Forum

Hello Hugo

I Just had a look on wikipedia's hiawatha article. I was old (v8.4).
I have updated it and also included SNI in feature list.
I have also updated other pages on wikipedia that link hiawatha
eg: webserver comparison page.

Plz have a look at it.

Thanks a lot! I changed 'SSI support' from no to yes, because Hiawatha comes with a 'SSI CGI', which has support for the most common SSI functions.

I was not sure what SSI is so I did not touch it.
I was thinking for quite some time how to contribute to hiawatha..finally I got a chance
I am also willing to contribute in development but I am a student, so my knowledge and expertise
are very very limited although I keep reading a lot but being an undergraduate student has its own limitations
Please let me know if you would like me to contribute and please suggest some direction about how to get started.

I may not be able to do much because of my limited skills but I assure I'll work on them

Thanks for your offer. There are two things you can help me with:
1) My biggest problem is that Hiawatha is not very well known. Perhaps you have some new ideas about how to promote Hiawatha in a non-intrusive way. I don't want people to hate Hiawatha the moment they hear from it.
2) How well is your English? It's not my native language, so it's very likely I made mistakes in the documentation I wrote.

Even I am not native english speaker but, all my education has been in english medium so I can help with that. BTW your documentation is ok. I haven't been through all the details, but as much as I have read it is easy to understand. I'll work on it and send you some samples.

About spreading the word, I have realised that social media is really very helpful, has very large potential reach and, it is free!!
People now a days visit facebook and twitter more frequently than they check their emails or update their blogs, it is viral, and for project like hiawatha,
which has been previously included in distros, it should not be very difficult to gain visibility. Many projects do this and I don't think it will create a bad impression on people. Using facebook will help you estimate the reach of hiawatha in different regions of the world etc. (there are quite many things in facebook analytics).

One more thing that can be done is getting hiawatha distributed with distros like was in some 6.x release
and a ppa for ubuntu(?) if feasible, it is more userfriendly not having to compile packages every time an update is released.
As of now, only place to hear about hiawatha is this website. People tend to move away when they do not find multiple sources of information and this is very important. Some thing can be done in this direction too.
I would be good to do apt-get or yum to install hiawatha.
:)

Some more things came to my mind -
1) Hiawatha is a long word and to and extent difficult. Hiawatha can be publicised with and acronym eg: HiWSe Pronounced as Heu-zee or some thing else
which is easier and catchy. You can continue using Hiawatha as the name.
2) You can apply to Google Summer of Code as an organisation. The project is old and mature enough.
3) If there is a way to inform forum users any activity on their posts? That would be nice to have and increase involvement of users in forums.

IMHO you should keep download statics displayed on the home page.
Please restore contribute page because, if the project gains traction, people will look forward to contribute and they might get disappointed.
You may also start post beta releases for testing as you used to provide earlier.

Hi,

I like some of these ideas. I'd like to see Hiawatha on:
Facebook and Twitter. Especially Twitter because I follow most of the major players there to get my latest dose of updates.

-k0nsl

I'd like to +1 some of what Mr. Jain said.

Like it or not, social media is an effective tool to use. Set up a Facebook fan page, and add a "like" button & "google+" button (I just this moment tested the google share feature), a twitter feed (that posts to the facebook page), and a blog/news rss feed on the hiawatha site, that posts to twitter (once it's all set up, there's not really any ongoing maintenance, it all just ...propagates).

About a month ago, I took the opportunity to upgrade the hardware in my family network to something newer and less power-hungry (three servers, each on a Supermicro D525 Atom with 8GB ram). The move (from scratch) from LAMP on CentOS 5 to LHMP on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was a breeze. Unfortunately the move from Qmail/squirrelmail on CentOS to Postfix/Dovecot/Roundcube, has taken three times as long to get right (but at least the syslog tail is fun to watch)

In the meantime (off and on), I've been testing the Hiawatha setup with the apache bench utility. While it's not a real userbase, it has been helpful for tweaking the MySQL setup in order to get the most out of the Atom processors. And I'm fairly confident that my Hiawatha settings are optimized as well.

We'll start putting content on the site later this evening, but there's a small hiawatha banner in the footer of http://www.jonesfamily.us

While small hobbyist users like me are all fine and good, I'd imagine that extending the user base really needs the help of a few small web hosting companies that tout secure servers as a selling feature. Tap the user base for referrals.

My $0.02*

* DISCLAIMER: Due to the effects of a debt-based fiat currency system, $0.02 is worth less now than when I began typing

Thankyou k0nsl and Mr. Jones for your positive feedback. IMHO what is important for a community to grow is frequent follwups. Suppose, there is an opt-in email notification for forum posts and comments in posts, the interaction of community will definetly grow. As of now, I check this forum twice a day. Most people will be bothered if they need to do this. If there is email notification it would be much easier for community members to get notified when there is some activity on their followed forums.

And for suggestion about hosting companies, plz have a look at http://www.lowendbox.com/ and provide your valuable feedback .
Lots of people use lighttpd or ngnix to host websites in low config VPS.

I've created a twitter account [twitter.com] for the Hiawatha webserver. I will use it to post messages about development progress. For now, Facebook is a step to far for me. Being a security freak, I also value privacy very much. Using Facebook is just too much for me

I'll change the forum so you can leave your e-mail address for notifications when a reply has been posted. But that will take some time to make.

About providing pacakges: I used to do that, but lots of people installed the Debian packages on all sorts of Debian clones which caused all sorts of weird problems. I replaced that with a 'build your own package' script. I can't make it more easier than that.

Facebook provides different modes of signup. You may create totally new account for that ?

And for the packages, I am just suggesting PPA for just ubuntu

Thanks Mr. Leisink for adding Twitter. That's going to be a good way for me to get the latest Hiawatha progress
I sort of agree with you about Facebook, but it's a OK way to get more traction. However, Twitter probably is enough though.

Sweet.

-k0nsl

I justed uploaded Hiawatha packages to launchpad for my PPA. I have no idea what's next...

+1, thats cool

While I used the dpkg -i command to install the .deb package on Ubuntu... it is my understanding that when you compile the package on your box it seems to work better (whether your box tailors the settngs, I'm not sure).

So, when you sent our your recent rebuild notice, I used Samiux's (sp?) 'build your own .deb' instructions to do just that. It was so easy, that even I could do it.

Intuitively, I would expect that most folks interested in Hiawatha are proficient at package management (or can Google same). But Launchpad does seem a good way to get "discovered" (plus a mention on ubuntuforums.org).

Yes, compiling the software on your own system is better. Unless you are 100% sure that the package was build for your specific OS. In that case it doesn't matter. Using the pre-build package only saves time and effort.