GUYTU6J wrote: ↑November 10th, 2021, 8:04 pm
Huh, another homepage design from forums user! I'd say I prefer the idea
here and
here, as a LifeViewer adds to interactivity very significantly and makes the site attractive.
The real problem I can see for any proposals of this kind is the absence of our one and only forums admin, Nathaniel.
Book's method looks pretty good, though. If all the work gets done and Nathaniel just has to copy over a prototype, the change is probably a lot more likely to happen.
Along the same lines, we could certainly have a LifeViewer always on the home page. With the cycling Patterns-of-the-Year idea, it might just have a different pattern in it every [day|week|month], maybe with explanatory comments shown in a textbox below or off to the side somewhere.
It's still a non-trivial amount of work to set up LifeViewer labels or waypoint scripts or whatever. Maybe a sensible place to start would be to plan on a weekly change to the home page, and just start with every pattern we can dig up that already has an interesting set of LifeViewer commands -- e.g., everything in Golly's Patterns/Rakes folder.
Then we just have to keep ahead of the game by having someone add a new article under LifeWiki's Articles/HomePage/* subspace -- start with whatever this year's POTY candidates are that fit in a LifeViewer, then maybe a retrospective of previous POTYs. Probably we don't want to go too far back, though; I was looking through the 2010 list, and a lot of the "current smallest" have really been microminiaturized since then.
Anyway, it's really just inventing new stuff to say that takes the time. Given existing LifeViewer-ed patterns and descriptive comments, I could easily build a template for new posts and roll a new one out on a weekly schedule. So that would potentially be a workable model, even if the home page doesn't change at all.