Wheee…
Check it out…
Sorry, http://www.firstscouting.org won’t work yet. (gotta write another email ;)).
Yeah, I know, nothing yet…
More coming soon!
I’ll also be looking for people to begin to develop stuff now.
Jack
Jack,
As i have stated before i would love to help in the developement of the FIRSTSN in anyway that i might be able to.
for starters, would you like any help with designing and implementing the website? I’d be more then happy to help with that.
can you make the url www.fsn.org or fsnet.org for us with lazy fingers?
if/when I know how to code websites I’ll help out… but I’m good with publicity and such, and the overall format of the site… just let me know
ByE
erin
*Originally posted by Erin Rapacki *
can you make the url www.fsn.org or fsnet.org for us with lazy fingers?
Both those names are already taken. Sorry.
Just wondering… why not firstscouting.net? I mean, it IS a network is it not? I’m slightly kidding though, it makes perfect sense as .org.
Also, I’ve noticed a lot of people have offered to help with the site, but not many are contacted to actually help? You know this would get off the ground a lot quicker if more people were working on it. And don’t make some excuse up about organization, it could easily be done bazaar (opensource) style.
hehe… yeah
As of now, the domains will be:
firstscouting.net
firstscouting.org
***.org
of course, there were other “first choices” but they’ve allready been taken, so that’s the best i’ve found so far. If anyone can come up with something else that’s open, we can add it to the list to.
Now, in terms of getting this off the ground.
Well… we just got our first VPS online yesterday night. Our dedicated server will hopefully be up before the end of the week. Until now, we really haven’t had any webspace which people could use. (The domains will be coming soon after too…)
You do bring up a very good point though. We have some general ideas, and now that we actually have some server space, where do we go? How does this type of project begin so that no ones work is wasted and work isn’t repeated? There is so much that we want this project to do, but where do we begin? My thought was to begin to design some type of basic site. Something to handle some simple data. (Based off the 2003 game). Then we could try to interface collection devices with it. Then, we could begin to design a really good web interface.
IE: Just try something simple first to see how it works, then do it again, but much more indepth. Also, make it so that just some fields would have to be changed when the 04 game is announced.
Ideas?
PS: Lets now move fast, we have 1.2 gigs of web space to work with now! 
I’d suggest that you hold off on any programming in the beginning.
Start up a few in-depth technical theads & discuss the design and overall functionality to death. It’s better to work out big mistakes in the beginning than worry about them when you have heavy traffic and not alot of time (build season,etc).
Just a suggestion though.
Okay so my suggestions as far as were to go now:
1> Make a list of things that the site should contain them begin to come up with descriptions of what the whole system is and the ideology behind it
2> Make a list of things that need to be worked on what needs to get done, that way people can volunteer for specific things.
3> Start executing 1 and 2.
4> Set up a basic website for people to start using, i would say that setting up a forum on the site would probably be a good idea, as i can forsee there being alot of discussion by developers and users of the sytem that would probably best be handled on that site rather then on this forum.
After you have a plan in writing of what you want to do its much easier to actualy do it. Once we get that done and get a basic plan of whats going down, then people can start doing developement on stuff. We can have groups that are developing the actual FSN database, as well as other people who would be designing front ends and such for the database. Other groups could be concentrating on planning how the system will be used next year and people can start working on the pr side of stuff. You could also have people talking to FIRST to see if any of the ideas that were discussed earlier are more then just dreams, like networking the pits, and having internet access onsite, and tapping into their database…
Thats my 2 cents.
Once it gets to the point of actually organizing code and/or documentation, possibly the easiest way to keep track of revisions is by using CVS (as mentioned in another thread). This does have a learning curve, but if you use Smart CVS (http://www.smartcvs.org) it’s minimized, since that is a much easier CVS client than, say, WinCVS.
If you get to the point where you’d like help with working on the site software itself, or with hosting one of the leaf servers (if that is your eventual design) I could help with that, and could provide a Canadian leaf server on a DSL connection (current software: Apache 2.0.46 w/ PHP 4.3.2, MySQL, SSH, and all the other *nix goodies, but, of course more can be added as required. It’s a dynamic IP, but is very rarely disconnected, anyway, and has a DNS address using no-ip.net).
*Originally posted by jon *
I’ve noticed a lot of people have offered to help with the site, but not many are contacted to actually help? You know this would get off the ground a lot quicker if more people were working on it.
I agree, so far it looks like the “FEDS” have it under control.
*Originally posted by jon *
**Also, I’ve noticed a lot of people have offered to help with the site, but not many are contacted to actually help? You know this would get off the ground a lot quicker if more people were working on it. **
Well, right now, we’ve been trying to get basic organization set up. Jack has been getting the servers and domains, and that’s all that has really been done so far. Once the project gets a little farther along, we’ll be contacting people to help. Right now, though, there’s not any real work going on. Even when we do start working, though, there will need to be a lot of discussion before we even write a single line of code. It’s all still just a general idea, and we need a concrete plan before we start making the site. More to come on this, though, once we have the servers ready.
*Originally posted by AJ Quick *
**I agree, so far it looks like the “FEDS” have it under control. **
As for it being “under control,” it’s not really ours to control. Jack’s just doing the server setup; once that’s done, we’ll try to bring more people into this. There’s just not much to do, yet.
*Originally posted by Timothy D. Ginn *
**I could help with that, and could provide a Canadian leaf server **
Would that be a maple leaf?
Sorry i couldn’t resist this one…
But yah I would say that an important thing to decide is going to also be who will be organizing all of this. No offense jack, but this is going to be alot of work and the more people that can oversee smaller seperate issues, the better organized and efficent it will all be.
Since there has been alot of talk of open sourcing the whole project. Is there going to be some sort of a review board that decides what features and what new updates and versions people have made get assembled into the official one. Yah stuff like that.
I think the best thing to do is wait until some sort of message board is up on the site for everyone who is involved and interested to communicate on, then we can start seeing who wants to do what. and then break people up into groups.
*Originally posted by oneangrydwarf *
**I think the best thing to do is wait until some sort of message board is up on the site for everyone who is involved and interested to communicate on, then we can start seeing who wants to do what. and then break people up into groups. **
cool…
well then, who would like to set up a message board? Something like phpBB, iB, … would be great.
If you would like to, (please, know what you’re doing ;)), send me a pm and I can get you ftp, ssh, MySQL.,… access to server. Yeah, for now, the url it would just be a long subdomain ( http://fsn.vps.fluidhosting.com ), but that’s ok. SO… someone pm me 
jack
ps: I’m sorry that people feel like i’m doing everthing now. It’s just that there hasn’t really been too much else to do. Hopefully, one we get an entire forum system to ourselves, people can begin to do stuff 
ok… we’re having someone set up some phpBB fourms now, and when they’re online, he’ll post here to let you all know. 