Naming the modules; Mailing lists

[Steven E. Brenner]

Hi Georg,

  First, just a general request -- could people reply _just_ to the list
(rather than to both the originator of the message AND to the list)?
While it isn't that tough to deal with the duplicate mails, it is a bit of
a pain, especially in my unfortunate current computing environment.


> > A handful of new suggestions:
> > 
> > - "Tersify" the Bio::UnivAln description.  Right now there are a lot
> > of long sentences and unnecessary exclamation points.  While I understand
> > and agree the intent (hey: this is really cool!), it is difficult to read.
> 
> will modify this soon, though I believe ppl can just scan the page
> for the information they want - I they're not interested, they'll move on.

But that's just the point!  People will scan, and will skip over all of
the nifty features just because there's too much verbiage surrounding
them.


> [lots of stuff ... deleted]
> All done. 

Looks great.  The text for the lists, in particular, is fine.

> In general, though, I think we shouldn't spend more time on this,
> improving WWW pages is a bottomless pit :-)


Well, a certain level of savviness is necessary, but I think we're nearing
a point where these modules look like they're professional.



> Majordomo automatically tells subscribers how to get off; those that we move
> from your list to vsns-bcd-perl-announce get the advice to send email to me; I 
> can append such an advice to each message sent via that list.

Ok.  Didn't realize that majordomo sent both the intro message _and_ the
'how to get of the list' message.


> > Also, can you put an X-URL: header on the lists, pointing to the lists
> > page?
> 
> Majordomo can do this, but I need to find out how. Majordomo can also prefix
> Subject lines w/ ``Bioperl:'', have an X-Unsubscribe, etc... 
> This is another bottomless pit: So much that could be done and so little 
> time :-/  (btw, the guy who maintains our majordomo is
> working on a WWW-Interface to all this admin stuff.)

I have found that for even a small list with sporadic postings, it doesn't
take much for most of the traffic to be 'unsubscribe me please' or 'where
is the web archive?'  Setting up these features is a one-time job, and I
think we agree that they're good in the long run!


> > > > - Why don't you use index.html as the default welcome page on your site?
> > > > index.html is the standard default page!   I do think that the mirror is
> > > 
> > > Well, changing this would take a long time ! Just think of ``welcome.html''
> > > as a friendly message: ``You're welcome to browse here''. Psychology, heh :-)
> > 
> > Why would it take a long time?  Couldn't you just make a symbolic link
> > from index.html to welcome.html, as a simple hack to effect this?
> 
> If we present stuff offline on our multimedia PC, every symbolic link
> is one too much !

Huh?  Why is the symbolic link a problem?  And what does an offline
multimedia PC have to do with this anyway?



> Maybe I can find time over the weekend to retry this - but I need to make
> one thing sure: Do you agree w/ the recommandations at
> http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/Perl/module_mechanics.html ?
> I cannot afford spending time on this and discovering later that it's
> not the right way to do it.
> [ ] agree [ ] don't agree, ______________________________________

I don't know what you mean by the 'recommendations'.  He just gives some
suggestions about how to go about building these things.  The directions
there seem reasonable, though those in man ExtUtils::MakeMaker are the
ones I would go by.


> > >       http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/bcd/Perl/Bio/welcome.html
> > Chop off the welcome.html, as discussed above
> 
> I will, since you really really insist on this... :-)
> But I believe we spend too much time on such details - it's just not worth it !
> Think of it this way: If our code is good, ppl will use it
> even if our presentation is just 95%-optimized !

Ahh, but the URL is also part of our user interface -- and a pretty
substantial one! :)  It seems to me that choping the welcome.html and
adding the symbolic link would be easy.