I had some ideas for web stuff to facilitate the above and I thought I'd share them here while they are fresh. =)

So the basic idea would be to collectively decide on some quality tutorials for a language/area that people would want to learn. A section of the site devoted to going through that tutorial would be established. There would be a main forum for that "learning group." Also, we would have a collection of exercises broken down by the section in the tutorial you would need to have completed.

The good idea that I just had was to use here the resource submission system that those of you who have submitted links or articles have seen: let any member submit an idea for an exercise that would appear subject to approval from an admin for the site or someone particularly appointed for that learning group. This exercise would then appear on a master list and in a page specific to its section. Each exercise would have a view with an explanation of it, and a place for people to submit solutions using the same resource submission framework as mentioned above. The exercises and solutions would all automatically be attributed to their authors, of course.

Other things that look like possibilities for that period of greater free time, the summer:
* Some old-time TPU members collectively buying a fast new server for TPU and having it professionally colocated
* Moving the TPU IRC channel to the Open Projects Network (OPN) and encouraging more new members to hang out there, possibly working together on the learning groups
* The old "learning shells" idea, hopefully integrated with learning groups to provide an environment pre-set-up so that you can get right to trying exercises
* Continue attempting to get some good web designers to create an attractive, yet low-bandwidth, web site layout
* Finding a way to discourage people from asking for homework or cracking help here. ;-)

Please post any other ideas of your own!

Do we even have enough active members to try these learning project things? I can only think of maybe 20 people that I see regularly posting here. The tutorials are cool, but who will write them? For every tutorial that is submitted (assuming there are more than one) will you make a new section of the site (a new forum) dedicated to it's discussion? Won't that be a pain in the ass?

"Some old-time TPU members collectively buying a fast new server for TPU and having it professionally colocated"

Don't look at me I'm broke. This server is fast enough, I see no problem with it. Unless you're running out of room, which I doubt.

good ideas, ill see wht i can do

Along the way you could make a section for a "collective project". Like creating a new layout.
Chances are that nobody is gonna do it on his/her own, so just let people submit some (little) parts to it, so everbody can view it, change it and say what they think about it.

I can write tutorials...anyone want one for Emacs, Scheme, GNU/Linux in general, C, ? As for the OPN idea---yay. OPN is much nicer...I have to search for a new efnet server every day because none of them like me (I am running ident, but the servers are always split). I found irc.vrfx.com, and that seems to work for me.

Mostly in reply to CodeRed:

My use of "decide" was meant to indicate choosing some already out there.

Several new people a week stop by apparently looking to get into various types of programming. These people could actually become regular visitors if we had the sorts of things I mentioned, and then I think you can see how quickly the member base would grow.

You're not "old-time," so I don't know why you thought you were included. =)

"You're not "old-time," so I don't know why you thought you were included. =)" Just making sure. Why do you feel this site needs to change servers?

This server now belongs to someone currently unaffiliated with TPU who volunteers to handle it, but is very busy with work and such, and has had to move the server on short notice (with corresponding lack of net access) twice in the last few months. There are noticeable page loading delays, so getting something faster than the PII-400 that this is now couldn't hurt. Also, a bunch of the truly "old-time" TPU members who mostly don't visit the web site would like to have a server to use freely for various sundry purposes, with plenty of resources and hosted by someone with an interest in keeping things running smoothly.

So it's not (entirely) my modems fault that pages take so long to render. A colocated server would be great, being able to run anything you want on it is a big plus (maybe TPU should run a quake3 server..for, um, running q3scheme [yes, it does exist, the project is somewhere on icculus.org]).

Yeah, my HTML "renderer" is slow too LOL