About 2.5 years ago I built a literature web site, 4Literature.net. On the site are over 2,000 public domain works of classic literature broken up into nearly 40k static web pages, along with a simple search mechanism. Back in April of this year I realized that something was missing: a way for the users to interact and discuss the books.
I looked over the alternatives. I'd been a longtime reader of slashdot, and had recently become aware of kuro5hin, so slash and scoop were the first two that came to mind. Scoop's design seemed far more elegant, as well as being a bit more democratic (stories chosen by users, not editors), so it won.
I noticed some overlap with a couple of existing Scoop sites, but not a lot; there would be a place for my site.
The Ordeal Begins
Scoop installation left me very close to writing an anti-technology manifesto. I should stress however, that none of the problems were scoop's fault! Scoop itself installed and ran beautifully. It was my newbieness combined with other necessary software that left me rabid. For my fellow newbies:
Lesson 1: RaQs suck. I spent many days trying to get apache+mod_perl to work properly on my RaQ before giving up and renting a new server with RedHat 7.2. Problem instantly solved.
Lesson 2: Do not use the nightly build and assume it is stable. I somehow wasted a dozen hours assuming it was my mistake. (I know, this should be obvious)
Lesson 3: Postfix setup time, 15 minutes. Sendmail setup time, infinite. (well, it felt that way)
Lesson 4: Apache's httpd.conf is very picky.
The Good
I'm really impressed with Scoop. Excellent job! The template/block/box design makes it extremely extensible and flexible.
mod_gzip...I know it's been mentioned here before, but I must say, mod_gzip is like magic. It's an Apache module that gzips text before sending it to the browser, where it is then unzipped. No plugin necessary. If there are no images on the page, I have download times as low as 1/3 or 1/4 normal.
The New
The most unusual thing I've tried with Scoop on my site is the organization. The topic is almost incidental, it's the section that is everything. I have about 2300 sections, 260+ parent sections, the rest child sections. For instance, William Shakespeare is a parent section, and under it are a few dozen child section which it inherits, such as Twelfth Night. On the left I have a box that shows the children beneath the current section (or all parent sections if it's the main page).
The up side to this 2300 section setup is that it's very easy for someone to go from reading Twelfth Night, to reading stories about Twelfth Night. The major downside that I've found so far is that I don't dare click on the link to administrate sections. At times it will hang the server for about 20 minutes; I assume it's reorganizing the cached section information? (Incidentally, it was easiest to add the sections by adding them into the scoop.sql file before installing.)
My Biggest Problem
So, now I've got a wonderful Scoop site...and absolutely no one using it. How do I get the ball rolling? I get 3,000 to 6,000 page views per day on my site and 200+ visitors from kuro5hin so far (all of whom are used to Scoop). After about a month I've had about 50 users created, 1 comment, no articles (other than my own). I'd press some friends into doing book reviews, but most of them don't care to write. Any suggestions?
