Updating the website

[winkleink]

I\'ve been coming to the website for a while and checked for new posts on the homepage. When there was nothing there I\'d leave again as there was no update.

Then I discovered that all the action is on Twitter and in the Forum.

I know it\'s more work but it would be great if more items were added to the Homepage.

Since the sticker thing on the 18th there has been a couple of interviews and videos, substantial work on getting qt5 working on the Raspberry Pi and also there is work being hinted at relating to the educational launch in 2012 and of course the fact that the first 10,000 are going into production.
None of this is on the official site.

As more normal people (the ones you want to attract to Raspberry Pi) come to the site their first impression is that nothing much is happening.

I just think it would be good to have some of these wins and headline worthy developments on the site and not just buried in the forum/twitter feed.

Albert.

[liz]

There genuinely isn\'t much to report until the PCBs come back. And I think that perhaps you overestimate the number of people working on this website and the amount of time they (cough…I) have in the day at the moment - what with stickers, financing, meetings, travelling up and down between Cambridge and Manchester and dealing with the press there\'s very little time in my day at the moment. When there\'s something genuinely newsworthy, we post it, but we have a policy round here of not posting stuff that\'s mundane. I will stick the WSJ bit on the front page to keep you happy, though!

[Point3Forever]

Wait what? I didn\'t realize that all that has happened. I check the forums, but I hardly ever check twitter. I guess I\'ll have to if I want more up-to-date information then.

[Chris]

Might I suggest just having a twitter feed section on the home page, just a small box showing the tweets about the R-Pi. Then anyone accessing this site can see tweets without having to use twitetr themselves.

[liz]

There is a twitter feed on the home page - you might want to consult your adblocker\'s whitelist! Oh - and the 1st 10k are not in production. We have about 100 alpha PCBs in production and testing, which we hope to populate next week. Because we don\'t have a firm date on that population, I\'m not posting about it until we do.

[eggn1n3]

[quote]We have about 100 alpha PCBs in production and testing, which we hope to populate next week. [/quote]
These are not the new credit card size boards right? If so, wouldn\'t you call them beta\'s?

[liz]

Sorry, yes; I mean betas. Absolutely knackered, which leads to this kind of slip-up!

[eggn1n3]

Great news! You must be so happy when all the boards are getting in production....

[ukscone]

[quote]Quote from liz on November 24, 2011, 13:38
Sorry, yes; I mean betas. Absolutely knackered, which leads to this kind of slip-up![/quote]

So just another 20 or so iterations of the board to go through then. how many letters in the greek alphabet?

[ukscone]

[quote]Quote from liz on November 24, 2011, 13:38
Sorry, yes; I mean betas. Absolutely knackered, which leads to this kind of slip-up![/quote]

Did you have to mention the B word? now i am having a panic attack about the maths workbooks we used in primary school. Please don\'t mention anything to do with pirates or ITA or i\'ll have to find a dark room to lie down in

[liz]

[quote]Quote from eggn1n3 on November 24, 2011, 13:40
Great news! You must be so happy when all the boards are getting in production.... [/quote]

Eben and I were just discussing what we plan on doing to celebrate last night, over a kitchen table covered with envelopes, stickers, labels and stamps.

Stamps are a particular sore point at the moment. We\'re meant to be using the Royal Mail\'s Smart Stamp service, where you can print the franking in your office, as part of the address label. It\'s been down for most of this week, so we had to go out and buy 700 normal stamps and stick them on by hand. Then the post office ran out of stamps (because all the Smart Stamp users had turned up in droves), so I ended up in a supermarket 10 miles away buying up all their stamps…

It\'s the unforeseen stuff like this that\'s making it all so much fun at the moment. </deepsarcasm>

[ukscone]

I bet the people behind you in the supermarket stamp queue were really happy with you

How long until you start asking people to send you a self addressed stamped envelope if only to protect your sanity.

[meltwater]

[quote]Eben and I were just discussing what we plan on doing to celebrate last night, over a kitchen table covered with envelopes, stickers, labels and stamps.[/quote]
Perhaps that might be worth re-wording slightly...or perhaps thats just me

Good old British royal mail. It\'s almost like they don\'t want you to send things. Should have applied to make the stickers official stamps

The last date for Christmas posting is 14th Dec for parcels...mind you with Royal Mail involved who knows, the best things come to those who wait and for r-pi we all will.

You have our sympathy! Keep up the good work, getting closer it seems.

[liz]

I notice I seem to be whinging a lot at the moment! I should stop it - this is actually one of the most exciting things I\'ve ever done.

[Bacan]

[quote]Quote from liz on November 24, 2011, 14:50
I notice I seem to be whinging a lot at the moment! I should stop it - this is actually one of the most exciting things I\'ve ever done. [/quote]

Oh, just wait until Eben gets you to give up on wine for 9 months. Then the real fun starts.

[Edit] Wish we could help with the R-Pi issues {not giving up wine for 9 months}, instead of being the cause of R-Pi business rough-spots. {Thought I better qualify the helping thing}

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For Xmas, I want a nice black leather jacket with a big Raspberry Pi logo on the back. Maybe next year.

[winkleink]

Liz - thank you for come back on this.
I understand that it is just you. I was just hoping that as more normal people come to the site their 1st impression will be so positive that they don\'t lose interest before the launch.

As somebody else suggested maybe move the Forum posts and Twitter feed to the top.
I know for me I didn\'t loo at the right hand side for a fair while. I think Google has trained me to ignore the right hand side as it usually isn\'t the most interesting content. On most blog type sites it\'s usually just link to the posts.

[Montekuri]

[quote]Quote from liz on November 24, 2011, 13:38
Sorry, yes; I mean betas. Absolutely knackered, which leads to this kind of slip-up![/quote]
Alpha board, beta board... how much time we will have to wait then until the pi board are produced?
Just a joke

[radu]

But if you ordered 10K kits, and if you expect a good demand, why didn\'t you do them all at once? Isn\'t it cheaper to do a big batch at once?
If you only have 100 boards printed, then it will take forever for most people to get their stuff..

[Montekuri]

[quote]Quote from radu on November 24, 2011, 17:34
But if you ordered 10K kits, and if you expect a good demand, why didn\'t you do them all at once? Isn\'t it cheaper to do a big batch at once?
If you only have 100 boards printed, then it will take forever for most people to get their stuff..[/quote]
I think they will produce a first 100 boards just to test the final PCB layout and its components.

[asb]

radu: the 100 boards is a test run. Imagine if you produced 10k boards and then found a fault.

[obarthelemy]

And on top of that, the Foundation\'s... well, founders, are guaranteeing payments with their own money. Imagine they produce 100K and sell 20K, or sell them all and 30% turn out faulty... isntant homelessness.
Plus, really, it\'s not a big issue. It\'ll take 3-4 batches to make everyone happy, and in 2 months we\'ll wonder what the fuss was all about.

[radu]

Oh, I thought they already tested the design with a smaller batch.
Anyway, 2 months is a long time, I have some projects for the winter that I would like to start right away

[meltwater]

What ever they need to do to ensure that it goes as smoothly as possible is fine by me, more than willing to wait if required. I would rather get one in a few months than for the project to be at any serious risk, not only because it would mean there\'d be none, but the project deserves success.

It\'s no light operation though, 10k of parts represents a heck of a lot of money on the line, but it is clear that they do know a lot about producing such products and the business side so they will do what they need to do to ensure that there is the highest chance of success.

It is clear they are extremely passionate about this and are just as keen to get as many out to developers as soon as they are able to. Many companies in such a position would be spending months product testing even with the final design and you\'d be looking at 3rd quarter before you\'d see anything and only then they would kick off with full-scale production runs. Hopefully we will get the best of both as developers.

We may think the demand is high (our personal demand is I know) and chances are the 1st batch will sell quickly, but the limit on the 1st batch is probably a very careful balance between available funds, risk of paper-weights and returns, debugging of production issues, how many they would actually sell (ok, that probably not an issue IMHO) verses the clear want of the developers and the obvious benefits of getting as many as possible out into the world.

It would probably be less risky for even small batches and a longer period between runs, but I\'m glad that\'s not the case for obvious selfish reasons. Fingers crossed, the 1st 10k will get the green-light from everyone and they can produce them as fast as they need.

^^Of course, I am no expert.

My post which puts it into scale...856 meters of r-pi!
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum?mingle ... c&t=1134.2

[Wooloomooloo]

I\'m not crazy about the rather static main page either but hey, it\'s your site, you make the rules. Still, since I don\'t have a twitter account (nor a Facebook one, sorry, will not get one either), I prefer to keep up with RasPi by RSS feed in my reader (which you can access at http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/302666251.rss, even if Twitter would rather not have you know that).

[liz]

I guess it\'s a difference in aesthetics (or in the philosophy of blogging, if you like); we much prefer to put substantial news only on the main page, rather than a load of inconsequential waffle. There\'s been an increase in numbers in last few years for popular sites which update many times daily in the last few years, thanks to the Gawker sites, the Cheezburger blogs, and things like Boing Boing, all of which have *large* teams, for whom content writing is their only job. That flavour of blog is becoming a norm, but it\'s an expensive enterprise in both time and money. We don\'t have a team, I\'m not poised to drop pearls of wisdom *all* day long, and there simply isn\'t the content to do that sort of thing.

The shape of what we do at Raspberry Pi dictates that there will be weeks (mostly when we\'re at conferences or when new hardware/designs hit) which are busy on the front page, and weeks like this one, where we\'re waiting on production, which will be a bit quieter. And personally, I find conversations (like the one we\'re having now, or the ones on Twitter - and even those in the comments sections under blog posts) can be more enlightening than a few paragraphs spoken by the Voice Of Authority on the front page.

But given how many of you are expressing a wish for waffle, I\'ll look at putting some of the bigger media coverage we get on the front page too. Hope that\'s a reasonable compromise!