Posted by Ken Leung at 04/26/2001 11:41 PM EST
College Student on team #192, Gunn Robotics Team, from Henry M. Gunn Senior High School.
In Reply to: message boards, chat rooms, etc
Posted by Patrick Butler on 04/26/2001 10:29 PM EST:
Having a centralized web page is certainly a great way for teams to have easy access to various resources on the web, and I think it's a great idea.
But there are couple of things we will have to consider if we really want something like this happening, and the most immediate issue I can see is the personnel working on this big scale web page.
As you mention each of those 7 categories, I could think of some great representatives of the different areas. So, if we are to combine all 7 of them, we will need different people working on different area. I know we don't necessary need all 7 webmasters, but we need a few to create/program different areas.
So, we will need to find the people to do it. For the people interested: May I suggest that you contact some of the teams' web page I am going to list below, which I think are great representatives of each of the 7 area, and see what kind of work it takes to maintain their web pages...
Second problem will be the traffic on this centralized. So far, I already know that the Chief Delphi website is killing their service provider because so many people visit everyday. I can also imagine the US FIRST website have a tons of traffic tooˇK So we will need to find some way of supporting this kind of popularity.
Third problem is how can we get people to switch to the new web page. Right now, I feel comfortable with all the different web pages because I have all of them bookmarked in a folder, so it is really convenient for me to go from page to page. Also, I enjoy how each teamˇ¦s web page having their own style and theme, making the visit from one site to another more interesting.
I think the first step right now is to put the links together, so that everyone will at least have some clue about where the resources are. There are three option after that: find people to completely create a site out of thin air, or using some sort of innovative interface to join the existing web pages together (linking sites together by links or some sort of navigator on top of the screen leading people from one place to another), or do some of both.
I know this is lot of work, but if it actually happens, then it will be great help to everyone.
Some popular websites I can think of right now:
Message boards: Chief Delphi forum
www.chiefdelphi.com
Chat rooms: Tigerbolt chat room
http://www.rit.edu/~us1stwww/chat.html
Links to video streams: (? do someone know who's in charge in this? NASA? Alan of 255?)
http://vanseg-1.arc.nasa.gov/first.html
More general info: US FIRST , SharingFIRST, and the Nuts4FIRST website
www.usfirst.org
http://sharingfirst.mit.edu/
http://nuts4first.net/
Not directly associated with any team: again, SharingFIRST and Nuts4FIRST, but also firstrobotics.net
http://sharingfirst.mit.edu/
http://nuts4first.net/
www.firstrobotics.net
Centralized robots database: SOAP108, and GMCIA(link?)
www.soap108.com