[theforum] Zombie!

[William Anderson]

On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 5:03 PM, Adrian Roselli
<Roselli at algonquinstudios.com> wrote:
> [This is a reply to William Anderson's post at http://lists.evolt.org/theforumarchive/Week-of-Mon-20130527/010696.html, which I cannot reply to directly since I don't have the email so reply-to headers be damned.]

It works, woo!

> As you know, the evolt.org site has been broken for some time. The platform is old, the content is even older, and the community that built it is scattered.

Yup.

> Here's my idea of how we celebrate 15 years:
>
> 1. Convert evolt.org to a static HTML site. Turn off submissions, commenting, and sign-ups. Take the site as it stands now (when it is working), spider it to flat HTML, and keep it out there as a part of web history. At that point, it can really be hosted anywhere.

Interesting.  I doubt we'd need to spider it since everything's in the
database.  See comments below.

> 2. Approach some of the names in the industry (folks like Christian Heilmann, Eric Meyer, and so on) who were evolters or had worked directly with evolt.org and ask them to write up a missive for the 15th anniversary (with a 6 month lead time).

Like it.

> 3. Approach evolt.org contemporaries of the time (Webmonkey guys, Zeldman) and ask if they'd like to say a few words about our shared history.

Anyone have contacts at WIRED?  :)

> 4. Gather it all and put together a nice anniversary piece on the home page, while gracefully announcing the permanent mothballing of weo, all links still intact.

weo as-is, unless there is a massive upswell of support for retaining
evolt as a web developer community and support site, should definitely
be mothballed.  I think it would be nice to wrap the *content* in a
pleasing, simple, modern HTML template, leaving it all Google-friendly
and reader-friendly at the same time.  Mike is looking at various
Drupal upgrade-locally / sidegrade-to-the-cloud options to make lives
easier.

> I think the lists and beo can continue on, assuming there is enough use to warrant.

Hence my thought of expanding the mission of evolt.org from web
developer community to simply community.  I'm not sure I'm
articulating this part well.  I like the idea of people sharing things
with people they like, and commenting on them.  I'm aware people do
this already on Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, et al.  I think we
could join in the fun.  I'm not sure.  Wibble.

-n