This has been discussed in the past on IRC but never went anywhere.
I think we should have a more scalable DNS naming structure. The flat space we have at the moment won't scale particularly well - we've already had a collision with Manchester, UK and Manchester, US.
So I think we should move to a simple two level system.
oxford.uk.openguides.org london.uk.openguides.org manchester.uk.openguides.org manchester.us.openguides.org boston.us.openguides.org vienna.at.openguides.org
and so on.
Worldwide sites like engineer.openguides.org could stay.
Whether we want to enforce existing guides to switch over I don't know, but we should at least put in redirects.
Secondly, we were talking about improvements to the DNS management recently. Various solutions were mentioned and no conclusions were reached, so I'm going to offer mine here and see if we can get to a conclusion.
Currently openguides.org is associated with Earle's personal account with gandi.net. I suggest that we get an Openguides-specific account with someone (them, or Black Cat Networks - my employer, I know we can do this, for example). That would give us a web-based update interface to which nominated individuals could have access.
We then have a wiki page that documents the DNS entries, who requested them, when they were added, who by, etc etc, to keep track of things. It's not a technically neat solution but is very easy to implement and provides a more stable DNS platform than something custom would (for example zone files in SVN were mentioned).
Comments welcomed for these two matters.
Regards,
Dominic.
So I think we should move to a simple two level system.
oxford.uk.openguides.org london.uk.openguides.org manchester.uk.openguides.org manchester.us.openguides.org
So, would that be Manchester NH, Manchester, MA or one of the other Manchesters?
boston.us.openguides.org vienna.at.openguides.org
and so on.
Worldwide sites like engineer.openguides.org could stay.
Whether we want to enforce existing guides to switch over I don't know, but we should at least put in redirects.
Secondly, we were talking about improvements to the DNS management recently. Various solutions were mentioned and no conclusions were reached, so I'm going to offer mine here and see if we can get to a conclusion.
Currently openguides.org is associated with Earle's personal account with gandi.net. I suggest that we get an Openguides-specific account with someone (them, or Black Cat Networks - my employer, I know we can do this, for example). That would give us a web-based update interface to which nominated individuals could have access.
We then have a wiki page that documents the DNS entries, who requested them, when they were added, who by, etc etc, to keep track of things. It's not a technically neat solution but is very easy to implement and provides a more stable DNS platform than something custom would (for example zone files in SVN were mentioned).
Comments welcomed for these two matters.
Regards,
Dominic.
-- Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/ PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)
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On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 01:36:38PM -0500, jesse wrote:
So, would that be Manchester NH, Manchester, MA or one of the other Manchesters?
I meant to add that I'll leave it to USians to comment on whether theirs should be a three level system with state. In most countries this doesn't tend to be necessary.
Cheers,
Dominic.
On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 06:38:20PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 01:36:38PM -0500, jesse wrote:
So, would that be Manchester NH, Manchester, MA or one of the other Manchesters?
I meant to add that I'll leave it to USians to comment on whether theirs should be a three level system with state. In most countries this doesn't tend to be necessary.
Not true. There are place name clashes in at least the UK, Australia, South Africa, Germany, Switzerland and France that I am aware of.
Perhaps you can suggest how we would name Croydon (Greater London) and Croydon (Cambridgeshire).
Also consider this town: http://www.grenspalen.nl/archief/baarle-map%20met%20enclave-aanduidingen-cen...
Which is in the Netherlands. The areas outlined in blue are Belgian enclaves. The area outlined in green are Dutch enclaves inside the Belgian enclaves.
Sorry, place names just ain't consistent. Your scheme will not work.
This one time, at band camp, David Cantrell wrote:
Not true. There are place name clashes in at least the UK, Australia, South Africa, Germany, Switzerland and France that I am aware of.
Place name clashes that we have not, and in all likelyhood will not, encounter.
Perhaps you can suggest how we would name Croydon (Greater London) and Croydon (Cambridgeshire).
There's also one in Sydney, but like Croydon being in the London guide, is easily covered by the Sydney guide. Croydon (Cambridgeshire) is unlikely to ever need a guide, and could easily be covered by a South Cambridgeshire guide.
The kind of attitude that gets us overdesigned DNS heirarchies would also have a committee deciding the names of categories. It's just not very Wikish.
Which is in the Netherlands. The areas outlined in blue are Belgian enclaves. The area outlined in green are Dutch enclaves inside the Belgian enclaves.
See also Greater Lille, most of which is in Belgium.
I do wonder if the most sensible thing is to stick with the current first-come-first-serve-with-sanity-check scheme and instead focus the effort on a good worldmap portal. One can wank about naming until the cows come home, leave again, come home again, die and are reborn in their next lives. Users are relatively unlikely to type "cambridge.openguides.org" rather than just "openguides.org" to get started.
Now, if there were a pretty map on the frontpage of openguides.org that showed guide coverage... ;)
On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 05:38:08PM -0500, jesse wrote:
Now, if there were a pretty map on the frontpage of openguides.org that showed guide coverage... ;)
+1
http://openguides.org/img/world_map.svg
Go nuts!
On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 11:01:47PM +0000, Earle Martin wrote:
http://openguides.org/img/world_map.svg
Go nuts!
So, how about a special page of output from the guides that announced the bounding box of their guide entries so that this can be autogenerated?
Cheers,
Dominic.
On Fri, 2 Dec 2005, jesse wrote:
I do wonder if the most sensible thing is to stick with the current first-come-first-serve-with-sanity-check scheme and instead focus the effort on a good worldmap portal.
indeed. first-come-first-serve-with-sanity-check scheme make sthe most sense. Since as dave said most people think of only one london. I also think we should have a nice dns scheme as well since addign another ServerAlias is hardly much work. city/town.state/county.country.openguides.org with then state/county wide sites as well and indeed country if we make use of the mirroring stuff. For example you could have the oxford guide which hen feeds into oxfordshire guide which holds everything else. Admiitedly places like croydon then get very confused. london/surrey or both.
also do first coem first served on city.country.openguides
admiitedly as you say this all wankign over naming schemes. and as simon said most people will just use google anyway.
One can wank about naming until the cows come home, leave again, come home again, die and are reborn in their next lives.
do we get to celebrate their lives by having them as nice juicy rare steaks before they are reborn?
On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 01:36:38PM -0500, jesse wrote:
So I think we should move to a simple two level system.
oxford.uk.openguides.org london.uk.openguides.org manchester.uk.openguides.org manchester.us.openguides.org
So, would that be Manchester NH, Manchester, MA or one of the other Manchesters?
Which is kind of where the discussion got to last time, and then got lost.
I personally am not a big fan of even 4 level domains, and adding a 5th would be particularly annoying. In addition, I think that most of the guides represent a larger area than Manchester, MA would. Looking through the Manchester result, Manchester, NH is the only one with population (In the US) greater than 20,000 (at 109k), with most results being somewhere between 1 and 5 thousand residents.
Cambridge doesn't need its own guide, nor does Brookline, nor probably even Mancester By the Sea. They can be included in the Boston guide without a problem.
I'd personally be in favor of larger cities - Boston, Chicago, SF, LA, NOLA, Miami, things like that - getting a higher level domain, and cities under 200,000 people or so being put under a state domain.
But that may just be because I live in Boston, and am biased :)
On 1 Dec 2005, at 18:33, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
Comments welcomed for these two matters.
While this idea is scalable, there's a point at which it becomes too abstract.
Where do you draw the line? Personally I think that if I go to x.openguides.org, and there is only one openguide for a city called "x", then it should go right to it.
If there are guides to two different cities called "x", then a disambiguation page should allow the user to choose, preferably with a big world map showing all the "x" that we have guides for.
This new city guide then has x.country.openguides.org or x.state.country.openguides.org as the unique hostname.
For me, the main thing that this exercise should ensure is that current URLs will work in future, and as such, doing something like:
http://x.openguides.org/old-url-etc
be the same, while having:
http://x.openguides.org/ being the redirect page.
The new guide only would then use a longer hostname.
Daniel
On 1/12/2005, "Daniel Smith" daniel@pling.net wrote:
While this idea is scalable, there's a point at which it becomes too abstract.
Where do you draw the line? Personally I think that if I go to x.openguides.org, and there is only one openguide for a city called "x", then it should go right to it.
That's certainly the more Wiki-ish approach. Deal with the edge cases as we hit them, rather than having a Grand Unified Hierarchy that attempts to deal with every possible case, including ones we might never hit and excluding the ones we didn't think of.
This has been discussed in the past on IRC but never went anywhere.
I think we should have a more scalable DNS naming structure. The flat space we have at the moment won't scale particularly well - we've already had a collision with Manchester, UK and Manchester, US.
So I think we should move to a simple two level system.
What about using the existing geographical structure of top level domain names? It would require the purchase of a domain for each country but for the little that it actually costs these days (at least for .uk) is this really a problem. I suppose you may also like to keep everything under the same TLD but it would solve the issue of having lots of levels in the domain name.
Whether we want to enforce existing guides to switch over I don't know, but we should at least put in redirects.
I like the suggestion of disambiguation pages when we do get a clash, with redirects up until then.
Currently openguides.org is associated with Earle's personal account with gandi.net. I suggest that we get an Openguides-specific account with someone (them, or Black Cat Networks - my employer, I know we can do this, for example). That would give us a web-based update interface to which nominated individuals could have access.
We then have a wiki page that documents the DNS entries, who requested them, when they were added, who by, etc etc, to keep track of things. It's not a technically neat solution but is very easy to implement and provides a more stable DNS platform than something custom would (for example zone files in SVN were mentioned).
I'd be willing to host DNS (and could probably also provide secondary) for the domain and could script up a web interface where users could be given passwords to make changes and document them.
On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 06:33:37PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
So I think we should move to a simple two level system. [Examples nusked] Whether we want to enforce existing guides to switch over I don't know, but we should at least put in redirects.
I'm wary of the URLs becoming too Byzantine when we start having to add in extra layers to cope with regions, states and so on. I'd like to suggest giving "naming precedence" to the largest city in a pair of cities with the same name, for example:
- london.openguides.org vs. london-ontario.openguides.org - manchester.openguides.org vs manchester-newhampshire.openguides.org - paris.openguides.org vs. paris-texas.openguides.org
If there's not much to differentiate two cities (Smallville, PA vs Smallville, AZ), then they should both have the state in their name (smallville-pennsylvania.openguides.org and smallville-arizona.openguides.org, in this case).
It would be courteous for the larger guide of such a pair to offer a prominent link to the smaller on its home page.
Currently openguides.org is associated with Earle's personal account with gandi.net. I suggest that we get an Openguides-specific account with someone (them, or Black Cat Networks - my employer, I know we can do this, for example). That would give us a web-based update interface to which nominated individuals could have access.
I'm 100% for this. There shouldn't be an SPOF for our DNS (that is to say, me!).
We then have a wiki page that documents the DNS entries, who requested them, when they were added, who by, etc etc, to keep track of things. It's not a technically neat solution but is very easy to implement
WFM.
Cheers,
Earle.
On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 06:33:37PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
I think we should have a more scalable DNS naming structure. The flat space we have at the moment won't scale particularly well - we've already had a collision with Manchester, UK and Manchester, US.
So I think we should move to a simple two level system.
oxford.uk.openguides.org london.uk.openguides.org manchester.uk.openguides.org manchester.us.openguides.org boston.us.openguides.org vienna.at.openguides.org
Bad idea. THE Vienna is in Austria, other Viennas are both less important and less likely to ever have a guide. And outside the few square miles around those other Viennas, everyone knows that Vienna means the capital of Austria. Users looking for THE Vienna would expect vienna.openguides.org to work, and they are far more numerous than those looking for Vienna, South Dakota, USA (population: 93 humans, all related to each other, and several hundred pigs all more intelligent than their owners).
And even if you ignore that, you still have to take account of this ... http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/gazetteer?manchester although none of them look very important so I expect we could recycle manchester.us.openguides.org fairly regularly when the only person in the manchester of the week who cares about openguides runs out of interest :-)
For the examples you give, the correct domain names would be ...
oxford.openguides.org london... manchester... manchester.something.us... boston... vienna...
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