[Actionchix] The former website effort: an apology to Jen and Gloria

[Mary Gardiner]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2007, Mary Gardiner wrote:
> Essentially there hasn't been any progress for six months or so. This is
> partly my fault and partly a group failing I think.

Jen-Mei Wu has rightfully asked for a fuller version of events and an
apology from me regarding this.

Firstly, the apology: I apologise to Jen and Gloria for implying that
they failed in any way in their part of developing a Plone replacement
for www.linuxchix.org. As shown below, they did a successful Plone
install fairly quickly, and the project failed after that point, almost
entirely due to a misunderstanding on my part.

Here's a fuller version of events:

We had decided to installed Plone and I asked for updates on Aug 26 and
Sep 4:
 1. http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2006-August/000474.html
 2. http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2006-September/000478.html

Jen and Gloria replied both times and Jen reported that Plone had been
installed by Sep 5:
 3. http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2006-September/000481.html

There was then some genuine confusion on my part about how accessible
the site was.  Had I read the above message properly (and I did not, in
fact, do so until just now), I would have realised that the Plone
install was publicly accessible already. However, there was some
discussion about it becoming accessible at http://test.linuxchix.org/:

 4. http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2006-September/000482.html
 5. http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2006-September/000484.html

In message 5 above, Jen suggested having a 'secret' virtual host listed
only in people's /etc/hosts files. This was where I got stuck, as I
reported on Oct 7, because I have a transparent proxy between me and the
Internet, and changes to my /etc/hosts don't help me connect to remote
sites:
 6. http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2006-October/000485.html

This seems to be where things ended. Not remembering that I could access
it via the alternative URL in message 3 above, and not getting any
replies to message 6, I thought that I couldn't access it at all until
such time as Dancer put test.linuxchix.org in the linuxchix.org DNS. I
asked Dancer for this off-list but got no reply.

I actually recall asking about this more times than I seem to have. I
don't know why I found this small impasse insurmountable, but I did. I
genuinely believed I couldn't access the site, and did not know what to
do from there, especially as the list died down.

-Mary