Re: new website: draft 3

[Graham Percival]

On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 11:35:16PM -0700, Patrick McCarty wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 11:16 PM, chip<address@hidden> wrote:
> > Graham Percival wrote:
> >
> > ------------------------------
> > -------------------------------------
> > --------------------------------
> > |        Contact                       |                     |
> >                    News                         |               |
> > Minimal Examples          |
> > |.       Bug Reports                |                     |
> >
> > Press                         |               |_______________________|
> > |        Help Wanted               |                     |
> > Thanks                       |
> > |        Developement             |
> > -------------------------------------
> > ------------------------------
> >
> >
> >   This makes no sense to me.  Please remember that 80-character
> >   terminals are the polite assumption to make when sending emails.
> >
> >
> > Here is an example of what I meant -
> > http://www.wiegand.org/lilytest/lilytest.html

Thanks so much!  I didn't know what you were talking about, so
this example was very useful.  Yes, that *does* look nice.


> I like it!  Anything looks better than those navigation tables.  Plus,
> I cannot figure out what to do with them (style-wise).
> 
> Graham, do you think we should hide more of the navigation tables
> (@address@hidden menu), and replace them with these new columns?

I'm beginning to think so... although this would be one point
*against* a uniform layout:
- the home page is special
- Explore... could either be left as-is, or just put all links in
  a box at the bottom... or maybe a two-column with the current
  intro on the left, and the links on the right?  We'd remove the
  image in that case, though.
- Download could definitely be a 1+2 column, like Manuals.
- Manuals are obviously perfect.  :)
- Community... hmm, I /guess/ it could be divided into 1+2
  columns, although not very neatly.

I must admit that I really like Downloads as 1+2.  And for the
sake of uniformity, I could force Community into 1+2.  In some
ways, Explore isn't part of the main site anyway (it's not a
"regular user looking for info" thing), so it doesn't matter if
that has its own layout.


I'm also toying with the idea of color-coded submenu items.
Somebody already suggested it and I nixed it for being too much of
a pain to do in texinfo[1], but I'm now really starting to think
that it would help the usability in Manuals, and it certainly
wouldn't hurt in Download and Community.

[1]  Write a text file containing
1: Features, Examples, Unix, MacOS X, Windows, Learning Manual,
Music Glossary, Essay, Contact, News, Tiny examples
2: ...
3: ...

when web-texi2html.init gets to the TOC function, it checks if the
item name equals anything from list 1, 2, 3, etc.  If it matches,
it adds a <div class="color_1"> to the HTML.



HOWEVER, I'm starting to feel that I'm in the realm of diminishing
returns.  The new website is oodles better than the previous one,
but these extra details don't necessarily need my touch.  There's
lots of git arranging, CG writing, release managing, etc. work
that I've been letting pile up.

Basically, there's plenty of people that *could* be adding these
details to the website, so I think I should start working on the
things that only I can do.  I mean, we'd all love to have working
menus in lilypad on OSX 10.5, or getting the LM 1 rewrite started,
etc.

Let's see where we are in 24-36 hours; at the very least I want to
finish the things that are currently in my mind.  After that, we
might end up with neat ideas that get dropped due to lack of
resources... unfortunate, but that's life in open source.  :|

Cheers,
- Graham