Put me to work!

Post ideas or dicuss development of the Blog / Forum / Bugtracker etc
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fxmech
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Put me to work!

Post by fxmech »

I've been lurking around the open source community (CMS/web applications) for over 10 years now. Some things don't change much. Lots to do and nobody to do it.

The Xbox1 is losing momentum in these golden years. One thing I like, and that The Google likes, is a frequently updated website. Especially one with useful, directly-applicable information on it. Relavancy is important, too.

For XBMC4XBOX and this particular project, I may well be suited to work on the website end of things.
  • I have extensive experience modding, styling and administering phpBB. I will happily take on a couple dedicated hours per week to tidy up as needed. Fortunately it doesn't seem to be the case, at least not yet anyway.
  • I can write a well-crafted wiki page. If I try. This includes attention to some basic tenants of SEO.
  • Site click tracking, statistics & marketing integration.
  • Willing to randomly solicit to have sites join a link-exchange / myFace[social marketeering] brainwash campaigns / etc.
  • Patch together useful scripts/linux serverly duties. My favorite.
  • Database porting, conversion, backup, design. Currently employed doing data restructuring and importing.
  • Work with templating engines (Smarty, PHP)
I assure you it isn't my intent to rag on the efforts put in getting the website back to the current state. BUT, the wiki needs work, and always has. Even XBMC's

I think it goes without saying the wiki should reference less to XBMC itself more to the specific XBOX1 fork. We should try to build name-recognition to our robot friends by re-branding all our links and point them to as many revised internal sources as possible. We collectively now should put efforts into creating material unique to the Xbox. In fact, there should be a deliberate effort to make every page's content somehow different than the corresponding page at the team-XBMC wiki.

As far in as the Xbox1 goes I've modded and gone full-circle on about 10 separate boxes in the last year.
XBMC-compatible: I have used XBMCbuntu, Windows, and obviously the Xbox1. But for the most part, I would say I can understand XBMC in general

Here's where I need some input. What should be the priority while choosing which wiki articles to make more up-to-date and relevant?
Any comments or critiques will be taken into consideration when deciding how to be useful on any of my days off. With a little effort and time we will have a website drawing and sustaining an active and educated community. :)
Last edited by fxmech on Sun Nov 18, 2012 11:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
Geeba
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Re: Put me to work!

Post by Geeba »

Great news! I'm sure BuZz will be glad of the help! :D
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BuZz
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Re: Put me to work!

Post by BuZz »

thanks for the offer. did you read the http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... ?f=2&t=461 thread?

Once the images are moved, the next job is to replace missing articles. the missing articles happened due to page renames on xbmc.org so its a matter of going back to their wiki, finding the article, see where it moved (as moving moves the history), then going back in the history to take a copy as of 1 march 2010 which is what the other articles are based off.

if you hadn't realised, the xbmc4xbox wiki was lost, when the admin of the old xbmc4xbox site disappeared. some info about that on the blog
fxmech
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Re: Put me to work!

Post by fxmech »

Has it all been lost? Really?

Maybe not everything has been lost!
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BuZz
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Re: Put me to work!

Post by BuZz »

Well, that data is less useful than you might think. I already have a copy of all pages from archive.org (grabbed using warrick). More useful but still problematic are copies we have of data from the google cache also when the wiki went down. some of the issues

1) the data from archive.org is old, and doesn't contains the xbmc4xbox specific edits
2) the data contains rendered pages, meaning all wiki markup lost
3) no history of edits

However, with the new wiki now online (based from 2010 xbmc wiki) and editable, hopefully with some community help it can be pulled into shape. I will make available all the cached pages we have and at least they could be used to compare content and see if anything important is missing.

There are also daily dumps of the content and monthly dumps of images available ftp://ftp.exotica.org.uk/pub/xbmc4xbox/wiki/ so that such data loss can not occur in the future.
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BuZz
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Re: Put me to work!

Post by BuZz »

And still no-one has helped on with the wiki :(
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Re: Put me to work!

Post by captainsensation »

BuZz wrote:And still no-one has helped on with the wiki :(
I said i would help some, no one has inboxed me any info on what i should be doing to help with it.
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Re: Put me to work!

Post by BuZz »

there isnt any info to send. there is no project manager. We need someone to use their experience to work what needs doing etc. we need people who can work out what needs doing and do it, rather than people who are waiting on instructions what to do :)

so - wiki editing experience, ability to look over what we have and work out what is missing, come up with ideas on how to improve the layout and structure (perhaps getting ideas and data from xbmc's wiki). and so on.
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