>> priority, >>> but a blog could be useful at some point for keeping in touch with >>> people (reporters, users, fans). >>> >>> --Dennis >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> William Stein >>> Associate Professor of Mathematics >>> University of Washington >>> http://wstein.org >>> >>>> >>> >> >>> >> > > > > -- > Bobby Moretti > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
