A modern looking portal Was: Better Perl

[Greg McCarroll]

On Sun, Apr 06, 2008 at 09:24:05PM +0100, Jonathan Tweed wrote:
> 
> But enough talking. What can we do about it? Will The Perl Foundation  
> pay for new sites? If not, why not?
> 

  http://use.perl.org/articles/08/04/03/2019221.shtml

I 'spose you (someone) could put in a grant request along the lines
of,

  * the proposer from the perl community would,
    - find a CSS/HTML / Designer type to do the work
    - act as the 'customer'
  * the aim would be to create a new site prototype for a perl
    news/gateway site, the final design would be available to any of
    the existing perl sites or a new one.
  * the amount of the grant would be reserved mainly for the designer
    type person and for any expenses of the proposer.

( also if anybody does do this, can I have a request - the design
  should include some sort of common site-link bar near the top so that
  ideally all the major perl sites that exist could eventually include
  it to bring some sort of uniformity to the perl web experience )

Although to be honest I think this would be a piece of work that would
be a better fit for a company that wanted to sponsor something for
Perl and also had a great internal design team. I suspect that,

  http://www.rubyonrails.org/ [1]

was developed just this way by sombody inside 37 signals.

G.

[1] nice features of this site:
    
    - the colour fade at the top (don't stone me)
    - dynamic language (text) with big shiny icons
    - positive quote by an industry thought leader (ok get the stones
      ready)
    - Q & A approach for easy accessibility to information and my
      favourite ... logos :-)

ps  random thought: just by mentioning RoR i'm potentially raising the
    web programming vs. general advocacy debate. one interesting thing
    a perl news site could do for general advocacy is run a series of
    articles, where each one is a focus on a specific industry.

pps random thought 2: sometimes we just don't market community
    resources right. perlmonks can be very helpful to new people, yet
    we never hear of perl being congratulated for its 'free real time
    support'.