Maybe we should retire the installfest & curriculum subdomains

[lilliealbert]

We have fun subdomains for some of the docs pages, but not for all of them, and I think it causes more confusion at this point for folks to go straight to installfest.railsbridge.org or curriculum.railsbridge.org. Yesterday at Tapjoy there were posters all over the place pointing people to: curriculum.railsbridge.org/installfest, which does work, but isn't really helpful or shorter or good, really.

I can see an argument for installfest.railsbridge.org remaining, but not so much for the curricula, since there are so many of them.

[lilliealbert]

hey @alexch, as Czar of DNS, what do you think?

[alexch]

It's doable. Another option, also easy, is to make subdir URLs redirect to subdomain URLs, which feels cleaner to me.

I really like being able to say "go to frontend dot railsbridge dot org" instead of "go to docs dot frontend dot railsbridge dot org slash frontend".

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 6:35 PM, Lillie Chilen notifications@github.comwrote:

hey @alexch https://github.com/alexch, as Czar of DNS, what do you think?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/railsbridge/docs/issues/257#issuecomment-26960651 .

Alex Chaffee - alex@stinky.com http://alexchaffee.com http://twitter.com/alexch

[mehulkar]

Hello! I'm new here, but my vote goes to redirecting all\ subdomains to learn.railsbridge.com and designing a home page that takes you down a sitemap hierarchy like this:

Home page:
  ---- Installfest
  ---- Why
  ---- Frontend
  ---- Rails
      ---- Ruby
      ---- Intro to Rails
      ---- Intermediate Rails
      ---- Understanding Rails

The Why and Installfest pages should be footnotes and the actual learning material should be the main branching point.

Workshop slides and teacher training should not be a part of this website.

**when I say all, I really mean all except the exceptions. Possible exceptions are workshops.railsbridge.org and teach.railsbridge.org

[lilliealbert]

I am all for having learn.railsbridge.org go to the docs TOC. Learn doesn't make sense as a repo name, but it makes hella sense as a URL.

That hierarchy seems mostly reasonable. I don't think Ruby should go inside of Rails, though, since it implies that learning Ruby isn't a Generally Good Idea in and of itself.

Where do you propose workshop stuff / teacher training things go, @mehulkar?

[mehulkar]

@lilliealbert What about putting teacher training stuff as part of a BridgeTroll? I'd think it would involve adding a User Types and adding a simple dashboard for "Volunteers" which gives them access to resources that are not relevant for students.

I think this is a sound approach because it would make this repo more and more about the student and we could encourage them to ask questions about the curriculum through Github post-workshop by opening issues here. Wouldn't require git knowledge to open issues, but it would be a foot-in-the-door strategy for students to see git in action as well.

[rachelmyers]

@lilliealbert @mehulkar When I think about who uses the teacher training and how they use it, I :sparkling_heart: treating it as a separate curriculum, and listing it with other curricula. We use it often at the same time as the installfest, as a mini-workshop for teachers.

I think of docs as the repo for all our content to be shared with people, either at our workshops, or just by interested people, and that includes our curriculum for teaching people how to teach. By contrast, I think of Bridge Troll as our admin tool for organizing workshops. And I'm hesitant to move our content there; it will make it less accessible.

What do you guys think of this TOC:

- Teacher Training: Learn to Teach
- Frontend: 
     - HTML & CSS
     - Javascript (assuming this finally becomes a thing)
- Backend:
     - Installfest: Install Ruby and Rails
     - Ruby
     - Intro to Rails
     - Intermediate Rails
     - Rails and Rails and Rails

I know putting the Installfest under Backend will be controversial, but people are always confused at front end workshops if they need to install things. And it gives us a little room to grow if we want separate installfests for different workshops. Just my :thought_balloon:s. :smile_cat:

[rachelmyers]

I'm really sorry that we're making this DNS question mostly about TOC. But I just wanted to say we should save space in our TOC for translations like the spanish version that the Codificadas are doing a really great job of creating/maintaining.

[lilliealbert]

All the things @rachelmyers said.

[nuclearsandwich]

Given that we have no idea where those urls are written in permanent ink. I'd be in favor of any solution that redirects to current content. Ideally installfest.railsbridge would link to $current_home/installfest and likewise for the curriculum but then someone has to volunteer an nginx instance to do that.

[mehulkar]

Treating teacher training as a curriculum makes sense to me. It turns Railsbridge into an ecosystem for education versus a classroom where the student is the client/user/customer. It's ultimately more powerful and flexible in the long run.

[alexch]

I suggest if we're talking about making changes to the TOC that we open a new issue. For now I'd like to pull this issue back to its title "retire the installfest & curriculum subdomains".

Contradicting what I suggested above, I now think it's a good idea to retire the installfest and curriculum subdomains and instead redirect those to docs.railsbridge.org/installfest. Then we can reserve the subdomain for different locales e.g. es.railsbridge.org/installfest -- each of which might have a different TOC and especially might have differently spelled page/site names e.g. es.railsbridge.org/festivaldeinstalacion .

I'm going to start coding that solution, but I won't merge it until I get some :+1: +1s over here. (Or dead silence, since silence implies consent.)

[lilliealbert]

Ha.

:+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1:

[tjgrathwell]

Who will do this retiring? Currently installfest.railsbridge and curriculum.railsbridge seem to be doing their same ol' thing.

[lilliealbert]

Proposal: update this issue every 6 months for the rest of time.

... or decide that my original idea is no longer important, and close it.

Votes?

[ultrasaurus]

:+1: :+1: for @alexch to retire the installfest and curriculum subdomains and instead redirect those to docs.railsbridge.org/installfest

I love the idea that we're teaching more than coding and keeping teacher training integrated with teaching coding. The more I witness the awesomeness of RailsBridge students, the more I think that the path from student -> TA -> teacher / organizer is a path to enlightenment. We teach a pattern of life-long learning. We teach communication skills -- talking about code, white-boarding, problem-solving as in debugging and problem-solving for people conflicts. We teach leadership. I think there's an opportunity to transmit some of that through written words someday. For now, I think the only place that is written down is teacher training. I think I'm arguing for "leave it the way it is" except for the URL re-direct thing above. If folks disagree or see action to be done aside from that, pls open a new issue.