[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2013 Free Software
Foundation, Inc."]]

[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable
id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
is included in the section entitled [[GNU Free Documentation
License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]

Just as in a book, this page is designed to help describe the tools used to
create this website and what methods were used to give it its look and feel.


What we see today is the junction of two different branches: the original
static HTML pages and the wiki pages.


# Static HTML Pages

In November 2008, the Hurd's old static web pages were merged into the wiki
pages' repository.  After a lot of cleansing work, on 2008-11-22 the joined set
of pages was made available for serving the official GNU Hurd web appearance at
<http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/>.


# Wiki Pages

## Rev. I

We used a particular implementation (or clone) of Wiki software called
[TWiki](http://twiki.org).  The wiki was reachable at
`http://hurd.gnufans.org/`.

A generic [WikiWikiWeb](http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors), or simply
Wiki, is _"a collaborative forum where people can share ideas and record any
consensus reached on difficult issues, along with rebuttal.  It changes as
people come and go, as experience develops, and as opinions change."  The TWiki
software is an enhanced descendent of the original WikiWikiWeb_.

We used the [GNU Skin](http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/GnuSkin).

The site began in May 2002 as one TWiki web: *Hurd*.  This WebHome page was
used as the front page of the whole site.  We grew this site and added more
TWiki webs by December 2002.  Due to the success of the site we had to act
with respect to more completely addressing copyright issues.  More people
started adding content.

The gnufans site's administrators would eventually step back from maintenance
of their wiki installation, so from roughly 2005 on, day-to-day tasks like
processing new user's registrations or spam removal would not be done in a
timely fashion anymore.  In July 2006, the [slow burial of the Hurd
Wiki](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2006-07/msg00014.html) was
announced.


## Rev. II

Considering this [from April 2006 on
already](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/web-hurd/2006-04/msg00000.html), on
2007-08-12 the conversion of the TWiki content to a format usable by
[ikiwiki](http://ikiwiki.info) was finally finished.  Read
[[about_the_twiki_to_ikiwiki_conversion]].

This wiki instance was running distributed over two GNU/Hurd machines,
[[flubber|public_hurd_boxen]] (Git repository) and
[[snubber|public_hurd_boxen]] (web server), both hosted by Barry deFreese.

The wiki's content also provides that of the official GNU Hurd pages,
<http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/>.


## Rev. III

As of early 2013, both flubber and snubber's duties are [[!message-id
"87vc9417dc.fsf@kepler.schwinge.homeip.net" desc="taken over"]] by Richard
Braun's [[darnassus|public_hurd_boxen]].