parrot.github.com website

[Andrew Whitworth]

I started working on a new website for Parrot at github.

http://parrot.github.com

This is something of an experiment to look into alternate website
hosting options, and also to look at expanding parrot's web presence.
This website is a git repo:
http://github.com/parrot/parrot.github.com. Any current Parrot
committer can clone a copy, edit, and push changes like any other
repo. Github's pages functionality will automatically update the
website when you push to the repo. (It takes a few seconds, maybe up
to a minute, for the changes to propagate).

One aspect of this that I find extremely appealing is that updating
the website is as easy as committing to a git repo and all our current
committers have access, unlike the parrot.org VM. This could
potentially make the release process much easier, because we can copy
the html docs files from the parrot repo to the parrot.github.org repo
and push. It becomes so simple that we can trivially automate it. In
the future, if we chose to, we can easily redirect the parrot.org
domain name to this page.

Right now there are a few content pages, which I've written in
Markdown because that's what I'm most comfortable with. We can use POD
as well, if people are more comfortable with that instead. I've added
pages to list things like compilers and other projects. I've only
filled them in with a handful of things that I could name off the top
of my head, please feel free to add more entries.

I've also used the github pages tool to automatically generate a page
for Plumage.

http://parrot.github.com/plumage

The page is U-G-L-Y ugly, and I don't have time tonight to play with
it. Patches welcome. Unlike the main parrot page which is a separate
repo, the plumage page is a branch in the parrot/plumage repo. Clone a
copy of plumage and checkout the "gh-pages" branch. Anything you
commit to that branch and push to github will automatically appear on
the webpage.

This is an experiment, and I encourage parrot hackers to play around
with it, add content, get a feel for how it works, etc. If we do like
it as a community we can start finding ways to better integrate it
into our systems and processes. We may even be able to replace some
other pages, like the current parrot.org.

Thanks,

--Andrew Whitworth