Smalltalk hosting ...

laurent laffont wrote

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 12:47 PM, Geert Claes wrote:
> Don't get me wrong Ralph, that's exactly what I meant when I said when you have "an application users
> want to use" ... because this IS your market.  If you miss this ball on this one you can have all the
> documentation, exposure, advertising and whatever in the world, it still wont make people want your
> application.
>

Not sure about this. Documentation, exposure and advertising attracts people. And among these people some will want to use what you have to offer.

Yes, absolutely but again: only if you have an application people "want" to use so that's the first priority.

laurent laffont wrote

I've just played a little with PharoCasts:
- Claire made a skin so the site looks better
- I've started a campain with google adwords (google offered me 80€ to try)

results: more visits, more Flattr and several mails from newcommers in my
inbox.

This is just a little experiment but it seems it works.

Nice, just one remark, the PharoCasts logo doesn't seem to work very well against the dark grey background.

laurent laffont wrote

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 12:47 PM, Geert Claes wrote:
> I agree and this is where I am trying to help as well.  It is extremely important but please beware that
> "marketing" is not something only "marketeers" do, everyone involved is participating in marketing, starting
> from application's requirements/features, look-and-feel, usability, quality, cost/license, documentation,
> support etc ... the whole shebang :)

I agree. world.st is nice. We need to have more people writing blogs, tweet, screencasts .... it's not hard, it's not a lot of time. If people want Smalltalk to succeed, do a small thing every day.

IMHO everyone and everyday is actually more important than big project/application. Big project is the consequence.

Thanks and absofreakinlutely :)  I actually wrote this post about CMS because world.st is currently a Google Sites website

Alexandre Bergel-5 wrote

> I started to use Pier after watching Damien's screencast. I've tried before but could not understand how
> to do => no courage to go further. May be I'm stupid, but I need them.

I am not sure you need a better external documentation for Pier basic usage. But you surely need a better and more intuitive GUI. Just better marketing as Ralph would say.

Exactly, a UI that's intuitive needs no or minimal documentation

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laurent laffont wrote

>
> Exactly, a UI that's intuitive needs no or minimal documentation
>

OK. Pier people, could you make an intuitive GUI please ? ;)

This takes me back to my initial question, what can we do to:
a) get more Smalltalkers to use a Smalltalk based blog system ... matter of setting the example :) and;
b) attract non-Smalltalkers to try/use a Smalltalk CMS?

Smalltalk probably needs at least one top class open source CMS, with the right features, usability, look-and-feel which is easy to host.

Well :)

I've been promoting Smalltalk for years, and lately, I've been promoting all dialects using

-- my blog
-- screencasts
-- podcasts

I'd be happy to do more, but my personal budget doesn't allow for much more :)


On Mar 17, 2011, at 8:18 AM, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:

James Robertson
http://www.jarober.com
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jarober-2 wrote

Well :)

I've been promoting Smalltalk for years, and lately, I've been promoting all dialects using

-- my blog
-- screencasts
-- podcasts

I'd be happy to do more, but my personal budget doesn't allow for much more :)

Yep, excellent job James! :)

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Hello,

would it not a good idea, to buld a central register of productive Smalltalk applications, to show the world about.
Because not only developers can win with Smalltalk...

Josef  Springer

James Robertson wrote:

Well :)

I've been promoting Smalltalk for years, and lately, I've been promoting all dialects using

-- my blog
-- screencasts
-- podcasts

I'd be happy to do more, but my personal budget doesn't allow for much more :)


On Mar 17, 2011, at 8:18 AM, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:

  

Hi guys

Where were you?
Where are your bogs, books, videos, and cool Smalltalk open source projects?
I mean that this is easy to get frustrated but it is possible to do things:
	- I wrote Squeak by Example not for me but for newcomers
	- We are writing Pharo by example two for the same. 
	- I wrote the Seaside book because it was important for other people (and because avi was not writing one)
	- we are pushing pharo because we want to create a good open-source smalltalk.

I came to smalltalk in 1996 when everybody left and I decided to do something. Now this is not enough but I'm not frustrated
and we are creating good energy. If people really want they can join and help or get frustrated.

Stef
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James Robertson
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On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 3:11 PM, laurent laffont
<[hidden email]> wrote:
> I like what you do James. We need more people do a fraction of what you do !
> Laurent.

even aside of writing our own blog posts (which should do), just
commenting on other peoples blogs, tweeting and buzzing about them can
be of help.

davorin rusevljan
http://www.cloud208.com/

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I myself have made an trial and error(ugly & beauty) screencast of using Pharo for Riak.

==> http://appdal.com/groups/36442/wiki/be0d1/Riak_Interface_for_Pharo_Smalltalk.html




2011. 3. 17., 저녁 10:56, James Robertson 작성:


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On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Alexandre Bergel <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> 2) Yes.  I have used and ported Pier, and presented it to non-Smalltalkers, and I have noticed that very small how-to or clarification things could delay me and would undoubtedly affect a non-Smalltalk user.  (Some of it was just order of presentation - the how-to's that a non-Smalltalker wants first are not too hard to find - if you're a Smalltalker and so can guess where to look.)  It would be good to watch people starting to use Smalltalk's 'best-practice' web suite and see what's slowing them.
>
> There is no need of how-to's for Pier for basic usage (e.g., editing pages, adding menus, doing internal links, adding users). It is wrong to think this is necessary. I have never read the documentation of SimpleCMS, simply there isn't and there is no need to.
>

You are apparently much smarter than I. I struggled mightly w/ getting
going with Pier and finally gave up and moved on to other things.
I doubt I'm an outlier on that. I'd love if there was much better
documentation but, I'm definitely not the person to do it as I still
don't really
get how to work with Pier. It is very non-intuitive for me.

Even if it is dirt simple to use, people are going to look at recipes,
how-tos and general documentation when picking a CMS.
Most people pick a CMS to make things easier not because they think 'o
i really want to use X language'.

-Sean-

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That's why I like Wki Server of MacOSX. It requires no syntax to learn. It simply works, with a little limitations. :-)

Balance between power and easiness is key to a software's success.


2011. 3. 20., 아침 5:48, Sean Allen 작성:


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I believe that Alex wanted to say that the basic functionalities should be so self evident that they should not need documentation.

Regarding Pier, Lukas did an excellent job of building a content management system for programmers. You would not say about Seaside for example that it is bad because you cannot program it with drag and drop. It is the same for Pier. The main focus was to get it beautiful from a model point of view.

To add a user-friendly interface on top of it would require an explicit and new project on top of Pier. The infrastructure is there and is powerful.

Cheers,
Doru


On 19 Mar 2011, at 21:48, Sean Allen wrote:

--
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"Reasonable is what we are accustomed with."


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Hi,

maybe that's an idea for GSoC?

Joachim

Am 20.03.11 09:35, schrieb Tudor Girba:
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Am 20.03.2011 um 09:35 schrieb Tudor Girba:

> I believe that Alex wanted to say that the basic functionalities should be so self evident that they should not need documentation.
>
> Regarding Pier, Lukas did an excellent job of building a content management system for programmers. You would not say about Seaside for example that it is bad because you cannot program it with drag and drop. It is the same for Pier. The main focus was to get it beautiful from a model point of view.
>
> To add a user-friendly interface on top of it would require an explicit and new project on top of Pier. The infrastructure is there and is powerful.
>
Yes, basically everything is there. I tried to push some of my friends to use it. Everyone said that it is not easy to use but they also said that wordpress is not easy to use. That does not seem to be the problem. After I explained it a bit most of them founnd it more clear and more easy than other CMSses. So I think we shouldn't be too hard to ourselves.
For all of them the bunch of links at the bottom was too disturbing to work with. Well, I have troubles to find the right link because there are so much of them in one place. So reducing the links to the necessary ones (for a normal user) and re-design the functionality sections commands, view and sitemap will do it a big deal.
And well, there was one single point everybody mentioned and that seemed to be to biggest problem for them. Everyone was asking if there are "themes" or "templates" you can chose from. Just to repeat it no one had real technical problems with the system but they expect they can chose a template (they are as good in design as they are good in programming) which looks good and start with a half pre filled page. That seems to be the success story for wordpress. And the default theme of pier is only appealing to purists.

So to marketeer pier I would go the ui way. Add support for 960.cs css framework (pier uses blueprint but a lot of people are more fond of 960.cs like me :) ). Then the command links of pier need to be layouted with bigger coloured areas (that have round corners :) ). Care should be taken that the pier look does not interefere with a template css. The links shouldn't be at the bottom. A comfortable sitemap component will help also.

In my opinion that is not too much work but one that helps a lot. I would expect with these changes the hosting question would be important to me because all of friends would want to have one :)

my 2 cents,

Norbert

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Dear Joachim,
    and to continue/review at ESUG in workshop or similar, as I
suggested in an earlier post?

While no doubt some things may benefit from further coding or elaborate
documentation, others may need no more than Pier experts helping Pier
dummies get started, accompanied by someone noting what the FAQs are,
debriefing, and tweaking the existing explanations.
             Yours faithfully
                   Niall Ross


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+1

Alexandre


On 20 Mar 2011, at 04:35, Tudor Girba wrote:

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_,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:~^~:;._,.;:
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At 09:35 20/03/2011, Tudor Girba wrote:

a content management system for programmers.

Exact. This is actually why I chose Pier for implementing my software platform for "online programmable CMS" [1]. During the past two years, I've been deeply extending Pier and never regretted my choice. As a matter of fact, Pier comes with a powerful CMS model.

To add a user-friendly interface on top of it would require an explicit and new project on top of Pier. The infrastructure is there and is powerful.

Exactly, and it's feasible since:
(a) Pier offers appropriate abstractions for plugging rather easily application-specific interfaces.
(b) Seaside offers powerful tools, e.g. JQuery, for implementing such interfaces.

For example, I've rather easily implemented on this basis several sophisticated interfaces [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Actually, all of them reuse a "home-made" framework for interactive hierarchical interfaces that uses Seaside-JQuery.

Cheers,
Reza

[1] http://www.afacms.com/blog/pontoon-app
[2] http://www.afacms.com/blog
[3] http://www.afacms.com/cats/contracts/
[4] http://www.afacms.com/cats/concepts/
[5] http://www.afacms.com/cats/activities/
[6] http://www.afacms.com/cats/activities/shopping/Seaside/

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At 10:59 17/03/2011, Geert Claes wrote:

Question is; what can be done to have more Smalltalkers use a Smalltalk
based blog system and attract non-Smalltalkers to try a Smalltalk CMS?

CMS is not necessarily the best market for Smalltalk. But, there are application areas where:
(a) having a CMS as an integrated component of the whole application software is a major added-value, and
(b) the application area is complex and dynamic enough to motivate using Smalltalk as implementation language.

An example of such application area is cloud-based provisioning of individualized and adaptive services to the elderly (information, monitoring, networking, etc). This objective is extremely hard to achieve in an affordable, acceptable and reliable way. In spite of huge investments, it remains a major open area of research and development. However, as argued previously [1, 2, 3], it is possible to address it to a large extent by a combination of Smalltalk-based solutions, including a CMS (Pier). 

So, an alternative approach to develop Smalltalk is extending its application areas (far) beyond what is possible with competing, and much better documented and marketed, languages.

This is actually why we specifically invest in the above mentioned area (ambient assisted living), and would very welcome interested parties for technical, commercial, and scientific collaborations. 

Cheers,
Reza Razavi

[1] http://www.rezarazavi.com/about/cv/publications/pppo-2011
[2] http://www.rezarazavi.com/about/cv/publications/iwst-2010
[3] http://osl.cs.uiuc.edu/people?user=razavi
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