On 03/05/07, Kjetil Torgrim Homme <kjetilho@???> wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-04-29 at 17:02 +0200, Magnus Holmgren wrote:
> > On Sunday 22 April 2007 22:23, Jeremy Harris wrote:
> > > The docs link on exim.org still gives a 4.66 doc?
> >
> > I've updated the webpages now. If I missed anything, please speak out.
>
> PLEASE make the URL to the Exim documentation stable. every time a new
> version comes out, the Google page rank is reset. in addition, nobody
> links to the documentation since the URLs will die within a year or so
> anyway. the end result is that a Google search will send people to list
> archives or shoddy howtos, and *never* the official documentation.
Whilst I agree with the principle, this is harder than you're
implying. The internal structure of the doc tree changes (if only
slightly) with each release, so it's not possible to have a persistent
URL for every sub-page - and when chapter numbers change, this
amplifies the problem. I think a bit of a redesign would help, though
- but remember that the web docs are generated with a toolchain which
also produces the other formats so it's not necessarily simple.
Judicious use of Google sitemaps would be be a good thing, too.
> as an example, I just searched for "isip exim". I got 512 hits, but at
> 156 Google said the rest were elided since they were similar to what I'd
> already seen. not *one* of these hits were at exim.org. the closest I
> got was a mirror: <http://exim.feraudet.com/exim-pdf-4.66/doc/spec.pdf>.
> this was hit #15.
But the old versions of the docs are not removed, so those should
still hit - I wonder why they don't?
> trying to emulate a slightly more savvy user, I tried the search "isip
> site:exim.org". you'll get the list archive almost exclusively. first
> hit outside the archive is a reference to the documentation to 4.30 at
> hit #49. the two hits for 4.66 documentation come VERY LAST!
> obviously, 4.67 documentation can't be found yet at all.
This is certainly an indexing issue - again, sitemaps would do the trick.
> this not clearly helping the situation with newbie users not reading or
> even finding the documentation, and the fix is simple. please do it.
As I said, it's not quite as simple as you're suggesting. But it's
probably worth some effort, I agree.
Peter
--
Peter Bowyer
Email: peter@???
