Proposed home page refresh

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Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » November 10th, 2021, 2:29 pm

I am proposing a refresh for the ConwayLife.com home page. Please see https://golhobby.com/test.
  • uses existing design elements in a contemporary layout with no distractions from calls-to-action
  • has a phone-friendly variant
  • focuses on our 3 calls-to-action
  • eliminates nav bar (unneeded distraction)
  • eliminates news feed, always a hassle to get a flow of good content and a major distraction; currently gives the impression nothing has happened in our community in over a year
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by dvgrn » November 10th, 2021, 3:58 pm

Book wrote:
November 10th, 2021, 2:29 pm
* eliminates news feed, always a hassle to get a flow of good content and a major distraction; currently gives the impression nothing has happened in our community in over a year
This seems like a reasonable change to make. It has always been a challenge to write (or to get someone to write) enough news-y blog posts to keep the home-page newsfeed looking anything like active. Have been leaving it this way to encourage someone to write things more often, but so far that certainly hasn't worked very well!

A news feed that we could use is the LifeWiki's CurrentNews template. It's a much shorter format than an in-depth blog post. Quite reliably for the past several years, I haven't been the only one updating that template: it gets used a lot as a reminder list for Pattern of the Year nominations (coming right up again, by the way!)

Come to think of it, the Patterns of the Year might be an interesting thing to showcase on a revised homepage as well -- just list out the subset of them that can be displayed easily in an embedded LifeViewer, with a caption saying which number it was in which year, and maybe throw together some nice labels or animations for each one, and display them in rotation.

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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » November 10th, 2021, 4:36 pm

A news feed that we could use is the LifeWiki's CurrentNews template. It's a much shorter format than an in-depth blog post. Quite reliably for the past several years, I haven't been the only one updating that template: it gets used a lot as a reminder list for Pattern of the Year nominations (coming right up again, by the way!)
That would be good. Need to have a feed for it so it only has to be maintained in one place.
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » November 10th, 2021, 7:47 pm

Come to think of it, the Patterns of the Year might be an interesting thing to showcase on a revised homepage as well -- just list out the subset of them that can be displayed easily in an embedded LifeViewer, with a caption saying which number it was in which year, and maybe throw together some nice labels or animations for each one, and display them in rotation.
That could be done. I like it better than "news" which has a lot of inspeak.
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by GUYTU6J » 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.

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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by dvgrn » November 10th, 2021, 8:28 pm

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.

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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » November 10th, 2021, 8:40 pm

1. Deploying this is fact just a file-copying exercise and I could coordinate with Nathaniel to make it happen
2. I have the time to work on the POTY idea and put that up on my test site for comment and review after #1
3. It would be good if folks checked the proposed page on their phones--the phone page it is its own page, redirected to when a phone is detected, and so does not have to have the bells and whistles that we might later add that would not work well on a phone screen
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by GUYTU6J » November 10th, 2021, 8:44 pm

dvgrn wrote:
November 10th, 2021, 8:28 pm
...
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. ...
Looks good to me! I should have made it clear, that the LifeViewer I mentioned is a fresh empty one where newcomers can draw and play patterns at ease, and share their creation(s) on the forums by copy&pasting RLE code. We have seen too many newcomers posting an image of - what's that website? - ah yes, playgameoflife.com, which is interactive and has thus become more handy than our Conwaylife.com, unfortunately.
Also, I think either the navbar (including catagolue as seen on LifeWiki) is preserved, or a block linking to catagolue in Book's model should be added.

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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » November 11th, 2021, 2:27 pm

GUYTU6J wrote:
November 10th, 2021, 8:44 pm
Also, I think either the navbar (including catagolue as seen on LifeWiki) is preserved, or a block linking to catagolue in Book's model should be added.
Added a navbar consistent with the page style, includes Catagolue: https://golhobby.com/test/
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » November 14th, 2021, 5:39 pm

...and improved what happens when you click on Golly in both the phone and default home page: https://golhobby.com/test/
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » November 15th, 2021, 3:19 pm

So, how do we move this along?
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by dvgrn » November 15th, 2021, 3:49 pm

Book wrote:
November 15th, 2021, 3:19 pm
So, how do we move this along?
I think the current key may be just waiting a little while. I forwarded this thread's link to Nathaniel, and got back the following:
Nathaniel wrote:Yeah, this is definitely on the to-do list. Maybe once the book is wrapped up for good.

Setting up the LifeWiki feed to display on the homepage shouldn't be too hard -- MediaWiki has all sorts of hooks and APIs that can be hooked into easily enough.
Decenber 31st is the current due date for getting the GoL textbook all sorted out and ready for print-on-demand publishing through (probably) Lulu.com -- and that date is already coming at us like a freight train, so it won't be too long anyway.

Meanwhile, if we want to do some Lifeviewerization of 2020 Patterns of the Year or other interesting new patterns, we could set up some mini-articles in LifeWiki's Articles/POTY2020/ or Articles/HomePage space. The POTY ones could be partly for practice for 2021: it's possible that LifeViewerized patterns might be what the POTY2021 nomination and voting threads link to, whenever such articles are available. It would give people a chance to do a little advertising, and make their nominations look good.

(And then during the next year those articles could be showcased on the home page, one per week or whatever, similar to the LifeWiki's "featured articles".)

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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » November 30th, 2021, 5:31 pm

Here is an update to the proposed home page, with a POTY gallery: https://golhobby.com/test/
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » December 2nd, 2021, 3:30 pm

Book wrote:
November 30th, 2021, 5:31 pm
Here is an update to the proposed home page, with a POTY gallery: https://golhobby.com/test/
Image
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by dvgrn » December 3rd, 2021, 10:59 am

Book wrote:
December 2nd, 2021, 3:30 pm
Book wrote:
November 30th, 2021, 5:31 pm
Here is an update to the proposed home page, with a POTY gallery: https://golhobby.com/test/
This is looking good! I won't have time for at least a few days to give the home-page refresh proposal the attention it deserves, but in the meantime I'd just like to say thank you for working on it. More soonish --

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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » January 3rd, 2022, 3:08 pm

dvgrn wrote:
December 3rd, 2021, 10:59 am
Book wrote:
December 2nd, 2021, 3:30 pm
Book wrote:
November 30th, 2021, 5:31 pm
Here is an update to the proposed home page, with a POTY gallery: https://golhobby.com/test/
This is looking good! I won't have time for at least a few days to give the home-page refresh proposal the attention it deserves, but in the meantime I'd just like to say thank you for working on it. More soonish --
FYI, you control the slideshow and the (optional) headline with custom.js: https://golhobby.com/test/js/custom.js

This is ready to roll.
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » January 9th, 2022, 1:34 pm

dvgrn wrote:
December 3rd, 2021, 10:59 am
Book wrote:
December 2nd, 2021, 3:30 pm
Book wrote:
November 30th, 2021, 5:31 pm
Here is an update to the proposed home page, with a POTY gallery: https://golhobby.com/test/
This is looking good! I won't have time for at least a few days to give the home-page refresh proposal the attention it deserves, but in the meantime I'd just like to say thank you for working on it. More soonish --
How to move this forward?
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Nathaniel » January 9th, 2022, 6:30 pm

Book wrote:
January 9th, 2022, 1:34 pm
How to move this forward?
Nothing you can do but wait, sadly. I was hoping to have a few days for this project in the January 1 - January 9 window, which I thought would be between when the book project ended and my new crazy-busy semester started, but sadly the book project isn't quite wrapped up yet, so that time window... went out the window.

This is still the next project planned for the website. I hesitate to make any further conjectures on when exactly it will happen, as I seem to be terrible at guessing how long current projects-in-progress will take to complete, and how much other work from other parts of my life will be thrown at me.

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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Nathaniel » February 11th, 2022, 8:05 pm

OK, here is a possible homepage replacement:

https://conwaylife.com/newhome.php

Feedback welcome. Currently only has two patterns available to be chosen in the LifeViewer (the one that starts off being displayed is chosen randomly on each page load), but I'll plop more in shortly. Some specific questions related to the new top navbar:
  • Am I missing any obvious links that should go there?
  • Do the Discord folks want a link to their Discord up there? If not, let me know and I'll remove it (it's also mentioned in the main text of the page -- let me know if you want it removed from there too).
  • I don't have a LifeViewer link in the top navbar (but I do have a link in the footer, and in the main body text of the page), since it felt redundant to have a link there now that the main page itself is basically a big LifeViewer. Thoughts? I'm happy to put a link to LifeViewer in the navbar if people (especially Chris) would prefer that.

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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by hotdogPi » February 11th, 2022, 8:08 pm

Looks good.
User:HotdogPi/My discoveries

Periods discovered: 5-16,⑱,⑳G,㉑G,㉒㉔㉕,㉗-㉛,㉜SG,㉞㉟㊱㊳㊵㊷㊹㊺㊽㊿,54G,55G,56,57G,60,62-66,68,70,73,74S,75,76S,80,84,88,90,96
100,02S,06,08,10,12,14G,16,17G,20,26G,28,38,47,48,54,56,72,74,80,92,96S
217,486,576

S: SKOP
G: gun

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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » February 11th, 2022, 8:12 pm

I would suggest a separate interface for phones (not tablets). Use your phone at https://golhobby.com/test/.
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Nathaniel » February 11th, 2022, 8:14 pm

Book wrote:
February 11th, 2022, 8:12 pm
I would suggest a separate interface for phones (not tablets). Use your phone at https://golhobby.com/test/.
When I go there on my phone, I don't see a LifeViewer at all -- is that intended?

I personally hate it when my phone redirects to a different version of a website than my computer, and I can't see the full website. But if others disagree, let me know.

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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » February 11th, 2022, 8:17 pm

I also suggest a simple home page for Golly that mimics what I did in my prototype Golly link.
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by Book » February 11th, 2022, 8:21 pm

Nathaniel wrote:
February 11th, 2022, 8:14 pm
Book wrote:
February 11th, 2022, 8:12 pm
I would suggest a separate interface for phones (not tablets). Use your phone at https://golhobby.com/test/.
When I go there on my phone, I don't see a LifeViewer at all -- is that intended?

I personally hate it when my phone redirects to a different version of a website than my computer, and I can't see the full website. But if others disagree, let me know.
Yes. It's just a front-end to our 3 core components, to get visitors started.

I don't think the viewer on a phone is a good starting experience.
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Re: Proposed home page refresh

Post by muzik » February 11th, 2022, 9:54 pm

Reckon we could have a text input/output for RLEs like the main lifeviewer page currently does?

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