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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    Re: [kde-promo] dot and kdenews
From:       Troy Unrau <troy.unrau () gmail ! com>
Date:       2010-05-08 19:03:03
Message-ID: AANLkTilxZbFvdxGqdaTmD2Neal13egzUsGDHHcsyCZHp () mail ! gmail ! com
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On 7 May 2010 14:58, Jos Poortvliet <jospoortvliet@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Kenny Duffus <kenny@kde.org> wrote:
> > why do we have the same content served on the 2 urls dot.kde.org and
> > kdenews.org ?.
> 
> Ok, maybe not, I have no idea why this is, I'm sure it has some
> historical reasons ;-)

IIRC, and I may not, the original name for the news website was
KDE.news, not the dot. In fact, afaik, that is still the official name
of the news website. The dot became an alias for the site for two
reason: it was the url used when setting up squishdot or whatever it
was that originally powered the site years ago - basically a
clone/copy of the software that ran slashdot at the time; and the name
KDE.news features a dot in the middle rather than a space.

Then we just started posting urls pointing to dot.kde.org instead of
kdenews.org for some bizarre reason, and the former won out over the
latter until we all simply called it 'the dot'. Some sites, such as
lwn.net, still refer to the site by the official name (KDE.News --
see, for example: http://lwn.net/Articles/371205/). Additionally, it
still appears in the website title and header.

So the correct answer is that KDE.news is the official name, and the
dot is just a convenient shortname that has, over time, become the
dominant name.

> maybe the sysadmins know more?
> 
> > the rss feed on dot.kde.org points to stories on www.kdenews.org
> > 
> > why and should we fix this?

The only reason I can think of to fix this is that results from both
dot.kde.org and kdenews.org are returned in google search results. But
then again, having two results in the top 10 might actually be a Good
Thing(TM).

This does bring up another topic, however, in that of the dot's recent
integration with promo. Up until about the 4.0 release (give or take a
little), the dot would have been considered a general news source for
people interested in KDE. It would link to intresting third party
articles, blogs, interviews, stats reports, etc. These days, it has
been consolidated into a KDE Promo platform. I'm not saying that this
is a bad thing, per se, as it is important for the Promo team to have
such a platform, however it now has the perception of only publishing
official stories - much like the official google blog does. In the
process, we've lost an outlet for the less official stories.

Should the two domain thing really bother people, one possible
solution I'd suggest would be to split the dot from kdenews.org
domains, and repurpose kdenews.org as a larger news aggregator for
unofficial stories, or release announcements not considered important
enough for the dot any longer. It could then live on in the original
spirit of the dot, leaving the dot as the natural platform for promo
releases. I'd be interested in thoughts on this, since it's something
that's been slowly bothering me for several years now.

Cheers

-- 
Troy Unrau, B.Sc.G.Sc.(Hons.)
Planetary sciences M.Sc. candidate - University of Western Ontario
http://cpsx.es.uwo.ca
 
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