The Great LinTraining Cleanout

Can you help me clean up the LinTraining database? I am looking for some good web-surfing volunteers to assist us in The Great LinTraining Cleanout on Wednesday, January 29, 2003 starting at 8pm Eastern US/Canada time.

The LinTraining site was established as a service to the Linux community by Dave Whitinger and I in 1999. It evolved out of the work I was doing with LPI where I kept getting asked by people interested in Linux where they could get training. Unfortunately, in the four years of its existence, much of the data has gotten quite stale and needs to be removed. WE NEED YOUR HELP to keep this site as a strong resource for people who want to get training about Linux. Help us help others come over into the Linux world!

The Great LinTraining Cleanout - Here is the plan. This coming Wednesday, January 29th, starting at 8pm Eastern US/Canada time, I'll get on a IRC channel #lintraining on irc.freenode.net with as many other folks as can help. What we will do is simply this:

1. Starting at the top of the country listing of training centers on the front page of LinTraining each person will take a category (country/province/state) and just start going through the listings. (reporting that they are taking that category (country/ province/state) to the channel). Ideally the person taking the category will be able to read the predominent language of the sites of that category so they can do more than just check if the URL is alive.
   
   
2. For each listing, the test will be really simple - can we get to the URL listed?
   1. If yes, the URL is accessible, then is there any mention of Linux training on the page referenced or easily found?
      • If yes, do nothing more and go on to the next entry.
      • If no, report it to the IRC channel as 'no Linux ref" with the center's name and location.
   2. If no, the URL is not accessible, report 'dead url' to the IRC channel with the center's name and location.

    

3. Once a person has completed a country/state/province, they go on to the next one that no one else is doing and repeat the step above. (I will be tracking the countries in progress.)

I will be logging all of the channel traffic and can then go back in the day or days afterward and delete the ones identified - or at least "unpost" their submission until it can be checked out further.

I think with a good number of folks we could clean up the database (or at least identify the potential problems) within a short amount of time. It should be a good bit of fun, too. So the only question is whether or not folks can be found to assist...

Are you interested in helping? Please drop me a note if you are. (Since I get so much spam, and haven't yet set up spam-filtering, please put "LinTraining Cleanout" in the subject line. Thanks.)