Home page is annoying

JonM posted on Wednesday, July 05, 2006

It is a bit annoying to type in the URL: http://forums.lhotka.net and then have to click on another button to get to the forums.  I think the forums list should be the default page that loads.

ajj3085 replied on Thursday, July 06, 2006

Why not just bookmark http://forums.lhotka.net/forums/ ?

lukky replied on Sunday, July 09, 2006

If I may...

I too have found this page a bit annoying the first time I logged onto the forum.

For the life of me, it took me a good 5 minutes to figure out why I couldn't get to the message board.

I think that JonM comment was relevant, and would have been better responded than by an IRC style remark.

After all, user feeback is part of what makes us evolve as programmers.

My 0.02$ 

RockfordLhotka replied on Sunday, July 09, 2006

I don't disagree - but I also don't see an option in the configuration to change this behavior, so I'm afraid the only answer at this point is to bookmark the main forum page.

JonM replied on Monday, July 10, 2006

It's not that big of a deal.  It's just that usually you would expect to be thrown right into forum selection.  Rocky, would it make more sense to make this your main www.lhotka.net website and just integrate all of the content off of the main site into this?

ajj3085 replied on Tuesday, July 11, 2006

If possible, that makes sense to me.. although I'm sure it'd be very low on the list of Rocky's priorities :-)

RockfordLhotka replied on Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Yeah - very low

I've spent much of my "spare" time over the past three weeks building a new Win2k3 server and ASP.NET 2.0 web site for www.lhotka.net - which just went live today. Spending another few hundred hours to learn how to customize CommunityServer 2.0 isn't even on my wish list...

I find web development to be one of the least fun programming options available today. There are so many moving parts, all with complex interactions, that doing even something simple - like creating a standard web page layout using css - is a huge undertaking (see my blog post). While the web does offer some really cool ways to present content, I find it hard to believe that it has matured so little over the past ~9 years...

So choosing to spend my spare time doing web development just isn't going to happen - especially when I could be spending that time working on version 2.1, or this background idea I have for a true object portal, or working on my evolving thoughts for a better way/language/tool to describe the business layer. Now those things are fun!!

I had to upgrade my server - so that time was non-negotiable. My old server was really quite old - built in 1999 (or 98?) and still running Win2k with ASP.NET 1.1... There are some commercial things I want to do with my site that were simply impossible without doing the upgrade. But I've talked to people about how to customize CS 2.0 - and it is a world unto itself. One which I simply have no interest in learning I'm afraid...

Tom Cooley replied on Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Just checked out your new site. Looks nice. I see that there is a login. Is the site personalized or is the login really only for you?

I have to say I agree with you on web development. It's not my favorite aspect of this job either. I think the core issue is that we've managed to force http to do stuff that simply was not intended to do. Bring on WCF.

Tom

RockfordLhotka replied on Tuesday, July 11, 2006

The site is not personalized at the moment - though it may be in the future.

It is unrealistic (and would be incredibly unfair) to rewrite the entire book for .NET 3.0 and 3.5(?). Yet I will end up putitng massive amounts of time into figuring out how to incorporate their concepts into CSLA .NET. So my plan is to write a "mini-book" or series of standalone "chapters" covering these concepts and then to sell that content directly from my web site. Exactly how I end up doing that remains to be seen, but that's the plan anyway.

One thing I learned from CSLA .NET 1.x is that by the time you get to 1.5 it is very hard for people to follow all the changes and their consequences without comprehensive documentation of some sort - like, for instance, chapters in a book. And yet writing that level of content is way to time consuming to do for free - it just isn't realistic. So what I'm hoping to find is a model by which I can provide quality content that people find valuable, in a way where it makes economic sense for me to do the work.

Tom Cooley replied on Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Agreed. I knew about CSLA before the C# version was available but waited until that book came out to dive in. If I recall, CSLA was actually on 1.3 by then and things like the RulesManager had been introduced even though they were not covered in the books. Learning these changes meant a lot of searching through the forums and reading the articles you'd post on the site. It is both feasible and worthwhile to go through that effort to learn the newly introduced features/concepts but it could be easier to find this information. So, I do understand (and appreciate) your goal.

A couple of models come to mind that may work. One would be to provide a timed subscription for updates to the documentation. Another would be to just individually sell each "article" as something like a protected pdf. I've purchased e-books in this fashion and it seems reasonable and would certainly reduce your publishing costs.

Tom