[Rd] Jazzing up the Task Views index page

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 3:34 PM, Joshua Wiley <jwiley.psych at gmail.com> wrote:

> Barry, is this a test/example only or would you plan on keeping
> something like that on your site even if it is not adopted for cran
> task views?  If it is not adopted elsewhere and you are willing to
> maintain it, I would like to link to it.

 It's really only a test, partly for fun, partly to try and kick up
some of the dust on the R web pages.

 There's been a few comments about that, for sure. The main R web
pages are becoming secondary to other community sites for information
on R and packages and so on. I know it is essentially maintained by
the developers primarily for the developers (as is R itself) but at
some point the users will take over - as they are with the community
sites springing up. However, it would be nice if www.r-project.org
took you to a lively, engaging web site with twitter feeds and google
+1 buttons and latest news postings. And didn't use framesets.

 There's also the issue of CRAN and its mirrors. Mirror technology is
so last century - the way to do these things now is via CDNs - content
delivery networks. You do magic redirection via http 302 responses, or
metalinks. It enables better logging, better resilience. All it needs
is a running instance of MirrorBrain. Or just stick .nyud.net on the
end of the URL and have everything magically cached and proxied by the
Coral cache network.

 The inertia to all this is 'well, it works okay at the moment'. But
why is 'okay' okay, when 'better' is better?

 Anyway, how many of you played 'Top Trumps' when you were kids? My
Task Views index reminded me of it, so I just spent an hour grabbing
some stats and formatting them:

http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/~rowlings/R/TaskViews/card.html

The inaugural Task Views Top Trumps World Championship will be held in
Nashville in June...

Barry