In my last blog entry I used the term "image-hack". It seems like it has been considered to have a negative feeling attached to it. Even though I consider this very amusing in a community that likes to pride itself with the term "hackers" I guess I can understand why people consider it a negative term. Even though technically a mockup of a website in image form actually feels just a crude hack it wasn't meant to belittle what pixelgirl has produced. Her image-hack looks extremely well.
Unfortunately no further contact after the debconf was established and personally I'm not convinced how the tiny image would work for other pages besides the start page—and removing the DSAs and News from the start page is a no-go, we actually do receive positive feedback for that. So it is what it is, an image-hack. An extremely well done one, but still just that.
Like written in a former blog entry I am working on preparing for getting Kalle's Debian Redesign tested and installed. Even though some unfortunate events happened which made me reconsider my efforts and a lot of things changed for me I am still up with the effort. Mostly because I didn't became part of the webmasters just to chicken away in the face of obstacles, and also not just because yet another image-hack did pop up that neither showed anything usable or overall-thoughts or actual code/concepts or even tried to get in contact with the webteam.
I only remember to have received positive feedback in which I also include minor change suggestions like that the exact hits and other hits sections in the packages site aren't as clearly distinguishable as before. I have of course forwarded these to Kalle and we are looking for a solution that would go with the style. Speaking of the packages site I finally managed to get the packages from the main pool displayed too so it shouldn't behave differently to the old one anymore in that respect (see e.g. wesnoth for some more distributed package).
The next step I finished these last days was setting up a testsite for www as you can find it on www.deb.at. Please notice that you might want to surf that site in English (either change your Accept-Language settings or click on the English links at the bottom of the pages) because some of the changes are only recognizable there; like, the main page in other languages look immensely different.
Where to go from here? Kalle also has proposal for the BugTracking System and the Planet so that targets are the obvious next steps. I can't tell yet when they will be done, depends on how complicated it is to set up an environment for it, but I will keep you updated.