web-centric meeting - 3/21 (Wed) 6pm
Rick (RocketScience) Kwan
Wednesday, May 21, at Tied House, 954 Villa St., Mountain View. Corky
Lakin is the organizer. Rick Kwan has lots of info, strange ideas,
and
opinions. :-) [I do; I listen a lot, too.] You can let Corky know
you're coming at: webmaster(at)aiaa-sf.org.
There are two basic needs address at this meeting:
* The current maintenance of the site, while open to participation,
has basically been handled by very few volunteers. We are certainly
willing to take new ones; they can even be neophytes.
* The website could do more for members, allowing collaboration in a
variety of technical and professional areas. However, this probably
will break the mold of the current site. Three relevant questions:
In what direction should it be taken? What tools are available to do
so? What volunteer time investment is involved to make it happen?
(Not all of these will be answered in a single evening.)
This meeting is open to AIAA SF members and invitees who want to
contribute to the website infrastructure. Tied House is said to have
wireless Internet capability; so a number of people are expected to
bring their laptops.
The website is at http://www.aiaa-sf.org; it has earned the San
Francisco Section several national AIAA section awards. This has been
done, however, by meticulous HTML and content editing. A blend of MS
FrontPage and just plain text editing have been the main tools. There
are also some sub-sites in PHP, and dinner meeting reservation script
now in Python (used to be Perl).
The web server currently of the Apache 2.2 series, running on a Linux
2.6.19 kernel or later. The site is hosted with several other
commercial entities and private individuals. (There may be other non-
profits in the mix as well.) The physical hardware is in some giant
server farm in Fremont. (I've never seen it personally... yet.)
The site has been live since the early days of websites, around 1995.
In that time, the web has gone through a considerable about of
evolution. The PHP language developed for easy server-side page
enhancement. JavaScript has come to be browser, amid lots of
incompatibilities, but now emerges as a force in AJAX. Commerce has
been enabled by the SSL standard from Netscape, a company which led
much of the development of the web and has vanished. MySQL provides
low-cost back-end relational database capability. A host of web
frameworks have
arisen -- many written in Perl, PHP, or Python. The HTML wars have
stabilized, with extensibility now driven into XML. W3C (World Wide
Web Consortium) has issued numerous standards and continues to pursue
several collaborative research tracks.
In other words, the web now looks very different from the time that
the AIAA SF website started.
Your ideas for the website are welcome, either at the meeting or in
this forum (Google group) here.
--Rick Kwan
Corwin H. Lakin
Good agenda,
Corky