Fresh install review, external name

[Dave Winer]

A couple of things --

1. I've started a project to work on the fresh install process, hopefully for the last time.

I'm doing the kind of review that we did at UserLand prior to the release of Radio 8. The idea is to slowly and carefully review the first-time user experience from the docs to the UI and the default settings to make sure that the user who doesn't know more than we think they should have to gets a good result.

I've got a pretty good list of things to look at, and have already started fixing stuff. So you should see a change in the kinds of things I report. Instead of digging new holes, for now, I'm just going to be fixing things. Some of them are issues that have been around for a long time.

2. The first one I tackled is the question of the external name of the server. This trips up a huge number of first-timers, even experienced server guys. The idea is that we need a name through which to refer to your server. And the confusion didn't just extend to the users, I was confused too, which made things worse.

I decided to allocate a name everyone's server at mediahackers.org. For example, my test server is 1821.mediahackers.org.

This happens without the user having to do anything. If they want to give their machine a different name -- no problem. But at least we know it has a name.

This has led to the next issue -- what do they get when they go there?

We know that http://1821.mediahackers.org/opmleditor/ gets you the administrative site. But what about http://1821.mediahackers.org/ itself?

I decided that it should redirect you to the administrative site.

http://worknotes.scripting.com/april2012/4912ByDw/redirectFromServerTopLevel

This is something you can test on your server after updating.

There's one gotcha. If you have beaut.root installed, which is now something I don't recommend doing, that's where you'll go.

More notes coming soon.

Dave