Zilla's Cities

The first city-specific entry page, http://www.tuezilla.de/ for surfers from Tübingen, was launched by tschild in 2002.

In the meantime, several more german cities have been zilla-fied, e.g. Esslingen (http://www.eszilla.de/), Bielefeld (http://www.bizilla.de/) and Freiburg (http://www.frzilla.de/).

Language- and Country-specific Entry Pages

http://www.dmoz.be offers Belgian searchers access to ODP both in French and Dutch. It is maintained by editor rotule.

jensarentoft has successfully snatched http://www.odp.eu when the .eu domains were launched, and has set up an entry page to World/Dansk. Congrats!

http://dmoz.com.ar offers access to World/Espanol. It was created by alpertron (who is hosting it) and camellus, with help from eibar, ferrando and goal608.

http://www.dmoz.de and http://ww.dmoz.at, both maintained by tschild, are localized entry pages for german-speaking searchers from Germany and Austria.

http://www.dmoz.nl, created in 2002, is maintained by editor vaness and the World/Nederlands team.

http://www.odp.no is a full-fledged copy of the most important categories related to Norway, i.e., World/Norsk, Regional/Europe/Norway and Kids_and_Teens/International/Norsk. The site is maintained by hansfn, coordination is running via a thread in the editor forum.

Portals and Portalinos

aef-dmoz.org

http://www.aef-dmoz.org is the portal of the "association des editeurs francophones", the organization of French-speaking editors. It offers:

• an entry page to World/Francais,
• a tool to check if a site is listed in ODP, based on ODP's search,
• a well-fed blog that has twice won a Mozzie Award for Best DMOZ weblog
• and ODP banners and buttons.

To learn more or contribute, please visit the planning thread in the World/Francais editor forum.

editando.org

http://editando.org is the portal, lovingly called "portalino", maintained by members of the World/Italiano team: geromarsala is responsible for the portal, gothica has created the beautiful layout and massy has personalized the scripts. The content can be roughly divided in two parts:

• a well-filled collection of articles offering ODP-related information, e.g. about new categories, ontology or how to suggest an URL.
• personal editor blogs in which editors share their thoughts and experiences.
• Additionally, editando.org includes.
• links to World/Italiano and the Italian section in Resource Zone
• and an impressive collection of ODP banners, created by emmeffe and folletti (468x60, 120x600, 88x31,120x90 and 120x60, other sizes).

All editors can participate. If you want to learn more about the portalino, the thread for planning and coordination is running in the World/Italiano section of the editor forum. Additionally, the thread entitled "curious questions, statistics and comments" discusses the development of the site and user feedback.

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Tips For Setting Up Entry Pages and Portals

Based on experiences made by various editors during the last years, here are some tips that may help editors and editor teams to decide if you want to set up an entry page, copy or portal.

Who is the audience?

What makes an entry page interesting, is its user orientation: a selection of categories and a layout that address a specific audience.

Long life of the url

Especially if you set up an entry page for a specific language, it is important to keep the url stable in the long run, i.e. for several years.
To give an example, dmoz.de is well-known and regularly quoted as the entrance to World/Deutsch - not only on web pages but in books as well. If the entry page would be removed, a lot of links and referring quotes would be broken.

The World of ODP implemented in PHP phpODPWorld , created by editors hansfn and asleo, is a program package that enables you to display all ODP or any subcategory (or categories) using the RDF dump. The package contains a helper scripts that parses and inserts the RDF into a(ny) database, and a PHP script that does the actual job of displaying the categories. It is Free Software licensed under the GNU GPL.

Maintenance

A copy of ODP content needs to be updated regularly.

But entry pages need maintenance, too: The urls of the linked categories may be changed by category moves and renames, or the information on about pages may get out of date.

Real-worldish troublemaking issues

... as e.g. costs of hosting and ownership issues:

• A domain needs to be paid regularly or it may get lost inadvertently.
• The editor who owns the domain may leave ODP.
• People who want to complain about listings or about not being listed try to hold the owners of entry pages responsible.

Do not underestimate these factors: if you want to set up a site, consider carefully what issues may come up, how you can prevent problems and how to respond in case something happens. Most important is to clearly explain the ownership and responsibility situation. Contact editors and teams that have experience with maintaining entry pages, and ask them for advice!

- - chris2001, geromarsala, hansfn, jensarentoft, tschild