[plug] LinmagAU Wiki

[Onno Benschop]

Observations:

      * While forums are a nice way to get consumer interaction, there
        are many of these available in other formats. In fact, we're
        using such a forum as we discuss this.
      * Publishing on an ongoing basis makes the magazine more like
        other information sources and less like a magazine.

When I was broadcasting in community radio one of the program makers
suggested that our role-model was ABC-FM. I countered that with: "If
people wanted to have ABC-FM, why would they bother with us."

What I'm trying to say is that we don't need to duplicate other people's
efforts in our content or presentation. (Slashdot / NewsForge / et-al.)

My suggestion is to do one thing and do it well.

To that end I propose the following (perhaps radical) approach:
      * Retain the calendar, the combined mailing list search
        engine/archive and the articles.
      * Go back to a monthly publication with deadlines and publishing
        time-lines, because it forces articles to be articles and not
        nuggets.
      * Forget about the forums, because all of the mailing lists are
        already forums.

I've not used the mailing-list search engine, but I would offer that
google does a great job of searching, all we need to do is provide a
single archive.

If we do the above, then we have simplified our job to:
      * Maintain a web-site with articles
      * Maintain a mailing-list archive
      * Maintain a calendar

I don't profess to be an expert on load-balancing, but to deal with
slash-dotting, I think a simpler approach would be to allocate the three
machines thus:
      * Database
      * Mail Archive
      * Web-server

In addition to the above, each machine could be fitted out with a
reverse squid proxy, thus making the page come from the cache and not
actually hurt any system.

In fact, you could just make the fastest machine a squid-box and combine
web and mail archive, and put the database on number three:
      * Web / Mail
      * Database
      * Reverse Squid

Anyway, I'm jumping the gun a little here, solving problems before we've
actually decided to do this, but I'll say this:


	"I'm game..."


Onno Benschop 

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