Month: July 2005

First let me say, thanks for the welcome lisa 🙂

I received a few comments on my blog, in irc and an email or three on the redesign already. Most of them were very encouraging and I thank everyone for the kind words. I can’t take credit for the design though, that was done by Aaron Shi. Gentoo sponsored a contest to redesign the site. There were five contestants that were picked by the Gentoo developers and Aarons’ design won the poll that was posted to the forum for the Gentoo user community to vote on. His design won by 46% and the runner up had 20%.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-227589.html

My role in this is simply to implement the new design in the XSL template that powers the Gentoo web site. While I’m doing that I’m also going to make the XSL a little more friendly to administer so that future Gentoo devs will have an easier time making changes. The current XSL evolved over the last few years in an ad-hoc manner and this time around it will be planned out.

Some of the emails and comments on irc were suggestions for how the design should be changed. I have no power over that. I was told up front before being offered dev status that I cannot change the design in any way other than usability issues (accessibility, cross-browser support, etc..). Besides, I’m not an artist. I can’t even draw stick people without a ruler and I’m slightly color blind. 😉

If you want to give your ideas and suggestions please join the www-redesign@gentoo.org mailing list by sending an empty email to www-redesign-subscribe@gentoo.org and send your suggestions and ideas there. Aaron and the powers that be are subscribed to the list.

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I got a lot of work done on the kernel configuration guide today. I should have a first draft for the interested kernel devs to look at in a day or two so keep your eyes peeled for it. bug #94955

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I wrote a new FAQ in the Forum. It covers the RSYNC_EXCLUDEFROM variable in make.conf. We get a lot of new threads started asking this question and it isn’t in the portage man page so a FAQ was in order. Hopefully this will cut down on all the duplicate threads.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-2551222.html

My blog is online at last. Thanks dsd for setting it up.

For those of you that don’t know me I’m a new developer working on the website redesign. I’m also contributing to the GDP a little and I’m a Global Moderator on the Forum. My devspace is still under construction and I’m not sure when I’ll have a front page up and running but I do have some screenshots of the preliminary redesign uploaded:

http://dev.gentoo.org/~curtis119/screenshots/redesign1.png
http://dev.gentoo.org/~curtis119/screenshots/redesign2.png
http://dev.gentoo.org/~curtis119/screenshots/redesign3.png
http://dev.gentoo.org/~curtis119/screenshots/redesign4.png
http://dev.gentoo.org/~curtis119/screenshots/redesign5.png
http://dev.gentoo.org/~curtis119/screenshots/redesign6.png
http://dev.gentoo.org/~curtis119/screenshots/redesign9.png

I have the entire main www.gentoo.org and the forums set up on a mirror here in my house that is fully functional and uses the new design. It runs off of my DSL line so I don’t want to make it publicly accessible. infra has set up a test box for me to use so once I have everything cleaned up and migrated to that box I’ll post a link.

Ioannis Aslanidis (Deathwing00) and I wrote a new document for the Forum, forum-guide.xml. I have a preview on my dev space in html format. It’s waiting for a directory under /proj to be set up before I can put it up live on www.gentoo.org

http://dev.gentoo.org/~curtis119/forum-guide.html

I’m also in the process of writing a kernel-configuration guide as requested by dsd. I’ve made great progress but still have a ways to go before it can go live. Hopefully it will help kernel newbies to understand the ins and outs of configuring a kernel and cut down on all the duplicate posts on the forums and in #gentoo on freenode. I’m sure NeddySeagoon will be happy to hear this 😉