[ic] New project site underway @ interchangecommerce.org

[Jon Jensen]

Interchange community,

For over 12 years now we have hosted the Interchange project site at the 
domain icdevgroup.org. It was never a pretty name, but it worked.

However, people have a hard time remembering it, and it is about as bad as 
can be for search engines / SEO -- not one real word in there, nothing 
about ecommerce or Perl or Interchange.

Back in 2013 I talked with a few people in the Interchange community (Jure 
and/or Stefan, if I recall correctly) about this. We brainstormed and I 
registered interchangecommerce.org and started setting up a clone of the 
existing project site rewritten under Dancer.

I stalled out in my effort to do that, but then this past summer I asked 
my son Phin to pick it up. He did, and got much of the content migrated, 
made a few templating simplifications for navigation, and set up Sphinx 
for searching. The Sphinx search is now broken, and the content has gotten 
out of date as the old production site has been updated.

But today I set up nginx and Starman to host the site, so that it's at 
least functional enough to mention here and gather feedback from everyone:

http://www.interchangecommerce.org/

Would you all be in favor of moving to this new domain? It's got two real 
words, would help SEO, and gives a fresh start to the project HQ as IC6 
starts to get more traction.

I presume nobody objects to moving the project site to Dancer, since Phin 
and I are the primary maintainers of the content on the old one now 
anyway. :)

There will still be work to finish the Dancer site, move the documentation 
and demos and Mailman, etc. After it's moved over, I would love to see a 
new design for the site and updated content about Interchange 6, but I 
decided not to hold up the work over that stuff. One thing at a time.

I would also like to serve the new site entirely over HTTPS and SPDY, 
which is the way the world is going and which will serve an ecommerce 
project like this well. GlobalSign is offering free SSL certificates for 
open source projects, so that may be worth applying for:

https://www.globalsign.com/ssl/ssl-open-source/

Anyway, I wanted to solicit community feedback before putting much more 
work into this. Please let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Jon


-- 
Jon Jensen
End Point Corporation
https://www.endpoint.com/