[GSoC] students and mentors! Gchat conference!

[Pjotr Prins]

This Friday we would like to set up a conference using Google Hangout
with all mentors and students! The best time will be around 15:00 UTC
because all of us will be awake (hopefully). The agenda is:

* Introductions
* Talk about produced BLOGS, projects and progress
* Prepare for first round of code reviews

John or I will chair the meeting. Everyone should show up. If you
can't make it, tell us beforehand.

PS Test hangout with your mentor/student first if you have never used
it! Sign up on Google+ and add my name to your list. During the
conference switch off the mike when not talking. Gchat is pretty good,
but ambient noise from 10 sides can be too rich ;)

[Magdalen Berns]

Sounds good!

Though blogging once a week is going to be hard when my timeline is split into fortnightly targets, I will try and keep in mind that an update checkpoint would be useful, halfway through the fotnight, knowing this. I might have to adapt the timeline though.

Can I propose we give an rss feed (of blog posts with a SciRuby tag for example) instead of manually publishing in two different sites? That would make things a lot easier, quicker and more efficient and it would allow us to post more often if we wanted to, as well so it might be preferable for you guys too.

I have not found that many blog posts from SciRuby students from last year. Did they actually do this or is it a new thing for this year? 

Magdalen

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[Pjotr Prins]

On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 08:51:46AM +0100, Magdalen Berns wrote:
> Sounds good!
>
> Though blogging once a week is going to be hard when my timeline is split into
> fortnightly targets, I will try and keep in mind that an update checkpoint
> would be useful, halfway through the fotnight, knowing this. I might have to
> adapt the timeline though.

I would not worry. You can blog about anything you learn or experience
with Ruby too.

> Can I propose we give an rss feed (of blog posts with a SciRuby tag for
> example) instead of manually publishing in two different sites? That would make
> things a lot easier, quicker and more efficient and it would allow us to post
> more often if we wanted to, as well so it might be preferable for you guys too.
>
> I have not found that many blog posts from SciRuby students from last year. Did
> they actually do this or is it a new thing for this year? 

They did. I think we want them on SciRuby to keep them for the future.
We have some control there.

Pj.

[Magdalen Berns]

Censorship!!! Outrage!!! Joking.

I *think you should be able to moderate an rss feed. Not sure. I'll look and see if it's simple to do. This would be ideal. As regards keepng them in future, that is definately possible with rss you can set it so it does not update. The downside of that is that edits and improvements would not go in either though, I believe.

Pj.

[Pjotr Prins]

On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 12:33:09PM +0100, Magdalen Berns wrote:
> They did. I think we want them on SciRuby to keep them for the future.
> We have some control there.
>
> Censorship!!! Outrage!!! Joking.
>
> I *think you should be able to moderate an rss feed. Not sure. I'll look and
> see if it's simple to do. This would be ideal. As regards keepng them in
> future, that is definately possible with rss you can set it so it does not
> update. The downside of that is that edits and improvements would not go in
> either though, I believe.

I meant that BLOGs disappear. This way we can keep them with the
project. You can still remove things on request, of course.

[Magdalen Berns]

I don't get what you mean, sorry. Why it would be a problem with an external rss feed that had been published to sciruby.com if a blog feeding it got deleted?

[Pjotr Prins]

I have the feeling we are talking not talking about the same think ;).
No matter.

[Magdalen Berns]

Sorry to keep harping on about GNOME but just so you know what I meant,.. I send my posts tht are tagged GNOME to planet.gnome.org as are most students who did GSoC for them at some point link: https://planet.gnome.org/ 

How it works is that we each keep a copy of the same posts but theirs is sourced from my feedburner feeed and mine is the original.

It would be possible to do this sort of thing for a sciruby planet using software like this https://github.com/thisMagpie/Planeteria or the easy way: by letting someone else host it e.g http://planeteria.org/ buut I think that ruby rails must have a plugin for this sort of thing already so it would work on sciruby.com's feed in any case.

[Pjotr Prins]

You tell John ;)

[John Woods]

Unfortunately, we're not using Rails. We're using Octopress.

I'm not quite sure what you're asking me, but I think we want to host everything ourselves instead of just syndicating posts from elsewhere. Part of the reason is that it improves our search rankings if we update frequently. =)

[Magdalen Berns]

On 26 May 2014 20:40, John Woods <john.o...@gmail.com> wrote:

Unfortunately, we're not using Rails. We're using Octopress.

I'm not quite sure what you're asking me, but I think we want to host everything ourselves instead of just syndicating posts from elsewhere.

Yeah I think we might be talking at cross purposes because( in theory at least), I am pretty sure you can host posts from a feed once you import it if done right. I did ths myself a while ago with the posts from the a11y project and the control over those posts was all mine *evil laugh*. I will have a quick look since it would be a time saver... In any case, I have a post or two in mind to add. Sorry if this was said already, but where do we put those posts for now?

 

Part of the reason is that it improves our search rankings if we update frequently. =)

 

I can relate to that but is manually doing that more optimal to updating with posts from a feed? I do not think so, but maybe this is because of the above confusion... I would bet good money that SciRuby would be more likely get more updates if it's a feed than a manual post simply because all it takes to publish to sciruby in the latter case, is adding a SciRuby tag to a post, ken?:-)

[Carlos Agarie]

Hey folks!

Friday is a bit problematic for me, but as it's 12:00 here in São Paulo, I can manage it. However, I won't be at home or at the office, so my Internet connection might be a bit flaky :( In any case, I'll try to at least hear you out.

-----

Carlos Agarie

Software Engineer

+55 11 97320-3878 | @carlos_agarie

[John Woods]

Yes, but Google rankings only improve when your material is original, so I prefer to encourage that.

If you check out the source branch of github.com/SciRuby/sciruby.com, there's a rake task for adding a blog entry. You can issue a pull request and I'll get it posted pretty quickly.

John

[Magdalen Berns]

On 27 May 2014 04:11, John Woods <john.o...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, but Google rankings only improve when your material is original, so I prefer to encourage that.

Ok but this is going to be posted in two places either way in my case so it makes little difference here.

SEO is improved not only by links to the site but lalso by relevant links out of the site too. A lot of people do not realise that but to be honest, if you are worried about google ranking, original content is the least of sciruby.com's worries.

A site needs to

• be accessible (screen readers and search engines crawlers have a lot in common -they are robots and read the site just like robots do)
  
• the html/css and js errors need to be fixed forthe above to happen
  
• all broken links need to be removed/fixed regularly
  
• have google adverts (ok this is not something google say but I noticed my ranking shot up when I put adverts on it and i believe advertisers and I strongly suspect might well get a bit of a leg up there. Small site like mine cannot make money from adverts by google. I think I get likw 2 quid a month of something pitiful liker that and if i could, I would scrap them and just put affiliate links to services I think my readers would likely want. Mine are there purely for ranking.
  
• Advertising. I think google have a good deal on where you get like $75 dollars free if you spend $25 bucks. I would only bother if someone is willing to do all the above first though since it seems like the owness is on the advertiser to be attractive and target the right places once the advert is set up. 
  
• Setting the domain and organisation up with a Google apps account( which is free for non-profits ) Sign sciruby to this and link the google+ etc to that, fiddle about with the apis and such and watch things improve 
  
• Be mobile friendly
  
• Send a valid feed out to planets :-) if a site is prepared to take a feed from sciruby then give it to them. This will mean the content is orginal but it will also draw new people to the site and the latter is going to outweigh the former in terms of benifts.
  
• Use webmaster tools
  
• index the site in yahoo, bing yandex etc
  
• Relevant keyword phrases
  
• making use of social networking like facebook like, google+, twitter and such by connecting them to the site
  
• Compressing javascript css and anything else to speed up the site
  
• Seeing what the readers are reading and giving them more of what they want
• run a blogspot blog. I actually deeply resent how many more hits my blog gets than my actual site but it really does lead for visits by about 2000 a month (unique!). Part of that is because it feeds out though part of it is that google blogs are more optimal than wp sites.
• ect

Updating content is good but it's definately the last thing to worry about in all that from what I can tell from webmaster tools all that is useless if the robots are crawling through stuff they cannot read or they are finding problems with because of broken links, dodgy redirects or innaccessible content

if I can send out an rss feed with the time I save alone, I could have a fair craic at fixing most of those problems and have 5 or so minutes spare and this would be much better for ranking that any any original content I could update sciruby with over the course of 3 months, though I am no expert, I know enough for that. It's not time consuming if done bit by bit and I reckon that would really help SEO more than this idea to post the slow way would ever do for sciruby.

But I guess being a sys admin you are in a good position to just ask google what we can do to improve the ranking for sciruby.com. It might be a bit cheeky, but that's what I would do in your shoes as well as try and get some free advertising probably but then I am a bit cheeky, you might feel uncomfortable being so brazen as to take the direct approach, like that regarding the site so I would not judge you if you chose not to do that!

[Magdalen Berns]

if you have not already done so http://www.google.co.uk/nonprofits/

[John Woods]

Focus on your project right now. We'll talk about this after GSoC ends.

[Pjotr Prins]

On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 03:18:18PM -0400, John Woods wrote:
> Focus on your project right now. We'll talk about this after GSoC ends.

Hi Magdalen,

John has a point here. Let's not lose ourselves in long discussions.
We all have work to do. Just know that your opinion is valued and
appreciated, but we don't have the stamina to stray too far off the
track. Life and work are challenging enough as it is. Let's try and
get SciRuby and GSoC cracked!

Pj.

[Magdalen Berns]

The thing I was getting at is that rss would save time and is not going to affect your SEO at all. So there is no need to worry, I won't be bugfixing in sciruby.com in favour of my project!!!

With that said, I take the point about the length of this blog discussion which is a bit longer than bloggimg deserves, in the grand scheme of things so yeah I am happy to agree to disagree and leave it there.

[John Woods]

We don't disagree. It's just a matter of priorities. My priority is to keep GSoC moving, and to ensure you get as much as possible out of your project. =)

As I said, bring it up again when GSoC ends, and maybe it can be something we do for future GSoC students.

[Magdalen Berns]

oh! Ok, that is good then let's do that. 

[Pjotr Prins]

Reminder. Tomorrow is the important day. Please make sure you are
signed up to Google+ and that gchat is working. You should add me to
your circles.

Pj.