Xarg blog Archive

There is a great article by Andre Torrez about building sites:

That's what's got me so bothered about people musing in their weblogs about projects they'd like to do. Stop talking about it an just build it. Don't make it too complicated. Don't spend so much time planning on events that will never happen. Programmers, good programmers, are known for over-engineering to save time later down the road. The problem is that you can over-engineer yourself out of wanting to do the site.
The only thing special about the code is that it was written. The only thing special about the sites are the users.

The OpenACS community suffers from a surfeit of ideas and not enough sites using the current code. I am certainly as guilty as anyone of talking about things but not acting, although I have made a real effort to get the code used on this site both out in the open and back in to the OpenACS code base. It would be great if more people working on the toolkit would try to run sites which actually provided some services to other people (and I fully intend to follow through with this, rather than simply write about it).

We have enough good ideas already. We need better documentation, more testing, and more bug fixes. But more than anything else we need people actually running services on OpenACS doing what it can already do and developing things further based on meeting peoples real needs. Launching openacs.org using 4.x has done more for the quality and functionality of OpenACS in a short period time than just about anything else we have tried. Running this site (with almost no services other than photos of my kids and a cvs log browser) has made me focus on problems with the toolkit I would have overlooked otherwise.