lets rock

[Anson David Parker <adp6j at cms dot mail dot virginia dot edu>]

looks like it's time to rock and roll - the first thing 
that must be done on our end is that the website's fonts 
need to be tagged properly for arabic... tagged properly in 
general for that matter, this is a great way to start doing 
tutorials, the way I've been doing it is with screen 
capture and then adding text over top of the files, then 
I've been adding text on the left hand in english and text 
on the right hand in arabic...  by keeping everything in 
table format we can extract the data later for use other 
projects (in QaMoose, this'll end up getting some great 
technical language in there...).  It may not be the most 
efficient plan, but it'll work.  I noticed you guys a 
python users, which is awesome, for several reasons
1) 'cause my favorite piece of visual software is called 
pymol (visit www.pymol.org) and it is written almost 
entirely in python.  I know I'm "preachin to the choir" as 
they say, but just to make sure we're on the same page -- 
as this progresses we can batch export these formatted 
pieces any way we want to... & python powered biochem is 
some seriously cool stuff...
2) We can always easily parse these tables back in to 
mySQL...

so here's the link for a piece that was put together for 
the biology department earlier this semester it is a 
demonstration for how the tutorials should be submitted.
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~adp6j/html_blank.html

just stick the text/media as needed in the tables..
**The two pieces of software listed there are free-ware, 
but pay little attention to the first piece for the time 
being, it is not open source.**

**I hope you all realize that this may entail a crash 
course in chemistry / biology etc... don't stress it a bit, 
I'll be totally honest I didn't really get involved in the 
software end until only a few months ago - what I've found 
out, however, is that
1)most of my professors don't understand any of it
2)this is an awesome opportunity to just set the record 
straight on the power of the web
3)yeeeeeha**

But I'm straying from the main point which is the following 
- we need to document our activities extensively.  get some 
screen capture deal going and use it.  We are at the ground 
floor.  I figure we have at most nine months of prep time 
before the web gets a whole ton of new visitors.  Let's 
role out the welcome mats.  They're gonna need tech 
support, we're gonna have it ready from google and ebay on 
up the food chain...

So go ahead and get a tutorial up in the format listed, 
eventually we can get some online database to pull this in, 
but that's down the road.  For the immediate causes an 
introduction to Arabic Markup would be wonderful, something 
that can be posted ASAP as the first "handshake"  - rock on

the forums should be working and links are going up now
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~adp6j/forum/home.html

with deepest respect,
Anson Parker

**If there are any obvious points missing please don't 
hesistate to send corrections this way, or post them to the 
forums**