[PySide] Web site transfer

[Matti Airas]

Hi list,

There's one final thing in the PySide migration to Qt add-on: the 
website. I've been trying to have the migration arranged, but progress 
has been very slow. Also, May 3 is my last work-day at Nokia, so that 
complicates things further.

PySide is currently hosted at a Virtual Machine provided by Nokia IT, 
which has made it easy because there have not been any fees or bandwidth 
quotas (and the connectivity has been quite excellent). Unfortunately, 
that VM is leased only until end of June, so arrangements need to be 
made pretty soon.

Unfortunately, Qt Project is unwilling to provide a virtual machine for 
PySide, and therefore a direct migration of the VM is not feasible. They 
have proposed that they can host the static content (binaries, 
documentation & doc packages) which account for vast majority of the 
traffic anyway. Then, the current WordPress site contents (which isn't 
much any longer, anyway) could be moved to the wiki, with a possibility 
to have a static landing page as the home page. The news blog would then 
need to be migrated to any free 3rd-party blogging platform such as 
wordpress.com. This is probably doable and something that the project 
could live with, but it does require additional effort and decrease the 
level of service somewhat, both for the administrators (no access to WP 
authoring tools) and for the end-users (URLs for binaries and docs 
change, blog aggregation needs to be updated). In the long term, this 
would be the approach requiring the least amount of maintenance.

Another alternative which could be feasible is to have a VM elsewhere 
and Qt Project would just point the DNS there. The VM requirements are 
not huge: the current VM is a single-core one Xeon 2.5 GHz with 2 GB of 
allocated memory and 40 GB of disk space. However, the site generates 
quite some traffic - in April, 120 GB, and the number has been 
increasing at a steady pace. Also, having a separate VM would require a 
dedicated admin who would be willing to maintain the VM, take backups, etc.

I would like to hear your opinions on this one. In the first option, the 
up front work and changes would be bigger but the long-term effort 
lower, and no external costs would be incurred. In the latter option, 
the migration would be less painful but having the VM would require more 
maintenance in the future, and recurring payments would occur.

Also, I'd like to call for volunteers to help with the migration and the 
future maintenance. As said, my work obligation at Nokia is ending and 
while I'm not vanishing altogether, it'd be helpful if someone else 
could take the lead. Srini, you volunteered for the webmaster and 
wikimaster duties in February - although this might not be what you had 
in mind, would you still be interested?

Also, if a separate VM is desired, a sponsor is needed for that. I 
wonder if any companies would be interested in providing that, for a 
modest logo or banner visibility on the web site? A basic 3rd-party VM 
with that amount of traffic would cost some 40-50 EUR/USD a month. Not a 
huge sum, but I wouldn't feel happy paying it out of my own pocket, 
especially with the steadily increasing traffic.

Cheers,

Matti Airas