www.conlang.org, and some administrivia

Well, I've continued to be swamped at work -- diligent but intermittent
skimming sessions are still keeping me 10 days to a week behind the flow of
conlang posts. The list has hit the 100 messages/day posting limit 3 or
four times in the last week and a half -- I've been releasing it, but that
may account for a bit of burstiness in the message flow.

www.conlang.org is a running server now, and I can offer redirection from
any .conlang.org domain to your own private pages, if you want. This is
based on NameVirtualHosts, which means that some older HTTP clients will
not work properly, as they are not smart enough to send the server name
when they request a URL.

For a domain (say dapnant.conlang.org), I will also allocate a url
www.conlang.org/dapnant/ for older clients.

If you're interested in a redirected domain, mail me directly. I'm too
behind on list mail for that to be a sensible way of contacting me. It may
take me a couple of days, especially at the beginning, when I expect a bit
of a rush...

www.conlang.org has essentially no content at the moment -- I have not had
time to work on this. The only thing on the home page is a link to the
conlang FAQ-O-Matic. This is a collaborative FAQ-building tool with many
options. If you want to edit things in the FAQ (Please do!) you need to get
an account (available automatically, and for free), and turn on the editing
options in your view of the FAQ. If you need to do something and don't have
the privileges for it, ask me. I think I turned them all on, but I can't
guarantee it.

If someone would contact Jack Durst, I suspect that a number of the items
in his FAQ  would fit into this format just fine -- and by allowing anyone
to edit, we may be able to keep things more up to date. I'd also like to
have a list of CONLANG URLs and short descriptions as part of the FAQ --
these could be edited maintained directly by the site owners.

At some point, I'd like to offer some level of hosting for those who can't
afford it, but the practical issues involved are beyond me for the time
being. However, the redirection approach should make switching hosting
providers much easier for conlangers, since you can have a consistent
address....

   -- David

[A note for the Python folks: I did look at the Python tool, but it didn't
have the option to build mutiple linked FAQ pages, and I think that that's
a key need. Many (most?) of our standard linguistic FAQs require long
explanations, and there are so many sub-areas, that a one-page FAQ is
likely to be overwhelming. The FAQ-O-Matic also has a way to generate a
one-page FAQ file, so that you can still make a single document to print if
that's your need.]
_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/  \  Director of Development
    Graduate Student no more!              \  Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\  http://www.dynamicDiagrams.com/
MAPA: mapping for the WWW                    \__________________________