[Cu-wireless] NG article

[by way of Illustrious niteshad <niteshad at whopper.de>]

>Okay, so Sascha and I agreed a while back that making the site >updatable
>would do wonders.  Mark felt the same, although he had reservations
>about
>making that "updatability" site-wide (he suggested a sandbox within >the
>current site).  I'll allow for the possibility that opinions have
>changed,
>and now's the time to voice discordant tones.


While my position regarding the design of the site has not changed
(including the vicious color scheme) I would like to clarify my position. 

First of all, I am in agreement with Chase, Dave and Sascha that the site
should be easy to edit and update.  I personally would like a Wiki area,
primarily because I favor interactive websites and am sick of all of the
totally linear weblogs and comment forums out there.  Wiki and Wi-Fi are both
technologies which expand the amount of power (and responsibility) of the user;
they are egaltarian, distributive and anarchic technologies allowing
individuals to forge new connnections in the web and in the community, which is why
I suspect that so many of the Community Wireless sites have embraced wiki. 
I think we should have one, if only for solidarity.

However, that said, I _definitely_ don't like the idea of the entire site
being wiki-driven.  I just got done reading the logs from my router today;
just for today there were over 300 separate instances of someone banging on
either port 80 or port 21.  Usually its an order of magnitude less, or so,
but I digress.  There are certain aspects of the site that are largely
archival in nature, such as the network design, our statement of purpose and the
_MediaGeek_ feature.  These are and should be static pages.  

The visual metaphor that I have in my mind for the design of the site is
main section which is laid out with all the professional precision of the
conductive tracings on a motherboard; from this a frilly, viney unruley weed
garden is growing off in back.  That way we look pro to the people who are
into that sort of thing (perhaps they might give us money or hardware :)  and
convey our healthy sense of community at the same time.  

best regards and warm wishes for a very happy, healthy and safe New Year.

Mark Lenigan


I think that we should avoid using 

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