More on Codezoo

I have created an initial DOAP file for Forrest. Currently we plan to update it manually since releases are infrequent and require some manual effort anyways.

Having done that, I went back to the Codezoo website hoping to submit the shiny new feed so that they could update the information on Forrest on their website. While Codezoo is a great concept, I think they still need to do a lot of work before it becomes truly usable:

  • for one, there is //no// obvious, visible mechanism for users/developers to submit/update their DOAP feeds
  • links to using DOAP on Codezoo are sparse and don’t stand out (given that Codezoo is the first biggest deployment of DOAP, I think this should change)
  • I’m sure Codezoo is thinking about this already, but right now there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism in place for stopping people from spamming the system (submitting fake DOAP feeds, for instance)
  • There is a “feedback” link on the top which seems to mean that we are supposed to give feedback on the Codezoo website. However, on the feedback page they also talk about “submitting new components”. I think this should go in a separate page on its own.

Meanwhile I would request other Apache projects to also get started on creating DOAP feeds for their projects. This is going to be like the RSS of blogs :-) Here are some links to get you started:

  1. Forrest in Codezoo
  2. Forrest Tuesday
  3. Better services
  4. HOWTO: Ubuntu on IBM Thinkpad T42
  5. FeedTree is half the solution

2 comments

  1. Marc Hedlund

    Hi,

    Thanks for the comments and suggestions. You’re definitely right that the DOAP scheme needs some improvement.

    We had a bug at the time you posted this, which prevented the DOAP submission link from appearing in some cases. If you return to the Forrest page on CodeZoo, you should see a link at the bottom of the summary for this purpose.

    I agree that spamming the system could be an issue, and we’ve started to think about ways to address this. For now, though, we think that getting people up and going with DOAP is the most important.

    Finally, thanks for the usability suggestions — we’ll work on those ideas.

    Thanks for trying DOAP and CodeZoo!

    -Marc Hedlund
    O’Reilly

    Reply
  2. diwaker

    Hi Mark,

    I checked the link you mentioned. Yes its there, and it leads me to a page where I can “submit a feed for Forrest”. However, I think there’s still some problem, and/or the site needs more work:

    When I submit the URL, nothing happens. Zilch. I mean sure something might have happened behind the scenes, but as a user, I don’t perceive _anything_ at all. There’s no helpful message, the page stays the same, nothing happens. Its disorienting.

    The only other way of finding out if the URL did get submit/read is to check if the project details were updated. Well, they haven’t so far.

    Sorry for the cribbing, I’m only trying to improve you guys :-)

    Reply

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