Facilitating improvements to the LW website

[John Salvatier]

Several survey respondents have mentioned that facilitating LW website improvements seems like a big win to them. When I spoke to Louie and Matt it sounded like the biggest barrier to making improvements to the website is that it takes several days worth of work just to get everything working so you can host the site. This seems like something we should do regardless of what else we do. Is anyone willing to take point in organizing work on this task?

Some ideas about how we could solve this issue:

1) Create a virtual machine image that has a clean working implementation of a hosting environment and can host the website. VirtualBox is the most popular open source virtual machine software. I think this is a good candidate to be outsourced using something like http://www.freelancer.com/ since there is a clear evaluation mechanism, either the image correctly hosts the website or it doesn't. Both testing and specifying the conditions would probably require assistance from someone from Trike Apps or similar. I estimate this would cost about $500 (3 days x 8 hr/day x $20/hr = $480). 

Advantages: 

• Should be plug and play
• Virtually eliminates setup requirements
• Straightforward to test the result

Disadvantages:

• Cost
• Developers will need to download a big file or we will need to send them a DVD
• Developers cannot develop in their own preferred environment, only in the environment the image is in

2) Make a set of instructions for setting up the environment.

Advantages

• More cross-platform

Disadvantages

• Not sure how complex this would be

Thoughts? 

John 

[Aaron Tucker]

It seems useful, and I'd be interested in attempting to do this.

I'm going to California tomorrow, but I should be able to work on it after I get back on the 20th.

[John Salvatier]

Awesome Aaron!

It might be possible to ask several people to split the cost of work for the image. I would be willing to bear part of the cost and I might be able to get a couple other people to pitch in from the Seattle meetup group.

We'll pick this up when you get back then.

John