[SGVLUG] Website / Mailing List Updates, Ideas

[James McDuffie]

tl;dr:
1. Lets go ahead and use the Github website and help me improve it
2. Lets get some traction on the mailing list/forum work

WEBSITE DECISIONS
-----------------
At the April SGVLUG meeting last Thursday we discussed the candidate 
replacement user group website I announced on this mailing list last week:
http://sgvlug.github.com/

The following is from the my recollection of the discussion we had. Let 
me know if I am misremembering things.

I think everyone was in agreement that using Github to host the main 
"landing page" for the user group was a good idea. The one dissension 
was related to it not being as easy to update the website from mobile 
devices, since you need to use git versus a web form. However, a 
counterpoint was that those who are actually putting out the effort 
should be the ones steering the implementation. Also Michael Starch 
volunteered to help me with updating and posting to the website.

That being said I think we should go ahead with adopting the Github page 
at some near future date. Recently I went through and dumped all the 
meeting announcements from the Caltech calendar and added them as pages 
on the website. However, I am limited by what content was available and 
so some pages just say: "monthly meeting."

I think the website is good to go, my only remaining reservation is that 
the fonts and margin widths the template designer chose are a bit too 
big on smaller devices such as smart phones. But this is just a matter 
of tweaking the CSS.

WEBSITE HELP NEEDED
-------------------

So in list form, here is the website work I plan to do and would not 
mind getting help doing:
1. Add missing content to meeting notices based on mailing list 
discussions at the time
2. Fix the CSS to look better across a broad range of devices. Luckily 
the template uses LESS CSS (http://lesscss.org/) which makes this much 
easier to maintain.
3. Add links to (or copies of) presentation material: slides, videos, 
etc, websites

With these changes the main website will be sort of an archive of the 
group at a gross level.

MAILING LIST
------------

I keep saying "main website" because we also discussed what is to be 
done with the fabled Drupal website. The main hold up on that having 
been Matt's time coupled with his desire to implement a mailing 
list/forum component.

We do need to move the mailing list elsewhere because:
1. Michael Proctor-Smith who currently hosts it at his house desires this
2. We have had drop outs in the past due to power and human error that 
caused messages to bounce from this arrangement

I did a bit of research to see if there was a simple way to host a 
mailing list for free while still maintaining the current mailto 
address. But, I could not find anything at that price point.

The mailing list will have to be hosted somewhere and someone will have 
to shell out for the hosting wherever it lives. There are possibilities 
for moving the mailing list to say Google Groups or Nabble, etc, but 
those would mean everyone would have to post to a new mailing list 
address. I do not think anyone wants that, I certainly don't.

Now coming back to the promised Drupal website. I think the 
forum/mailing list integration would be a cool feature. And we could 
host this at say, forum.sgvlug.org or some similar domain name. Matt has 
said that he has talked to Paul (sorry don't remember the last name) and 
he has volunteered hosting this.

My only request is that enough group members have access behind the 
scenes so that there is no single point failure. If possible we should 
have sort of redundancy set up.

DRUPAL
------
Matt, Miguel, if you do not have time to finish your implementation, 
then maybe you can post what you have so far to, say Github? We can 
certainly set up a repository for that.

MAILING LIST ARCHIVE
--------------------
Our current mailing list archive goes back to 2005, there is a wealth of 
information there. Although I was not able to find a place to host a 
free live mailing list, I did come across some great places to keep 
backup archives.

http://gmane.com/ has 13k + websites that it archives and they appear to 
allow you to send them your curring mbox formatted archive to include.

We could use this service to have a backup archive for all existing 
messages and any future ones for the new incarnation of the list. And 
yes they do respect the X-No-Archive header value for the privacy minded.

APOLOGIES
---------
Sorry for the tl;dr, just trying to capture everything as best I can.