We're trying to organize the site in a way that makes sense. The old way was ok, but there were frankly too many categories with too little information. Instead of the old randomland.net/whatever approach, we'll be using vaguer subdomains.
Here are the proposed subdomains. Shoot 'em down or raise 'em up. The day of reckoning is near! It's time to unite! Stand as ONE fellow Randomlandians!
...err, um. Just give your input.
Main Site: will contain site news and links to subdomains via the sidebars and a sitemap. Also, useless little promo-type things we can't find a better place for.
Dev: the programming and computer development section. It will contain everyday tips and tricks for programming. It will probably also contain larger how-to style programming projects (ie: "Creating a Simple Flash-Based Side-Scroller")
Forum(s): here! Each subdomain would be obliged to have its own forum...or forum section. That's my thinking anyway. Can we set it up like: forum.randomland.net/photo?
Gallery: redirect to photo.randomland.net
How-To: it's a good name but breaks the categorization. Maybe make this a launching-pad for searching specific sub-domains. This needs some thinking through.
Motors: the home of everything that goes vroom! Car how-tos, the classic tale of the tempo, and land of the future SuperRiceBoyKart.
Media: I like music. Lots. I suck at playing it, but maybe I could put those stupid techno songs here and others could do similar things. Maybe music and movie reviews too. I am going to say that this eats the previously suggested "games" subdomain as well.
Opinion: remember all those old stupid things I wrote which were offensive and/or brainlessly stupid? Yep, that's what will go here.
Photo: we all like taking pictures. We will probably have a gallery and links to camera reviews and stuff.
Rec(reation): what's even better than taking pictures is taking pictures OUTDOORS! The woods and the goods. We'll post camping stories, suggestions, outdoorsy things, geocaches, and artsy things that don't belong anywhere better (like the good 'ol lightsabers page)
Ok, stab away. We need to hammer this out!
Might have a media subdomain to encompass music and movies?
Yeah, I think "media" is better also. It's good and vague.
What else?
Post in here what color schemes you think we should have. If possible, post samples of the colors. Also post and non-logo graphics you would like to suggest.
Ok, I'm not sure how to pull this off, put having one of these images span the header and sidebar might look cool with the right amount of non-distracting photo-chopping done to it.
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=158&g2_serialNumber=2) | (http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=161&g2_serialNumber=2) | (http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=164&g2_serialNumber=2) | (http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=167&g2_serialNumber=2) |
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=167&g2_serialNumber=2) | (http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=170&g2_serialNumber=2) | (http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=173&g2_serialNumber=2) |
Ok, granted they weren't framed all that well, but the LCD pixel lines look pretty cool. See the full(er) size images in the gallery -- http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_itemId=150 (http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_itemId=150)
I haven't a clue if anyone even looks at these forums...but I shall give my opinion anyways. For the Logo thingydoo I am rather partial to the Pabermnabe Scribble thing. A bit fancy perhaps but it has a nice look to it. That's what i say.
I was pretty sure I already linked this on the forums, but whatever. I'm probably losing my mind.
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=231&g2_serialNumber=1)
(This is what happens when you "find and replace" all "a"s with "i"s in an code file)
This is just one of those screen shots above with a couple of greenish masks. I was thinking it'd make a good sidebar type thing. You'd need some trickery to blend it into a solid color on the bottom, which could then be repeated to the end of the document. Or you could try and make it into a header.
Or neither. It is probably still a bit intrusive to put text on top of.
Ok, Brad. I'm re-creating some of the old articles and I remember that I was starting to make certain CSS "blocks" for certain types of text. I've added them back in on motors.randomland.net (http://motors.randomland.net), but nowhere else yet.
The ones that I remember I need are (and the names can change, that's fine)
- A note block and note block's text. This is used for "hey, look at me"
- A warning block and the block's text. This is used for "Warning: deer aren't as squishy as they appear
- A navigation block. Just something simple but unique-enough looking for hard-coded page links (like Francine Part 1 linking to Part 2). We could use some pagination thing for this, but I'd like to keep them separated, I think.
- An image block
- An image caption block (in practice, should probably embed in the image block)
I think there is one or two more, but I can't remember right now.
And another.... this could make a good banner if you zoom in on the blue part.
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=324&g2_serialNumber=2)
I like the motors sub. header. Its a nice. :-)
That looks pretty good I think.. Now we need some way to have more than two articles in each subsection.....Hmmmm content..
yeah, I'm trying to get the old stuff back up, but it takes some time, especially with rebuilding the picture gallery. It's fun look through the old pictures, but it's time consuming. If anyone wants to help.... feel free!
I changed the header on the forums again (see it?) and made the 'logo' image a png so we can have transparency (so the image is not tied to a specific background. That setting is in the style.css of the theme if anyone cares) The header is now blurry-leaf green. I thought it had a nice gradient, but still it is meant to be temporary.
What header image do you think would represent the forums? Green w/ trees? Just simplicity (like it is now. what color?)
What logo embodies the spirit of the forums? Ideas?
I could certainly go with a nice panoramic tree shot for the header graphic. It'd be cool.
I made a very ugly, and very mis-placed link back to the main site. I didn't really take the time to understand how their whole theme worked, so yeah, it looks like it does. Something more professional for that would be good. Maybe tie that in with the graphic or something, too?
Yeah, something. I noticed that when the page is too wide the header gets all blue on the side. I don't think I mind the look of the nice little link back guy up top. Simple and unobtrusive.
Ok, so there has been a little talk (http://randomland.net/2008/08/subdomains) around about how we need some more content and/or to cut back a little on the subdomain setup. I don't mind stripping things down a bit, but I need some suggestions.
What would be even more beneficial is, of course, content. I'm thinking of putting up a little deely on how we re-routed the wiring in the back of the Blazer last weekend. Ideally, we would write up stuff like that, then spend our lives on Chevy forums saying how we did things. People like that sort of stuff.
I'm not sure how much I like this board. It's ok...maybe it just needs skinned a little. I know forums are always a bit isolated from the main site, but it'd be nice to do something to make this "look Randomland."
The whole site need to look more "randomland." Its all kinda vanilla and default.
Siphon some of their traffic to our site? Sounds like a good idea, and I like their site so if we help some of them all the better. I ran more wires yesterday and installed a switch to control the power watts invertanator. I also welded a real basic mount for the inverter and screwed it to the floor in the back. Right behind the passenger side wheel-well. Now one can control the power from the drivers seat. I took lots of pictures with the intent on making a basic guide to do-it-yo-self wiring and the sort.
I still like the idea that one of us had before. The one about having small sections for all the admins 'rides' and the stories behind them. Brad should do one for his mustang though.....not the honda. That page would go along the lines of "I bought it, my wife got mad because I wanted a manual, it gets 450 miles a tank" :)
So yeah.
Also. The forum and gallery site need links to the other/main site(s). More ties to the rest of the site, more complete package. Randomland...the experience...the life style.
ok... I might be ready to concede. Randomland is currently way too spread out for the small amount of content we do have. I like the separation, personally, but I'm thinking searching the site for anything is too impossible.
I guess we could try to find some sort of Google searcher that will dig into the subdomains, but I don't know. What's the best solution?
Get out the beat sticks! We NEED to redesign out site to look less like canned WordPress. I might even be willing to give up my stipulation of wanting variable width pages. We just need to do SOMEthing.
Like the expansive mass of nothingness they call the "Great White North," so is our Randomland.
Look thee hither! Look thee thither! What impresses upon thee therewithin this land we proclaim to be "Random?"
Nothing. Let's smash the site back together. Set up categories where we have subdomains. And map subdomains the the categories
ie:
motors.randomland.net --> randomland.net/motors, where "motors" is a WordPress category
We can make the theme smart enough to load different banners based on the current category. Easy enough. Better Googleable.
*Sigh*
Man! How is the Randomnets get so awesomed?!
Well, ok, it's a little different now, but not good. We need to:
- Get back unique banners for each section
- Change search box to search all subdomains (maybe make a radio button to give you the option)
- Get a non-crappy theme (each of my attempts ends up bland)
Grumble, grumble on behalf of the Wordpress. I'm sick of trying to slap together plugins to make WordPress do what we want. Yes, it is decent for content management, plugin support, and news. And will save us from reinventing some wheels. But we need to attack it differently.
Blog-style doesn't appeal to me. I'm thinking we should see if we can statically create the site structure we want. Then we just write the code to load the content. Easy and straightforward.
Sooooo...if that approach works, we could do something like this:
/index.php: front page. Load latest news, but also make it look inviting. And not like someone's 10 second WordPress site.
/motors/index.php: set as a subdomain on GoDadday and make an actual page for motors. Make it load motors related news by filtering a WordPress category "motornews" or something
/motors/francine/index.php: create a Francine folder. Make an index.php file which loads a stored WordPress page "Francine Stories"
/motors/francine/cc-part-1/index.php: create a folder for each stored WordPress page, with index.php file that loads the page
The problem I foresee is wordpress's url rewrite junk not letting us traverse the directory structure in this way...
I agree that the wordpress stuff is not working quite like we would like. I would say we should go for writing our own backend if it was not for the need to make: a comment system, a user system, a posting system, a login/admin system, navigation, and working with the forums and gallery. We wrote all that once.... but it was far from mature. What are the probabilities of a custom wordpress plugin or a different set of site management tools?
Another set of content management tools might be a good idea. Exporting/importing the content would be trivial (except for image links, but I hate how they're set up now anyway).
What IS good about WordPress is that it has a lot of search-engine and anti-spam stuff already written. I know I made that one dorky submit-us-a-response form with email verification and it got spam in no time. And that wasn't a known, existing system.
Point being -- I don't want to write anti-spammer code. A million people already have. It's boring, frustrating, and wouldn't work as well as what's already there.
We used to make our own pages and links. We can do that again, if we must. But WordPress does have some decent (better than Notepad) authoring tools. I'd like to keep that.
So stick with word press it is. I will try to find a way to make it more a site with content areas and less a broken blog when l have some free time. :-)
Yes. We do need to do something. It is agreed that we ditch wordpress? Does brad have any input on the toppic? (I know he never visits the forums or the site so Courtney will just have to use one of those beat-sticks next time he seems him) And if we do go with the other CMS, what shall we do to the default theme before going with it? I have been playing with the thing as time allows, but going is slow as I am unfamiliar with it (and Linux keeps eating my dsl connection. Though, that has been up for about 5 hours now with no drops)
I say ditch it. We just need to be sure we export all of our pages. I know there is some "content" that never even got imported anyway.
I have been working on gallery-type stuff. I don't really want to write an entire gallery system, but I am. And then we can have control again!
There are other ways. If its just permalinks that you want we can find one that has that feature, or move to a host with the apache rewrite thing installed. I still have copies of the old gallery if you want it.
Have you played any more with the Joomla or Drupal test sites? I fully support the Randomland Department of Forestry design. And I can play in da pshopz, if it'd help.
Let me know what needs helped on with the gallery and I will do my best to assist. You have a SVN repo set up for it? As for ditching wordpress I am all for it. I sure we would do what we wanted to with it, but the alternatives seem more geared to doing what we want to start with. They were around before the "blogosphere" and all that and know what a real site is.
blog n. an informal writing composed, read, and transmitted through various digital medium.
v. the act of composing a blog (n)
? > ME blah + L -g > bl[ah -> o] + g
I thought it was just short for "weblog." A public forum for all your most personal thoughts. :)
No, the root word is definitely "blahhhhhhh" ;)
WordPress my heiress!
(it just rhymed)
I forgot what I was going to write...
Oh yeah.
Suggestion:
Make posts on the front page styled differently per-category.
For example, make anything posted in "Opinion" have a comment-bubble style and say more obviously, "Posted in 'Opinion'." We could make the "Recreation" posts be a greenish block with some fance, as well. "News" could look like a piece of newsprint, or something.
Yeah, this would require a new theme. So, yeah, we should decide if we x86 the WP and spew the Joom or flip on the Drupe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupe).
I is make doodle. See doodle?
What think doodle?
(//)
I made some mock-ups of the top banner. See any you like?
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=55&g2_GALLERYSID=f2430c3c8e713089590ec99740d6c995) (http://forums.randomland.net/index.php?action=gallery&g2_itemId=55)
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=44&g2_serialNumber=1)
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=49&g2_serialNumber=1)
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=52&g2_serialNumber=1)
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem?g2_itemId=55&g2_serialNumber=1)
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=58&g2_serialNumber=1)
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem?g2_itemId=61&g2_serialNumber=1)
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=67&g2_serialNumber=1)
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=70&g2_serialNumber=1)
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=73&g2_serialNumber=1)
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=76&g2_serialNumber=1)
(http://gallery.randomland.net/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=79&g2_serialNumber=1)
I think the tinyportal thing will let you do that. Articles from different sections can have different icons next to them (I think)
I'm diggin' the blue and green themes. Not quite excavatorial
1, but it's a good start. I think the biggest thing holding back tho site theme right now is (what appears to be) missing body DIV formatting, most notable on admin pages (link) (http://randomland.net/admin). Look at the "welcome" text...it's pretty hard to read. It seems like that should be a gray body-background there.
And some more thoughts:
- Poll is excessively wide
- I'm pretty sure I have to log in twice (SMF password sync related?)
- A custom gallery keeps itching my programmer brain
- I'd be nice to clean up/delete/order old stories (like paginating the Francine Saga)
- I don't know how the system works yet...How to edit theme, front page, etc
1 from to excavate. The state of being indicating a highly favorable opinion of the subject in question. An emphatic form of vernacular dig
Replying to old, ancient post:
I like the current banner on the forum. I'd like to do a custom one (for some reason I dislike using canned images).
The Francine story is is a "book" which is a "story" with multiple pages to use the drupal lexicon. Its more or less the same as it was on the wordpress site. That is if that is what you meant.
I haven't had any problems with double-logins but I will delete my cookies and take a look.
The current banner is custom. I made that image playing with photoshop brushes. I did the menu buttons too. Though they were kinda adapted from another theme and changed a little to match other stuff.
Sweet. I do like it. Maybe it was the old Drupal banner you were talking about which was a default one. The current one is fittingly cool.
Have you figured out how to do pagination? I was trying to figure it out, but it looked like you needed custom modules, which looked somewhat unsupported.
Also, I realized most of the story formatting got lost. And I need to fix the image links...
What do you mean by "pagination"?
Splitting up longer page/post/story/book things into multiple pages. For example, just part 1 of the Tempo story is at least 600 words. That would work best (in my opinion) split across 2 or 3 pages, with a little nav bar at the top and bottom.
Ok. I get what you mean now. I agree they are a little long as they exist now. But not unmanageably. Though thats not to say they could not benefit from further break down. Perhaps a landing page with links to the separate parts with each part being a multi-page book unto itself. Any other way would make for a need to rethink the nav menus. Though I think already they need more thought put into them then I alone can muster. I think such things benefit from multiple points of view as its all relative to personal taste.
Yep -- agreed. We should probably change this topic name, too....
I need to dig through the content and see what is missing and what is trimmable/excessively embarrassing.
Its become more of a improvements and design suggestions.
OFF TOPIC!!! :)
I just made a useless post upon the front of the randomnets. When --
hey, Christmas music!!
When using the little text-editor, I noticed that it is not parsing my line breaks as new paragraphs. This should probably be fixed. I'm not sure if that's an issue with the editor or just a CSS thing. Either way, yeah.
(Also, where is the background DIV on those paginas, senor?)
Ummm.... whats a pagina? Divs where? I know about the text box thing. The WYSIWYG editor is a little weird. I just havent fixed it yet. If you like you can mess with all sorts of its settings in the admin place or just disable the editor and you will get the default unformatted text box.
I clicked onto the main page and it struck me as ugly. I know that I am the one who made it that way and I still like most of it. But the green title for the posts needs some serious work.
I made yet more potential banner images for the main page. I post them here for you, the internet, to consider.
It seems that my first attempt at one for the forums didn't bother anyone so I will stay for at least a little while.
Lone Tree:
(http://randomland.net/sites/all/modules/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=73&g2_serialNumber=1&g2_GALLERYSID=e2e5f5613e0f55cf6e24b8236258be5c)
Misplaced Ravine:
(http://randomland.net/sites/all/modules/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=76&g2_serialNumber=1&g2_GALLERYSID=e2e5f5613e0f55cf6e24b8236258be5c)
Phantom Tree:
(http://randomland.net/sites/all/modules/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=80&g2_serialNumber=1&g2_GALLERYSID=e2e5f5613e0f55cf6e24b8236258be5c)
My initial reaction is "yes to all." But then I realized this isn't a multiple choice test, so I had to enact my critical side.
I like the idea of the first one the best. That is, a large tree looking small and lonely. Also, I like the sparse, wispy grass on that one. My only gripe is that the background trees are a bit too light-colored -- they distract your attention from Lone Tree. I particularly like the headroom on that image -- it gives Lone Tree a sort of "I'm so good looking, out here under the vast, open sky, where no one can see me and that's the way I like it" sort of...um...plantae humility?
The "aurora sky" technique in #2 is interesting, but slightly distracting. If it was done in a dark, dark color against a starry night scene, I could definitely see that working well. But that might be a bit too "busy." It depends on what look you're going for; I was assuming a "simple yet distinct" sort of scene.
The last one doesn't quite "pop out" enough, in comparison to the others. It's cool, but doesn't quite conjure up that "diminished beauty" feel that Lone Tree does.
<puts away artistic critique>
Oh, just one more little thing -- I'm not really diggin' the background's background (the blue one). I'd prefer something blurrier or "softer." Oh, and I just noticed that I can see the bottom of it when my monitor brightness is cranked up.
(I'm just throwing suggestions, not insults, by the way)
Like....This?
(http://randomland.net/sites/all/modules/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=83&g2_serialNumber=1&g2_GALLERYSID=e2e5f5613e0f55cf6e24b8236258be5c)
This one seems a little dark now that I look at it again. Missing something...
Spooky Wood #1:
(http://randomland.net/sites/all/modules/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=86&g2_serialNumber=1&g2_GALLERYSID=e2e5f5613e0f55cf6e24b8236258be5c)
Woah! On that last one, my brain gets tricked. When I first glance at it, I see light (white) coming through a silhouetted forest (black).
Nick wrote:
QuoteYou should look at the motors, rec, and opinion sub sections. Each one is created in a different manner. See if you like those styles better/worse. I don't know if I like having a perminent block of unchanging text at the top of a section. Its only usefull the first time you visit the page. After that its only in the way. What do you think?
If you didn't notice, I renamed the "Dev" section to "Tech." It's not the best name, but it's a little broader and more accurate -- we can be all electronic hardware/software stuffs in there. It's pretty empty at the moment...I think I lost a few Flash examples I did on old-randomland.
Anyway, I agree with your assessment -- the way motors is set up is good for a landing page, but that's about it. It's nice to see recent posts, but it provides no navigation -- how am I supposed to know that "Francine" is categorized under the motors section? There is no link other than the sidebar nav. This seems insufficient.
But I can't seem to decide what I'm expecting to see when I navigate around the site...a descriptive "about" page? A list of recent posts? A link to our "top stories?"
Something along those lines, but I don't know exactly what.
The panel layout thing is cool, but not very straightforward. I did learn about Drupal's "views" though. Maybe coding the pages manually would provide some more flexibility with less confusion?
I will keep them coming until you find one you like :)
MoonMist Forest #1:
(http://randomland.net/sites/all/modules/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=92&g2_serialNumber=1&g2_GALLERYSID=e2e5f5613e0f55cf6e24b8236258be5c)
But I like them all :)
Ok, I appreciate that. But if you had to pick one to either alter and add to the main banner or add as is what one would that be?
Oooo! I also added a member pages menu. For blogs and the like. And gave yours an alias of "zourtney."
There is something about that last picture which seems to fit better than the others. I don't know if ts the coloring or what. The white speckles don't quite fit, as they are though.
My $0.02
Those white specks were my sad attempt at stars. I guess I could reign them back a little.
I like the moon/big giant ball of light behind the tree idea. I like the stars, but they look a little too "mspaint" as they are
Note taken. I like the moon too. I will try and fix the stars.
Ok, quick read on a star making tutorial and I redid it. So thy this on the other foot.
Moon Mist Forest #2:
(http://randomland.net/sites/all/modules/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=95&g2_serialNumber=1&g2_GALLERYSID=e2e5f5613e0f55cf6e24b8236258be5c)
Moon Mist Forest W/o Stars:
(http://randomland.net/sites/all/modules/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=97&g2_serialNumber=1&g2_GALLERYSID=e2e5f5613e0f55cf6e24b8236258be5c)
I like the second one better. I do see starage in it, too. Though not nearly as much, of course. I'd like to see what ever banner gets put up there to be aligned mostly to the right -- the current layout seems a bit left-heavy, in my opinion.
Ok, I'm tired of being so critical. Too much whining from me.
One last one for the night.
Odd Sun Rise #1:
(http://randomland.net/sites/all/modules/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=99&g2_serialNumber=1&g2_GALLERYSID=e2e5f5613e0f55cf6e24b8236258be5c)
Rollin' along with the obnoxious site-desgign opinionation I promised I would drop....
Header image is a go! I like it.
Can we get the plaintext "randomland" words replaced with an image? I like the one the forums has. The blue-green contrast might be ugly on there though. I don't pretend to know those things. I will pretend to know that the new banner makes the RL seal look a little too green. Maybe a color-contrast (like a yellow glow from behind) would eliminate that.
But, as always, I'm only being critical because you asked and it's changable :) Leave it as-is and I'd be just as happy, as soon as I stop actively pondering it!
Disregard what I said about changing the rl seal. I'm dumb. I'm starting to think browns might be good throughout the theme. Again, I have no idea what I'm talking about.
Edit: they're already there, stupid stupid-me. I think I would like it if the main site's nav used the same button size and style as the forums. In green or brown maybe.
Annyoing comment: I've inexplicably become a fan of orange hues I've the past year. Not saying we should use it; just positing pointless personal information on the internets. (Isn't that what they're for?)
As it is the header logo is too big (both too tall and too wide) and it squishes the menu if the page is too narrow as it is. And keep the comments coming. If left to my own devices I might make things that only I think look ok. And feel free to submit your own ideas. And I agree about the colors not matching up. I ran out of time to fit it yesterday (had to go can peaches and get a tank ready for my grandmas new turtle friends. Oh, on a side note; The root directory is indeed .../www/randomlnd/ for the site. I think the gallery required some other directory stuff of its own. And the forums are a sub-directory of the main site.
ok bye.
Yeah, the forums definitely could use their pretty URL back. But, in due time.
A few other thoughts/suggestions I have:
- Make main nav bar full width, like the forum.
- Add About and Search items to main site nav (I added About, but it seems out of place as it is)
- Small search bar up top, so people can search Randomland. Maybe put "log in"/"log out" links up there too
Ok, see a bunny.
So, I tried enabling the search block, but it has a few problems.
- I can't position it where I actually want it without editing the HTML
- It's really ugly because I don't know where the code for that block is (needs a background if it's going to be on the sidebar. And it should look less 1998.
- Most importantly, it does not return decent results. I searched for "mono" and got nothing (remember, I wrote that one post yesterday?)
Aaaa! You turned the copyright thing back on? While I don't mind it in its self I think it might be a little obtrusive. Or perhaps I was just startled by it as its new.
And I am not sure what happened to the search box... I am thinking that there used to be one in the header... I must have broke it and not noticed. Sounds like something I would do. But either was we do need one, and one that works. I can work on the menu, though I kinda always liked it. I thought it looked clean, and "etched" comes to mind. But for the sake of site wide consistency it wouldn't hurt. The main site menu already uses the same button graphic as the forum one (just in blue.) It would be simple to use the green instead and change the menu containers display type or give it a background, or whatever needs dome.
I guess I missed the fact that you (Nick) replied a few weeks ago. Yeah, I turned the footer back on. It's big and ugly, I agree. It is two separate blocks. And while the whole "blocks" idea is nice, the default padding is pretty huge. Perhaps a few little css tricks would fix it; but I kind of forgot about it
Ok, this is relatively minor, but it would be nice if we could make the main site's theme a little more mobileweb friendly. Having to zoom isn't a big deal, but the post content still feels a little dwarfed by sidebars. It is more apparent on phoneywebs. By contrast, the forum theme isn't bad at all. How is it under the mobile IE?
I have mobile opera and mobile IE, soon I will have mobile firefox as well. I will give it a look and see what its like. The size of all the fields are set in CSS so its easy to change. I will have to play around with it a bit. Or you can too if you like.
I was wondering, would it be easy to float:right that poll in the text body? (or something similar, since I believe it is a block)
Ok, something I find more problematic:
When looking at Randomland's front page, it lists only excerpts of the post. This is what it's supposed to do, yeah. But it's not immediately obvious to me whether that is the full text or not. It seems like the "Read More" link should be immediately after the post body. Maybe it's just me?
Dude. I so know how to move those. I think. At the very least I could figure it out. Perhaps above the leave comment link and bolded. Not sure how else to make it clear that here is more to see. We could do like the register does and have a short caption and a title. But that does not lend well to most of the posts.
I like your style on the turtle post (http://randomland.net/node/137), calling out a link to the full post. But it should do it automatically.
Better: we could manually write the excerpt text, all would be good; I can insert a hyperlink, dangit. I've run across an old Drupal module which supposedly lets you do that, but it sounds out of date or at least not officially supported. Throwing in <!--break--> works ok, but seems insufficient to me and apparently I'm not the only one (http://drupal.org/node/272335).
Am I asking too much?
Hint: roll along and find the hidden-nugget links! :)
Links show up as a distinct gray on my screen :)
I need to fix the input fields for drupal. I think I set them up wrong when I installed the whyswig editor thing. We want unfiltered HTML rather then the filtered HTML. I can enable the editor for that input format and then you can hyperlink away. And if you still want the raw HTML to edit there is a button that turns the editor off and another that provides the HTML in a popup.
But I agree that an automatic link would be nice. The more link is what we want, we just need to move it and make it a little more verbose... so its not in the actual article. I think there is a way to make a completely separate version of the post that is just for the preview. But I am not sure on that.
So I finally made the size adjustments to the poll and menu. The poll went from 290 px to 230 px and the menu from 210 to 190.
Let me know if this looks ok.
And I would love to see the footer become less obtrusive. I think its a little to tall. But that's just what I think.
Also, I like the idea of the teaser being separate text if one wants. (Courtney linked to this module http://drupal.org/node/272335 (http://drupal.org/node/272335) and it sounds like what we want.)
When making new posts the default input type is "unfiltered HTML" So your tags will show up and you can use shift+enter and enter for line breaks and new paragraphs. URLs will automatically turned into links when you preview or submit and I activated some gallery thing. I don't know what it does. Enjoy.
AAaaannnnnd. I added a plugin for the gallery that ties it into the XML sitemap that google looks at to find new pages. So our pictures will be indexed.
Be warned.
Or something.
I installed the Excerpt plugin. It looks like it works. I don't have anything to post tonight so I didn't test it.
The sidebars seems less intrusive now on the mobe'. In fact, I didn't notice until read that reply. That's a good thing.
I also have nothing to add to randomland tonight....
So, is the unfiltered HTML option now a complex variation of filtered HTML? I have had bad luck with the wysiwyg editor (removing line breaks). If shift+enter is the trick, then cool. However, I tend the add div styling on a whim, so I need to be able to access the raw HTML. What input type should I use? Previously I was using the unfiltered HTML type...
annddd....I tried doing that thing where you remove the index.php from the gallery URL, but I couldn't get it to work.
I changed the last line of config.php from:
$gallery->setConfig('baseUri', 'http://randomland.net/sites/all/modules/gallery2/main.php');
to:
$gallery->setConfig('baseUri', 'http://randomland.net/gallery/');
define('GALLERY_MAIN_PHP', '');
Changing the first line caused no problems. And supposedly (link (http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery2:FAQ#Can_I_rename_main.php.3F)) you can just define that PHP const to an empty string and have it work, but I had no luck. I suppose it's not really that big of a deal. Now part of me just wants to prove it can be done. :P
And a few (http://drupal.org/node/80285) more links (http://gallery.menalto.com/node/77664) you probably already found (http://randomland.net/index.php/admin/?q=gallery&g2_subView=core.AdminRepositoryDownload&g2_pluginType=module&g2_pluginId=geturls), including mostly useless (http://randomland.net/index.php?q=gallery&g2_view=geturls.GetUrls&g2_itemId=23&g2_return=%2Findex.php%3Fq%3Dgallery%26g2_0%3Dgallery) stuff.
Drupal was removing the line breaks, not the editor. Unfiltered HTML has no filtering (no tags get removed) and the only changes that are made is that URLs will automatically become links if they are not already (so http://whatever.com will become a link even without you adding the <a> tags)
Ok.
I suck.
How did you get that page for easy-links?
I summoned 6:30am Google search results for "why am I awake when I am not going anywhere for an hour (http://drupal gallery2 short url -NOT -why -am -I -awake -when -I -am -not -going -anywhere -for -an -hour)." Sorry. I'm annoying.
No, I found a reference to that gallery2 module in some of those links I posted in my last post. It wasn't what I was expecting, though could be slightly useful (since apparently I should be stripping out the GALLERYID=xxxxx and I have not been). The admin interface for downloading and installing plugins is pretty slick.
I know I like it. Easy cheesy.
I changed some settings one the wysiwyg editor. I think it looks nicer now. It also has a pop-up context menu and advanced image placement options. Have fun.
My favicon died :(
Yay, it's back! :D
I'm trying to get everything on the site to use a somewhat standard image block div. Right now, it's a CSS class called .image-block. Ultimately, I think it should be:
A bounding box
with image block
<image, possibly as a link to gallery>
some padding
a caption block
<caption>
Positioning and size would be up to whoever writes the article. Caption block would be optional. How would we best implement this? PHP code? Call to a global javascript function to generate code? Do it yourself every time?
Something built into the editor that prompts you with the settings and inputs and the slaps it down. I don't know how that would work though. Just set it as a standard I guess. The style selection should show up in the editors drop-down list. So it should be easy to do by hand.
I'm casually getting around to putting the pictures back up (along with extras) and putting some basic formatting back in those old stories. A lot of old stories were done using <br><br> instead of <p> tags. That's a no-no, I know. I can't do much until I'm back home though because I didn't bring my giant picture archive hard drive...
Have I complained lately about the lack of a site search bar? Even a link in the header which takes you to a google search "site:randomland.net" would be an improvement. I suppose I could do that myself, eh? Suggestions?
There was once a seach box. I even positioned it in the header when I was working on the theme. I don't know where it went or why. It didn't even leave a note! I will look into it a little more deeply then I did before. See if it cant be dredged up from someplace.
I added a little spacing to anything wrapped in a <p> tag. I kept doing double-breaks after a paragraph, which seemed like a bad solution. So I just added a little margin to the bottom.
Also, I added a little CSS back in to get some old, lost styling working again (see info boxes on this page) (http://randomland.net/motors/francine/part2). I'm not sure on the colors yet, but at least the CSS class exists now.
I like the random picture which shows up in the sidebar when you're viewing the gallery. Can we implement this site-wide? (excluding the forum, of course)
Yes, we can. It is as easy as enabling the block. Just have a look! It should be there by the time you read this (unless I have killed the system again)
Nice! I might CSS in a background color, unless you like it naked, like that?
Feel free! it would be nice if it tied into the rest of the menu colors and the like.
This may be heresy, but what do you think of hosting our images elsewhere? It'd save you a lot of bandwidth but we may lose a little bit of control.
A quick google search (http://www.tw3o.com/photos-to-host-or-not-host/) popped up a little blurb in favor of using external web hosting. I did a quick search for Flickr-Drupal modules, and it looks like there is something out there. So it might actually make our lives easier (for permalinking pictures).
Just a thought.
Oh, I forgot to mention the reason I thought of this in the first place: if we're on Flickr or something, we'll get noticed much easier.
Ugh. My head hurts.
Also, after looking through Flickr's limitations, I don't like the sound of trying to use it. You can only create 3 or so photoalbums with a free account (and I don't see any compelling reason to pay $25/yr for a pro account). Only the last 200 photos show up in the "photostream." They encourage static linking, but if you can't view everything we've uploaded, what's the point?
So the local gallery still wins. And the desire to create our own grows a little.
I made a few uglifications to the main site's theme. If you notice them, let me know if you think they help or make things worse.
On another note, I was trying to clean up some messy and duplicate content this evening (after my headache subsided to "tolerable"). I noticed that the breadcrumb line often made no sense. It seemed that all pages were at the top level -- only pages that were part of a book were showing up any useful information. I dug around for a few minutes and found some logical answers. This site (http://projects.contentment.org/blog/83) suggested making a
book for every section. I have implemented this structure for Motors (http://randomland.net/motors) and it seems to work well.
- The plus side: breadcrumb nav makes sense!
- The down side: books automatically add a nav footer. The "next" and "previous" links show up and will jump you to an unrelated page (ie Francine's Top Level Page (http://randomland.net/motors/francine) has a previous page of Blazer Projects (http://randomland.net/motors/blazer-projects))
I matched the breadcrumb path to the custom URL path for everything under Motors (and Tech, I do believe). This seems like tedious information redundancy, but it the end result is good. There is only one problem...
The Rec, Opinion, and Review sections are set up differently. I do believe it is displaying a
View. This makes it impossible make it into a
Book. Perhaps we could change it so that the root page of every section is an "About" page with the view embedded in it? We could change the
View URL to
/section_name/search accordingly.
Just a thought. Opinions?
I set them all up like that to play with the different ways you can make a page. They are just lists of everything with a specific taxonomy term attached. I think the category type might do the bookish thing you are looking for to get the bread crumbs working nice without the bottom nav (having the bottom nave makes no sense except for multiple-page articles.) sopkalh I am tired and thats all for now.
Ok I lied. I have more.
I like. Though I think the menu bar still needs a little refinement, but it looks cool. Also the bottom text on the poll is a little hard to read on my monitor. Don't know how it is on newer ones. But nice!
Yeah, I can read the black text on the blue (for the poll footer), but the links make my eyes go a little buggy. I was wondering if it did the same for you -- apparently so.
I had to change the PHP a little, but now link footer of the poll is in the CSS as .poll.links (I think). It's in the theme's CSS file.
Any luck finding your camera?
Oh yeah, and as far as the header thing, I was trying to do something similar to the forum. It ended up being not very similar, but I like the look of a menubar that spans the screen width. It could certainly use refinement. That image is called 'tabs-back.png' under the theme's image directory, if you want to mess with it.
Also, the breadcrumb background image is called 'breadcrumb-back.png' in the same directory. I can give you the PSDs when I get home, if you want. They're easy to recreate though (and you might do a better job)
Refine away :)
Its raining so its either that or start cleaning again. Though I guess I should do a little of both. I'll see what I come up with and perhaps put some examples here. Then we can decide if they are of live-able quality.
So, I was wondering why we still have so many themes installed on the server. There is a 'randomland' theme, but that is not used. There are a bunch of others too. Do we need those? We're kind of set in our style, and it's all based around the 'zen' theme.
The zen theme is kinda like a blank template for making a theme off of. If I had done it correctly there would be a sub theme to the zen theme called randomlands-theme or something. But I got distracted before I got that far, though it is not to late to finish that. You can delete the others if you want. Some of that mess is the result of the test install becoming the live install. Just don't delete the zen directory :)
Ok, I might do that some time soon. I just wanted to make sure they weren't being used anymore.
I was kind of toying with the idea of making a mobile theme where the sidebars were removed. It seemed like a fairly simple thing to do when I was looking into it a week or so ago. Just a thought...
If we did that, we'd probably need to do some sort of weird subdomaining stuff which looked a little more complicated, but not impossible. Then we could have like http://m.randomland.net/motors/francine, or something.
Again, just a thought. It probably wouldn't ever benefit anyone but myself unless we get a traffic explosion...which sounds cool on multiple fronts, but is highly unlikely.
Sounds like an decent idea. Those who have full browsers on their phone might not care either way, but at least making the sidebars smaller (or just removing the right one) would probably help the mobile masses access things. I don't know if removing the BOTH sidebars would be good, how would anyone get to the admin section or user section? Unless we add that as the secondary navigation row (under the main menu bar thing) so yeah
Yeah, I'm not sure what to do about that, but it was just one of those ideas I was toying with. If we do it, it would be good to have a plan. Not that we ever use those..! I'm not particularly fond of the side menus at the moment, but i can't say what exactly bothers me about them... Anyway, yeah.
Today, Nick and I were toying with the idea of obliterating the sidebars in the main site. Opinions? What do you* think would be easiest/best?
I like the clean look of no sidebars (top nav only), but we would actually loose some functionality. For example, where in the world would the poll go? (Nevermind the fact that it went missing all on its own :) )
I think replacing the left-side category menus with "landing pages" would actually improve ease of use. As it is, the Francine story (for example) is given a randomland.net/motors/francine/xxx url, but going to the motors root page (randomland.net/motors) just gives you a bland listing of all posts under that section...in reverse order, mind you. This is particularly unhelpful for reading through "books."
Ok. I'll shut up. Your* turn.
* You[r] (pl.)
I kinda like the idea of the poll having autonomy. Coming and going as it likes. Sadly not the case though. I could write a script that turns off random blocks for arbitrary periods of time though :)
I agree that the site need more work. Things need better organized, we need some guidelines for posting (like what should go where, what constitutes a page, a story, a blog post etc.) We need better ways of finding content other then hoping that the great googlebot will bestow a favorable page ranking on up and people will stumble upon thing of interest. Though that too is a goal. All in all we need organized. And I am much better at talking about doing that then I am at even trying to think about how that would be done. So some discussion is needed.
"it seems a little time is needed
Decisions to be made
The good advice of friends unheeded
The best of plans mislaid"
Or so the story goes.
@motors section pagers
Quotehttp://randomland.net/sites/all/modules/smfforum/index.php/topic,25.msg601.html#msg601
I agree, they are nonsense. I was trying to use the Drupilian powers to arrange things in a hierarchical manner such that the breadcrumbs made sense. It worked, but had the side effect of being more confusing.
I like the Up button. I think that should be everywhere. Prev-Next links on the posts are by no means unprecedented (see "every wordpress theme ever" and "internet"). However, I have never, ever liked it.
In theory, we could add a little PHP logic to the theme. Also, there is most likely some crazy collection of modules you can install which eventually would make it work after 5-6 hours of "
gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!?!."
Its looking like there are a collection of modules to do anything you want. But you need a degree in drupal before you will know what they do and why you would want to do that and how they will interact with other things. Its kinda like chemistry, but then its more like alchemy because you might eventually get some gold from adding various things together in a nice little melting pot. But then no one else will see it because the access controls got messed up some how. And the poll might just go out for a walk in the middle of it. But in the end drupal is our "linux o'da internet" friend.
I like how things are shaping up on these random nets. It's my home-away-fro
-usefulness.
I am liking how the newly installed Drupal image modules are working out. It is not easy to use, but I think it fits our site's needs. Plus, I like wasting a day writing a php module we may or may not use. It was a good learning experience; I will do a little writeup tomorrow.
I would like to see that. Then I will know what it is you did :)
I'm almost done. I had to bag up like 15lbs of meat last night and that takes a long time because I'm slow.
On another note, I created a symlink called 'forums' in the randomland folder so 'www.randomland.net/forums' should be a valid url now. It's a little prettier and certainly easier to remember. Any objections? I'm not sure if there is a better way to go about it.
I notice that 'forums.randomland.net' is set to redirect to the 'sites/all/modules/smfforum'.
I recently added that to fix the broken links. I hopped that a redirect would be better then masking (I think google know when both are happening but maybe the redirect wont make for duplicate or confused googlee-box indexings.) If you know of any reason not to do this, then let me know. I have toyed with the idea of setting things up a little differently since out DNS people dont do wild cards, what I could do is like with test.randomland and mail.randomland is set another address to be updated thats forum(s).randomland have have apache treat the forums directory as www-root for that domain. I always just wanted /forums to work and sim-link does that. But if anyone wants the forums.randomland to act normal we can do that too.
I was gun-ho for subdomaining everything before, but I'm not so sure now. The 'randomland.net/[section]' seems to work well. As it is, both forums.randomland.net and randomland.net/forums are working now. I have noticed that is was forum.randomland.net at one point (on the old boards). As such, we are getting a lot of broken links. Could we just dump all of those "forum." 404ers onto the current board, or something?
Both forums.randomland and forum.randomland will work now. They just redirect to the normal path (so all the links should be fixed and working correctly.) They can exist for backwards compatibility.
Cool. That makes good sense.
In other news, hot sauce is still awesome.
Also, Randomland's stylesheet isn't parsing properly in Internet Explorer. I'll put that in the "Bugs" topic.
I changed the forum's stylesheet so I can see links a little better. It was fun having them all hidden and stuff, but they're green now, like the main site.
Which brings me to a suggestion: can we make an official color palette? I find myself digging through the stylesheet to find the HEX color values. Let's write 'em down. I'll start (a lot of them are hard to see on this background):
#449900
#4b7f00
#497a1b
#68a055
#2c642a
#689146
#445c3a
#3a425c
#c1d4ea
#2763a5
#6191c5
#b5c9d8
#4070a1
#cfd0da
#dbdce7
#d7e3f0
#2266ab
#8697a9
#eeeeee
#e1e1e1
#ecedf1
#f1f1f5
#efefef
#eaeaea
#d8d8d8
#ebf2f8
#ffc600
#5f4e25
#413021
I like the idea. We should make a little things some place that talks about the randomland theme and how it came to be. That would be a good place for a nice little color reference guide. Or maybe not. I don't know. At the very least a page dedicated to the randomland palate.
Agreed. Should this be a public page? Colors are never secret information. However, I can see the use of something similar for various logins (Google, YouTube, etc). But storing that info online is a bad idea.
I think colors are safe to share. A login info page would be cool. Should that be a drupal page with strict access rights, or a custom php page with a password of sports. I am sure the drupal stuff has been tested more extensively then anything I would wright.
I added (yet another) a module to allow specific taxonomy terms to be set to off limits. I will set a section term called 'Internal' to not allow access to anyone but admins. Any pages you want to be private just add them to that term.
Alternately there is another module that allows for page by page control of access rights. And then there is also an ACL module.....
Update: For the record this is an example of bad documentation http://drupal.org/node/31601 . Referencing that you do something 'like apace' does NOT count as documenting it. There are terms and options that the module uses that are barely even mentioned there. PLUS the module itself only uses one letter abbreviation for there terms with NO KEY. Uggg. Sometimes I hate unix/linux people. Trying to make everyone else feel dumb by purposely making things impossible to learn to use, unless that is you already know how.
Even though it looks like a solution I might not use it, as I don't want to explain to everyone how to use it. Unless you off hand know what A, I, D all mean, and more specifically what they do. Grrrrr.
:-X
[suppressing the urge to reference immunity disorders]
I've been moving the boards around a little bit, trying to remove dead boards and merging them in with more active ones. Let me know if you hate it.
The Motors and Photography boards are pretty dead, but I don't want to delete them...we just need to talk [photo]shop more, I suppose.
Fall/winter oriented site banners/ banner side images (the trees and the green wispies?) Having season-specific visuals is always a little cheesy, yet more then a little nice. I have some that I made awhile ago, you guys should make some too!
Totally. Whip up some banner and let's see them! I'd like to see some snow covered tree art.
A little refresh of an oldy but goody (that never got used for anything)
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/randomlandSnowTrees_0.png)
Nice, I like. Good job with the snow, too
Have I ever mentioned that I dislike the login box? I think we should go for an upper-right corner type of login button. Like most of the rest of the webbernets do.
Agreed. There are allot of little things on the site that I don't like, that being one of them, this are still there because I don't know of anything better or am not sure how to change it. But that should be easy to move. I think one can disable the login-block and then add some theme information for where it is to show up. But I will have to do some reading to be sure of how to do it.
I know it would be simple to hack something together, but I probably wouldn't do it "right." There is a lot I don't understand about Drupal theming.
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/1024px_wide/nick/images/MountainTrees.png)
Another idea for logos for the lands. Sorry if its a little rough, I am on the third day running with a constant headache and ear-pressure.
Another idea...
Continuing with the logo that sits atop the forums now, would people like a full length field of snow to span the logo/banner/header (what should we call it?) area? We could change out the green wispies for some snow and green trees for a few months.
Yeah, that'd be cool. Maybe have the snow and a few scattered trees peppering that top banner. Maybe sit the whole thing atop the "news" dividing bar.
I liked your mountain above, but the scattered trees seem a litle less epic and "infinity"...in a good way. Seems hom[l?]ier.
EDIT: nevermind about sitting it on that bar. I forgot about the "Get Out. See Green" subtitle
Also, I notice that when I switch between the forums and the main site, the main site's coloring seems awefully bland. I don't know if it's the drab greens or what. There's discontinuity between them, though many, many sites are like that...
So scattered trees good, mountains bad? That one tuned out nothing like I was originally intending. I always go into it wanting to make a randomland carved out of a rock face and always come up short of that.
QuoteMaybe have the snow and a few scattered trees peppering that top banner. Maybe sit the whole thing atop the "news" dividing bar.
That is almost exactly what I was thinking. With maybe a little snow covered cabin on the right end.
Are you working on it now or something? There is an ugly white box at the bottom of the top box.
Yea. Sorry, it will take a few moments before I get things lined up.
Its not finished but its kinda up there. Comments or suggestions? I will work on it more a little later.
I like the house!
Thanks!
I should start working on a spring and summer version. Unless people want to see the wispies come back once the snow has melted.
Seasonal versions would be awesome. Also make sure to do every major holiday and famous persons birthday.
Also, your snow drawing abilities have improved vastly from what I saw when you first tried that Roof Snow Load picture. Your final version of that picture turned out pretty good, but I like the snow in these pictures even better.
Things just look better small :)
The new banner is awesome. I like it a lot. I agree that we should have a few throughout the year...but don't go overboard.
I would enjoy something similar for the main site. What can you cook up?
I can cook bacon! I know that for sure. I will see what I can do without losing its distinguished drabness that reminds me of the old department of forestry site. They don't have their own site anymore. Its all been centralized (probably to cut maintenance costs.) I have been thinking about the main site though. I need to find some way to make all this pay me monies. Or find a place that wants to pay me monies to do this kind of stuff.
It'd be kind of nice if we could set up nicer profile settings on the main site. Right now, the options are just a sour mash of plugins throwing tabs on an already user unfriendly screen. I want something where I can put up a picture, give a little "about me" crap, have a shortcut link to creating a new "blog." That kind of stuff.
You mean the little side bar you get after you log in? That would be good there. I rather don't like the (mostly) useless sidebars we have now. They need fewer menus to stuff that never changes and better ways to find new/interesting content.
Also, blog entries on the front page. Yay, or nay? The default is to have them not. I think that the creator should still promote them to the front if they want. People can use their own discretion. And what about tech related blog entries? Should we make it possible to attach entries to sections of the site (tech or rec related blog entries anyone?)
I'm feeling kind of wishy-washy about blog posts on the front page. For me, as a registered user, I definitely care about recent posts. However, as a John Doe stumbling across the site, I would prefer to see a landing page with a sentence or two about why this site exists. As a user of the webbernets, I notice how quickly my interest evaporates, especially when I don't find what I'm looking for in about 2 clicks.
I don't know if you can have different front page settings for registered vs anonymous users or not. Well, I'm sure you can. I mean with the existing tools and modules.
I think it would require installing another module. I don't like static text on front pages... that should be on a mission statement or about page. Its so geocities to have a static block of text at the top of the page. What I DO like, is custom "your not logged in text" telling the user "Welcome, please register or login. This. Is. RANDOMLAND." or something. Just don't push them down a well if they refuse to register. (go watch 300 if you don't get it.) But that would be a place to put a short little about the site.
Perhaps something along the lines:
"Randomland: Crazy group of apathetic computer fools with a love for green things and automobiles, sharing their lack of insight with the web at large"
:) Nice.
Yeah, I suppose you're right about that being "so Geocities." We do have our About page, which serves its purpose and is well placed (standard, at least). Though it is a bit boring and could benefit from a few more pictures of explosions.
I'd prefer having the login thing up in the banner section, like the forum has. It's not terrible where it is, but I prefer the other. We could have a little "Why register?" link, or something in there.
Yeah. I agree about the placement of the login thing. I just haven't gotten around to moving it yet.
Yeah, it takes a lot of time. If we move the login and make the sidebar actually useful, we'd be in good shape. The only problem is that I don't really know what should be on the sidebar...Maybe a select set of very high-level links. An "archive" link sounds like a good idea; maybe it could throw you on to a page which lists stuff out by month/year it was written? I don't know...
Also, I really dislike the layout of the admin links on the sidebar. I once downloaded a "admin toolbar" module but never actually tried it out. I'll click on "Administer" and then use the on-page links from there. Maybe it's just me that finds those links next to useless. But even then, the admin pages are nothing close to intuitive. I was looking at (suprise!) a module which replaced the admin page with something more user friendly. However, I never got around to trying that one out either.
Ok plah.
I think the admin stuff is allot better in the next version of drupal. That's not yet out. And is incomparable with the druapl/smf bridge.
I would like to see the betterified admin stuff. A menu bar at the very top of the page would be nice, with drop downs and little text-popups that tell you what things do.
Feel free to install the module if you like... FTP might not be up yet.... I need to get you a VPN to connect to so you can samba your way into the www directory. Its so much nicer that way.
That indeed sounds quite shizzle-ous. Let me know if you get that set up and I'll give it a shot.
About the sidebars: I don't like the current setup because it misleadingly shows too little content. There are missing sections, yes (like 'Opinion'). But it also makes it look like there are only 4 articles under 'Motors.' It links to the biggies, but there is no effective way to access a section's front page from the sidebar -- for instance clicking on the block heading.
Collapsable might be nice, too. I don't know. Maybe I'll browse around and peek at others' sidebars. They seem to be disappearing, actually.
We can ditch the sidebar and just use the top menu for nav. Give each section its own landing page (a view) that lists articles in a compact manner (so you can fit lots of them on the page, think 'The Register.') Then all the content would be more obviously available (no distracting sidebar so people will go straight for the top nav,) the front page will be cleaner and the world will finally know peace. Or so one can hope.
Let us know if you see any interesting site designs we might want to emulate.
Ok. You should be able to VPN into the server. Message me for details.
I'd certainly go for El Reg style frontpages. The only thing that I dislike about their layout is the lack of teaser text. Perhaps if we did a 2 column layout (instead of 3) with a little longer teaser text? Of course, The Register uses headline-writing wit in place of descriptive teaser text. It works well for them, but I don't think we should try that. :)
What! You doubt out mad witting abilities! Man they used to call me J.C. Witty, due to my razor sharp whit and retort. Never did know what the J.C. stood for.
Ok, ok. No one ever called me that. I will experiment with the layout of thing eventually though. I would like to get more things on the front page/ landing pages for the sections.
:)
I started playing with the layout a little bit, then jumped into editing a view (on test (http://test.randomland.net)). Needless to say, I got very confused. But it looks like you can create a custom template file for a view, if you so desire. One that overwrites the page-template.tpl (or whatever it's called).
If that's the case, that could be a good way to go for section landing pages. It's also possible that I don't know what I'm talking about, because really, I only looked at it for about 5 minutes then decided I had best get some (paid) work done.
It's true you can do that. I think I made one for something in the gallery, but I don't remember what exactly. Also, if I remember correctly there are a few little tricks you must pull to get that stuff to all work right. One of which is flushing the drupal cache so it finds your new template file.
Should we have a wiki?
Wiki Devil poster! 666 posts = EVIL!
Man, I was totally looking at the first post on here, from like May 2008 and I was like "woaaahhh maaan. We lamed."
Well, lets fix that lame!
Looking at the HTML5 canvas stuff, it looks like animated banners will simple and easy on the bandwidth. Any suggestions as to what we might throw up on the main site?
After thinking a little, I came to the conclusion that very subtle animations would be the best way to go. Not all flashy and distracting but something that rewards a careful observer with leaves swaying in the wind or the gentle rippling of a brook. Perhaps even random animals that run through the banner. With JS so much would be possible.
That sounds cool. That might be a good thing to play with. It sounds like it's actually coming, so let's learn it! If people start using it, it'll become better supported...right?
And according to an interweb (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/01/google_to_remove_ie6_support_from_google_apps/) or two, Google apps are going to stop supporting the dreaded IE6 (http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS243&=&q=ie6+hate&aq=f&aqi=&oq=). And if they don't bother with old, steamy poo-pile of a browser, why should we? ...Not that Randomland has been robustly tested with obscure/ancient browsers as it is now, but yeah.
But with a little JavaScript you could just tell all things IE to throw up a boring, static banner (and maybe slap a little 'get with the times!' watermark, just for jabs). And with compatible browsers, we can start whipping out the fance. Microsoft will eventually have to get around to supporting this HTML5 thingy, right?
From what I read they will be supporting some of it with the next releases of IE (updated to IE 8 I think) and defiantly with IE 9. So it looks like its all OK to use. Its Kinda exciting to finally get some new HTML to play with.
Yeah :)
HTML was old when we learned it in middle school. I guess it has changed a fair amount, with the shift from table layouts and "under construction" gifs to DIVs and SPANs and database dependence and the proliferation of serverside scripting (PHP/ASP) and client-side scripting (Flash/Silverlight). Still, it always feels like web technologies are two steps behind the way people are trying to use it.
For instance, how long did it take before PHP was a legitimate, object-oriented language?? (It still has a bit of identity crisis, in my opinion.)
Aaaanyway, yeah, what types of Randomlandy things would lend themselves to the visually-oriented programming we could do with this new stuff?
Moving banners, go-cart racing game :).. ummm graphs... real time GPS readout of the blazers location on a map.... games of all sorts, the ability to draw on and annotate pictures in the galleries. Stuff like that. You have any ideas?
Annotations in the galleria sounds the awesome!
Maybe I'll have to start digging in to the Drupal again. There are tons of things I'd like to do with that gallery but don't know how. Theoretically, with images being stored as nodes, we could write our own stuff without really stepping on the toes of all those weird plugings we have installed.
Oops, this belongs in another thread...
I've been thinkin'...
The entirety of Randomland could use a little refining, as far as design goes. Yeah, the fixing the sidebars to make some sort of navigational sense would be great, but I was thinking of a slightly more thorough and purposeful refinement.
The Good:
- I like the current color scheme we have going. Greens and browns suit us well. Perhaps the blue should go the way of the buffalo.1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowly_Going_the_Way_of_the_Buffalo)
- Top nav is a good approach, breaking the core elements of Randomland into two handfuls of links.2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowly_Going_the_Way_of_the_Buffalo)
Um...I'll finish this thought later...
So by "going the way of the buffalo" you mean that its "totally puck rock"?
And by "handfuls of links" I mean 9, as is the number of fingers of the fictional character Mr. Lyle on that old show "The Pretender." Really, there are 9 links.
But I think we could shave it down a little bit. Maybe to 6 or 7? Opinion has stagnated into oblivion1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion) and Reviews still only has one post under it. Finally, the Gallery link still points to the ancients.
Most of the stuff I wrote in Opinion should purposefully be lost forever.
I agree with zourtney. We could easily remove the "Opinion" and "Review" sections and just move all the content over into individual's blogs. You could then put a "Blogs" button on the top navigation bar.
With that done, you should be able to completely get rid of the sidebar.
Also, we should normalize the color scheme a little bit. The green, black and brown thing we've got going is good but the blue nav buttons and blue background seem out of place. I think we should switch those over to a complimentary shade of green.
The gallery could use some major help too. I'd start with actually making the link point to the correct galleries, followed by showing an image's tags when you view an image.
Should we make the main site match the forum colors?
And what is with the random annotations, Zourtney? I am not complaining by any means. Just observing. :) (Thats where my 'punk rock' comment came from. You link to a wikipedia page about MxPx for the buffalo comment.)
:) Until we have brain-mapping software whereupon you can track back why I came to write a particular phrase, this is the best I can do. I'll try not to abuse it. And frankly, that's pretty creepy, so I hope no one is working on such a thing.
I think our blue background gradient thing needs a little help. Maybe a brown or complementary shade of green.
To continue what we were saying before, about reorganizing the site's categories:
I think we could slim down to the following sections:
Home (http://randomland.net) | Motors (http://randomland.net/motors) | Rec (http://randomland.net/rec) | Tech (http://randomland.net/tech) | Blogs (http://randomland.net/blog) | Forum (http://randomland.net/forums) | Gallery (http://randomland.net/gallery) | About (http://randomland.net/about)
Anything lingering under Reviews or Opinion that we want to keep should be shuffled over to a blog entry (can we change this without creating a new node?).
The left sidebar is another can of worms. Mostly, I think it can go away.
I like it!
I don't have a blog though :(
Everyone has a blog. You just never made any posts to it that I know about so I didn't add it to the side menu. It would be easy to do if you would like to have one in the list with the others :)
I think it could all work. How should the blog pages look? Do we have a general blog landing page with snippets from all the blogs to lead people to the individual ones? Or should we have a blog landing page broke out into columns/rows detailing a post or two from all the blogs? Or perhaps just a list off all the active blogs. Or no landing page at all, just have a drop down menu from the main menu item with all the blogs listed...
Given the limited nature of our site's topics, I wouldn't mind dropdowns on that top navbar. Like, for the blogs, you could make a dropdown entry for each one of us. But if you click on the link you just get them all mashed together like we have now...or a nicer landing page would be alright, too.
Either would be fairly simple to do. I think making a nicer landing page would be good. Though that would get cluttered/hard to do if we had more then 5 or 6 blogs.
I'm definitely, definitely in favor of landing pages for the major subsections of Randomland -- Motors in particular needs it. I'm kind of "take it or leave it" for the other sections, since they have less content. But yeah!
If you're bored, mock something up so we can look at it. I tried a couple of times, but never had much vision. And thus, gave up.
I'm going to rearrange the forum categories a bit. Complain if you hate it...
EDIT: ok, I'm done. I moved the categories around to be in the same order as they'd appear in the main site's top navbar. Opine away.
EDIT #2: I've started converting Opinion and Review nodes into blog entries. I've been removing the opinion/ and review/ from the URLs and replacing it with the author's name. At least half of the stuff is being changed to "unpublished" (I don't like deleting, ok?) Almost all of the entries are mine, so I'm guessing that nobody cares and will be less embarrassed of Randomland as a whole, this way. Just know that Google will be linking up to nonexistent pages for years to come. But....oh well?
Ok, that stuff has been rearranged. Let me know how much you hate it.
Question: how do you edit the text of these pages -- Opinion (http://randomland.net/opinion) and Reviews (http://randomland.net/reviews)? I want to put a little note that says these sections have been shut down, but they don't have the normal tabs across the top. Whatever text I changed under the "Menu" admin surely did not change the text that shows up there.
EDIT for all the uncaring masses, I've started removing links to the old gallery. Where I can (like here (http://randomland.net/rec/camping/tentin-2009)), I am replacing it with an [rlimg] tag. Inaction didn't seem to phase out the old gallery, so I guess I must do it.
That text is in the taxonomy stuff I think.
I think the blog landing page needs some help.... but I have no concrete idea what to do when I look at it. Just another "not like that" feeling.
I will join you in fixing the images when I find them!
Darn. I was hoping someone had some ideas other than "not like that."
Let's see...
we could...uh...
make some boring text saying "this is blogland"
then list out each one of us who has a blog (just three of us at the moment).
Maybe like
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
| pic | zourtney -- ancient randomlander who writes too much crap |
| here | on the randomnets. |
| | 47 posts, member since 2002. |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
| pic | nick -- founder and Mr Server himself! Picking up slack |
| here | and slappin' out swamp-diving references. |
| | 31 posts, member since 2002. |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
...
It would be nice to have something of a public profile. I've kinda wanted that for years (despite the fact that not a single person in the whole wide world would be interested enough to intentionally view it).
We could do something like that. And list the five most recent post titles below each name. Also, I think it would be easy to make a profile page for each member with the drupals. If the default member page is not to your liking then I am sure there is a module to make a new one/change it up. We could even make a new page type for member info or something.
welllll, the only thing we have in place for a "member page" is the default thing which looks like any other admin page. And I really dislike the layout of the admin pages. I find them to be difficult to navigate and visually..."blaaaahhhh."
I once ran across a module which set up the administration stuff into a "dashboard" like page. You know, kind of a grid layout with icons/text links. But it seemed to have little community support at the time. To me, that layout seems to make the most sense.
I thought that WordPress's admin pages were slightly lacking...then we moved to Drupal! :(
(sorry, I'm coming off Anti-Drupalist today, though I am not)
Everything I see about druapl 7 says the admin pages will be a little more friendly. But in the mean time a little sprucing up to ours would be nice.
off the topic of admin pages, but....
How hard would it be to implement dropdown menus on that top navver? I was thinking something along the lines of
-----------------------------------------------
| Home | Blogs | [...the rest]
-----------------------------------------------
| Brad |
| Jacsveus |
| Nick |
| Zourtney |
------------
I think all the stuff we need is already installed. One would just have to figure it out. I'll take a look before I get to involved in stuff today.
Of course, having nice "landing pages" could eliminate the need for such links...I'm not really sure which I prefer.
It looks like there are more then one module that will do it (nicemenues, superfish) but it will take some themeing and a little coding to get it working. Does not at all look hard but there should just flat out be a module to do it. I would do the work but I don't have time right now :(
Yeah, we could do something like that. It just depends on what you guys want. I'm getting the urge to refine the main site a little more. People don't usually complain when I do, but I think that's because no one notices.
I "mumbling."
And I forgot why I opened this thread in the first place. I was going to suggest something. Hmmm...
EDIT: Oh! Oh! I remembered! I was wondering if anyone thought it'd be worth making another section of the forum. Sometimes I have randomness in my head about posting about pets/wildlife, plants, and food. Now, those don't necessarily fit into the same category...just askin'
Make it food/arts/entertainment? And an animals section under something.... but that could just go under general unless we are going to have lots I guss.
So, I was messing around and found a fairly easy way to implement mobile device themes. So I did. It's disabled right now, but it can be found under the admin section. And I have created a theme called rltheme_mobile under /themes.
And goodnight.
Uh, I'm not really sure where to put this, but I was thinking it might be fun to play with Drupal 7 on a subdomain of Randomland. According to this (http://drupal.org/project/drupal), they released an alpha version just a few days ago. It may or may not be worth putting any effort into playing with...but so too is Randomland.
Anyway, let me know if you're interested.
Yeah. That cool. I have been waiting for them do commit to some kind of release. We can throw it up on the test site.
Sounds good to me. Hey, ho, let's go!
Ok. Lets 'ho' it then.
OK. So the theme has a few problems in the new version of the forum software. Some styling needs fixed and some images and missing or wrong.
Some of the missing images are the ones that tell users if a category has unread posts in it or not, so I thought we might as well personalize it a bit with some new one. I was thinking perhaps some trees or other imagery fitting with randomland. I made some concept trees for your (YES, ALL OF YOU!) consideration :) Or, does anyone have any other ideas? We could have little RL seals to denote a read or unread status. But thats getting a little full of ourselves.
Here they is:
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/nick/images/conceptTrees.png)
I'm loving the gradient tree. I think we should slap that in the seal!
Like this?
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeSeal2.png)
Yes! I like it, like it, like it!
Maybe this?(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeSeal2.1.png) Or this? (http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeSeal2.2.png)
Or even this! (http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeSeal2.3.png)
The first one seems a little to generic to call it our site logo... but it could work great as a graphic someplace else.
Oh yea! I like the coloring on the last one a bit better. The lighter color stands out more. And yeah, three trees is the way to go :-)
Can I get the Illustrator file for that? (Or whatever you made it in)
No Problem.
TreeSeal 2 (http://randomland.net/node/1434)
TreeSeal 2.3 (http://randomland.net/node/1435)
See all the logo ideas in one place! Please add any of your own (and post them here.)
- http://randomland.net/node/1437
And here is yet another tree seal concept drawing...
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/nick/images/treeSeal2.4.png)
Cool, cool. That is looking very nice. And in response to the link's question, no I don't think it needs wiki'ed. This seems more conducive to the forum's capabilities.
I think I do like the rear trees with the lighter tops instead of the front one. It's a toss-up. The gradient background does us good, for a more finished logo. I've been wanting to mess with it just to see what a monochrome, bare-bones version would look like. But I haven't gotten around to it. Anyway, I certainly say that the latest is the bestest.
I'm not real keen on the "RandomLand.net" text at the base, but maybe that's just me.
Ok, I will keep the tree gallery on the main site.
There is a look I would like to achieve with the background of the fadded, vintage matte look. I an just not sure how to do it just yet. You can see am attempt with the "firy" trees below.
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeSeal2.5.1.png) (http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeSeal2.5.2.png)
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeSeal2.5.3.png)(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeSeal2.5.4.png)
Woah, these look totally different on a full sized screen, as opposed to a phone in a bright room. Have you been posting the source files?
I liked the fiery red-and-orange one from the 'mobe, but on my desktop it looks kind of "Last Survivors of the Apocalypse." Or perhaps just "Forest of Fiery Fir." Oh man, I need to stop looking at it. I'm feeling sad for the trees as the walls of flames encroach from the left! encroach from the right! Ah!! SAVE YOURSELVES! You're more than wood to me!
Uh..........
I can post the source files for any you are interested in. Its an extra step to do when putting the images up so I haven't been. I have files for all of them though. Plus a few others.
Any ideas or suggestions?
And now this.... I am very flexable on the font. I liked this one because it stood out without looking cartoony. But I think it might be a little to jungle cat.
I would also remove the text on the seal from a banner like this.
(Illustrator File) (http://randomland.net/node/1443)
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/1024px_wide/nick/images/treeSealBanner1.png)
Just a note, before I forget:
For the past...um, 7 years or so, I've been casing it "Randomland" as opposed to "RandomLand." I think the capital L came about in the very first version of the site, but then faded out from my usage. Do you prefer goin' cap-L? If so, why? Please describe your thoughts in a 3 page, double-spaced essay---
Ok, no. Please don't. I am curious though, and I'm alllll about standardization (across things we can control). Of course, throwing it all lowercase for the logo is oh-so-standard these days. I kind of like it, and it might be good for logo purposes.
Oh, and I feel I should say, "yeah, baby, thin fonts are in!"
I thought it looked more dramatic with the 'cap-L. And it looked strange in most fonts all lower case. Might just be me though. I should play around with it a bit and see how things look.
I can understand that. I should probably be less picky about things which don't matter, too.
Graphic design is all about the little things which don't matter and yet define an image. So pick away. I find the more I work with something the less critical I become. So I need other peoples criticism to keep me in line. Otherwise I have to leave an idea for a day or two and then come back to it.
What do you think of replacing the trees in the forum banner with the gradient-tree? Or a derivation of that tree. For variety ya'know.
Which banner? And "yes."
Oh, another point of consideration:
When I was playing around yesterday I coloring the "random" and "land" with greens from the trees. I liked it. I was going to upload a picture, but even Opera gives me an upload error now. Poot.
Oh, and just a random comment: either I missed this logo (http://randomland.net/node/1426), or you never posted it. There something so wrong, yet oh-so-right. I'm taken back to the days of old. And I am convinced that if I viewed those trees from any other angle, I would be seeing the same side of the tree :)
I know exactly what you mean :)
And by forum banner, I mean the only one we have. The one right up top.
And what is with everyone having problems uploading? If it persists we will just have to turn off the multi-uploader.
And the random and land from the one that I made are colored from the same colors in the trees and a brown from the background. I do want to see yours though.
Oh, oops. I did not read carefully enough. I tried two greens, and it was pretty acceptable. Maybe better than a brown? Hard to say. And oh yeah, we should slap up some favicons.
I made a (super) rough example of what I was thinking for the forum logo. So far it looks nothing like I had pictured in my head.
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/lilSpringCabinTrees2.png)
I have been trying to redo the forum banner with the new-looking trees, but they just don't fit with the rest of the look. I think the whole thing will have to be redone from scratch.
Yeah, sorry, I forgot to post back on this one. The idea of those trees in the banner could be cool, but it seems like it'd have to be a more abstract scene. Which is ok, too.
The other day, I looked at the main site's banner and was like, "wow, that's cool." I like the shapes. I never really look at it and kind of just see "logo, strangely placed text, bland green blobs." But when I look at it, I like it. And it's a good contrast with the intentionally spartan RL Seal. (I wanted to use the term "juxtaposition" because it has a lot of syllables, but I couldn't fit it in the sentence.)
Verdict: I don't know. I like the main site's cool trees for bannerage.
Dude, we should work on that logo again. That was look. I like the "three trees seal" thing.
You could even do an HTML canvas / SVG version :)
That sounds cool. Another web technology that should have been standard 5 years ago, not just now coming into use.
Ok, think any changes need to come before we put the image into use?
What is the most recent version? I was liking it, though I do think we should keep to a relatively simple background.
Yeah. I was trying to get a mottled, kinda vintage faded look for the background. But I unfortunately have no idea what I am doing and ended up with a bunch of other (cool looking) things I wasn't after. Perhaps a light gradient will do for now.
Yeah, maybe a gray or light brown? So as to get a lot of contrast with the trees.
So, out of the choices posted on the testo page (http://randomland.net/node/1437), I pick this one:
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/nick/images/treeSeal2.4.png)
I think the fiery one (http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeSeal2.5.2.png) is all (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS243&q=skydiving&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=) kinds (http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS243&q=world%27s+largest+dump+truck&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=Rp0qTNahLZrrnQf54ZHWDg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CB8QsAQwAA) of (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS243&q=paintballing+on+the+slopes&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=) cool (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS243&q=how+is+cheese+made%3F&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=), but is a bit over-dramatic for everyday use.
I'm a little torn on the coloring. It's got that kind of washed out look, which I like. But it doesn't grab attention like colorful, saturated colors do...and perhaps that's why I like it :)
Seeing as how Randomland readership is hovering around the 2.5-3 unique visitors per ever, I suppose it doesn't matter a great deal. What do you (all?) think?
I am never completely satisfied with anything I make, but eventually I get to feeling that I am doing more harm then good and just call it finished.
I think I could take the fiery one and make the whole background that texture, but more brown. Unless I have already made one like that and didn't like it.... I should look.
What would you do to change it (anyone)?
Can you upload the source file? I have a few ideas, but I don't know how they look until I try them...like maybe doing a background so light that it's almost white? Or matching the circle's green to one of the center tree's colors? Or applying a subtle radial glow on that outer circle? Just subtle change ideas...I don't know how they'd play out.
But, even as it is: I like it!
Here (http://randomland.net/node/1435) is the plain-Jane one. Any particular file you want?
Well, in my quest to come up with a more definitive answer to the eternal logo question, I just ended up with more questions. I guess the idea behind the monochome ones was stickers, t-shirts, etc. I didn't really end up doing anything, but maybe it'll spark some ideas. Then we can get working on that Drupal 7 theme! ;)
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/Thumbnail/zourtney/images/Seal-of-Trees-06-30-2010.png)
Pretty much same as before, with a little bit of a radial glow. A bit overdramatic.
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/Thumbnail/zourtney/images/Seal-of-Trees-06-30-2010-part-bw.png)
Useless but interesting variation which seems to make the center tree "pop" (to me, anyway)
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/Thumbnail/zourtney/images/Seal-of-Trees-06-30-2010-grayscale.png)
I'm going monochrome. And I don't know why.
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/Thumbnail/zourtney/images/Seal-of-Trees-06-30-2010-grayscale-inv.png)
My favorite of the useless ones -- this one is totally unprintable and worthless as webpage decor. But it's dark and delicious (like some chocolates).
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/Thumbnail/zourtney/images/Seal-of-Trees-06-30-2010-minimalist.png)
Finally, what says "randomland" more than a lone tree? Minmalist, lone, and standing tall. :)
I like them all in one way or another. And I do rather like the idea of making the center tree 'pop' more. With a little refinement, any of them could work. Now I'm not sure what I like.... Good job :)
I would perhaps like to make a few monochrome window stickers for the blazer (or anywhere) :)
Looking at them on my phone in a brightly lit area, I think we do need to accentuate the center tree. The top one, with the browns and greens has too little constrast to be "instantly" recognizable. And as much as I like the brown background, perhaps white is the way to go.
Shine as flashlight at your monitor, squint hard, then turn your head slightly. It'll be about the same effect. :) I think "first glance" recognition is important.
Do we really need to worry that much about "brand recognition" :)
Of course not. It's the principle of the matter! :)
Haha. OK then.
I will play with the logos tonight and post back if by change I happen to have a mediocre idea.
Can I some illustrator files for those?
As I can has cheezburger!
The more complete answer to the intended question, which I think was, "Can I have the Illustrator files for those images?" is: not really. I pretty much just played around and overwrote what I was doing within the same file. The last monolone tree and the fancied up (but indistinct) versions can be found in the attached file. Everything else you can probably recreate in a minute or less. Sorry.
Cool. Thanks.
Do we need an officially adopted font? For consistency and good lookery?
Just to mess things up I made a few alternate logo types...
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeSeal2.6-mono-dystop.png)
In a dystopian future... More of an ominous 'barcode-punk (http://www.google.com/images?num=50&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=oqk&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=steampunk&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=FSQuTNiABZGsngfe8o3VAw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CDQQsAQwAA)' style
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeLogo1.0.png)
A more linear logo styling.
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeLogo1.0-mono.png)
You wanted to see that in mono, right?
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeSeal2.6-mono-shaded.png)
Courtney's mono image with some shadeing
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/1024px_wide/nick/images/shieldLogo1.0.png)
And finally a more ancestral style..
Hai!
Did you get hacked?
No, that was an affirmative to the official font question. And now I see images there!
I like them. The Randomland coat of arms is cool. Though I'm not sure where you'd use it. Maybe for when we start our line of battle gear?
Exactly :)
I like graytree. It's stickerable
But what do you like as a main logo? I like the elegance of a minimalist design, but they are hard to get right. Though they easily seem to carry some impact in their simplicity. I also like the look of the linear logos. Though much more the colored one. They have a kinda professional look to them. Not to say that the seal-style logos are unprofessional. They have their own allure, built from the official finality of the seal. The mark of organization that stands behind that seal and all they place it on. I just don't know. I do know I want to make some stencils and get to spray-painting something.... hmmm, that computer case looks like it could use some touching up.
Also. I made some widow clings with your mono-tree mash up.
Ok, lets (maybe?) make a decision. At least for the short term.
| (http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeSeal2.7.png) (http://randomland.net/node/2427) | (http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/nick/images/treeLogo1.1.png) (http://randomland.net/node/2428) | (http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/zourtney/images/Seal-of-Trees-06-30-2010-part-bw.png) (http://randomland.net/node/2418) |
I like the polished look of the first seal (hopefully that's not the exact same one I did...my opinion would be tainted!) If I had to choose, I'd say that one! With a prominent "randomland" to it's right, with the tagline below (like previous mockups had).
If I could adjust one thing, it'd be to make the background lighter. Or to somehow make the trees contrast with the background more. I tried myself, but was never real pleased with the results.
Número uno is my vote.
EDIT: looking at it on another monitor, I like it more. I say keep it as is!
I will give a few more tries as making the trees stand out without making them look too out of place or neon. Perhaps lightening them a little and making the background a hair darker... or some shadow/outer glow.
Just another variation (perhaps I should stop). I dropped the brown background opacity down to ~60%.
Knock it.
EDIT: I changed my mind. I don't like it. It made the problem worse. And here's another I don't really like.
I should stop -- I still like the first one of yours best.
Ok, ok. I promise -- this is the last one for tonight. Silhouetted right and left trees. It could work....but nah. You can look at it anyway though.
I like them all. But as logos go I think the one that you were saying to use before is still the way to go. It is, as ever a hard decision to make. They all have good points that stand out, each possessing their own elegance. But for most logoishness I think that the prize goes to three trees classic.
Aye. Let's run with it!
Its up. But I think it needs some tweaking to make it a little larger.
Cool. I like it
I'll have to look at it on a bigger screen tonight.
Upon seeing the new logo on my desktop monitor, I say: awesome!
I think it looks really nice. Now, we should make the rest of the theme (or a Drupal 7 theme) which goes along the same lines. Simple but glossy. Green and brown and everything outdoorsy.
I like it! A lot.
I am glad! And I agree on the theme specifications. Now I need to find (time+motivation)-distractions to work on the new theme a little.
If it's easier, we can do some Photoshop mockups before we start getting Drupal grit in our nit.
Might be. Its nice to have something you are working towards when doing that sort of thing. Keeps things more coherent.
Yes, it makes collaborative synergistic teamwork more cohesive.
I just barfed a little in my mouth. ::)
I keep looking at the new logo and liking it. So, good job. Can we do our navigation bar in a similar style?
Theme, theme, theme, theme, theme, theme, theme
I like the idea. Making them match would look good. Should we do it with the new drupal, or both?
I say we just do it for Drupal 7. Unless you have any worries about Drupal 7 in general, and just want to stick with 6.
Nope. I was just unsure of how fast the migration would take place.
Yeah, but I don't mind Randomland's glacial pace. It's kind of "our thing." Which reminds me, I really need to get that Tempo story fixed up...
I think we should make our favicon.ico a miniature version on the new tree logo! A single tree though. And super simple, because it's only like 16px square.
Yea? Nay?
Yea.
Do you have the Illustrator file for the latest logo?
Yes. I have illustrator files for about a dozen versions of it too if you like :)
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/zourtney/images/favicon.png) (http://randomland.net/node/2446) Here it is. So boring that you might have just overlooked it! I call it faviconcept. Just a simple 16x16 pixel tree in three shades of pre-approved Randomland green. Knock it and/or try for yourself (AI file attached)
I like it. We should use it! So lush and tiny.
(http://randomland.net/sites/default/files/imagecache/600px_wide/zourtney/images/favicon-angled.png) (http://randomland.net/node/2447) A slight change: can you notice it?
I can. Much smoother points on the bows. I like it better. It looks even more tree like. Use it!
So when is the mobile-friendly version of Randomland coming?
Aha! I'm not the only one!
I'd like to create a mobile theme. It makes more sense to do it in Drupal 7 (the API is very different). Unless, of course, we just get stuck using 6 because we're too lazy to upgrade.
How are you liking your new phone? I want to play with it :)
Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days.
Bam. We move sooooooo slow.
Lets move to 7 and poo-poo the consequences!
That's the randomland spirit! Woohoo!
I could start a new topic...but why? When I can just dredge up old ones!
I'm starting to play around with theming. In some ways, I'm less picky than I used to be (ie fixed width nay be tolerable). But I'm more picky in other ways...like requiring something mobile friendly and having stuff looks like it was designed on this side of the millennial divide.
Anywho, first order of business: colors. I'm feeling the greens and browns. Perhaps even the autumny shades of orange and yellow. I'll try cooking something up on one of those color-palette sites.
Opinions?
Sounds good to me. Another thing... the mobile theme wants to quote who you are replying to. We should fix that.
Yeah it does. It's kind of silly. Which is a nice word for stupid.
I was actually thinking about Drupal theming, but we should theme them very similarly, I opine. Both will need some help.
Should we mock up a screenshot or two? I'm not good at Photoshop...also I like having the cart before the horse. It worked for Porsche...
You have to use the Reply link at the top of the page to reply without quoting a specific message.
Wow, this (desktop) theme for the forums is much better than our old one. It still needs a few tweaks in the header region (like the login/user info box), but overall, I like it. Maybe we can model the main site to look similar to this.
I added a themes folder (http://randomland.net/repos/randomland/themes) into the SVN repository. They're empty for now, but I'll be playing with it. And if anyone has any good ideas, just chuck it in there. On a laptop somewhere I started a Garland-derived (http://drupal.org/node/171205#base-theme) theme.
I see. In that case we need to add another such link to the bottom of the page.
Dude, what are we going to do with the site?
Better question: What should be on it? How should it be divided? What should be on the landing page? Do we even want a unified landing page? Should we have a bunch of related blogs instead? Should the forums takeover and use some static-page-making plugins? Should we put it all in a bottle and see if it floats?
Ok, this is just one man's opinion...
Randomland[proper] should primarily be a chronology of projects and adventures. These will be predominately (nature-seeking) outdoorsy and (beater) automotive activities. A smattering of musical, electronic, and woodworking projects fit the bill nicely, too.
Maybe I think it should be this way, because that was its genesis (Tempo!). The "long form" stories and single-post how-tos are the meaningful ones that stick out in my mind. Tuffy may have been a whorefeline flusey, but it didn't exactly add, anything other than comical, value to the site.
Browsing through the "Rec" and "Motors" section, we actually have some content I like. We need a way to "promote" the longer write ups, because they get lost amongst the "I promise we're doing stuff!!!!1" posts. Maybe making them pages is the way to go? Maybe better landing pages is the answer.
Maybe making the site look less twenty-oh-four is the answer :P We desperately need a new theme...I'll mullet over.
Do we dare switch back ends again? What are the options nowadays? I can write a better website with my recent skilllzzz, but have no interest in creating yet-another-CMS from scratch.
Well, I agree with your opinion. Some pages with tutorial like content about projects might actually attract people. A better version of my water rocket for example. (which there is a lame video of on Facebook if anyone cares.) Granted there are lots of tutorials about those already.
As for the theme...well, yes. It probably should look less 8 years old as you said. How? I have no idea. But that's my two cents.
With reguards to the backend; Yeah. It's not a problem of 'can', it's a problem of "There are 16 already made, lets just use of those." But what one?
If you make a rough of a suggested sitemap it would help me see what you are envisioning.
Promoting content of the site is hard. Most all of the content I come across on the 'net is from search results or aggregate sites. Unless it's a forum I don't ever hit 'Home' and see what else a site has to offer (with the exception of company and government site that I HAVE to use.) So having pages appear in search results is the best way for people to find them. But not having any way for people to find them otherwise is not a good move either. Hmmm.
Yos. I was going to install a BBCode plugin (http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2305) that allows for "floated" text, but it seems to be out of date. Would this be useful to anyone else?
The code looks super-simple to update to be compatible with our current version (2.0.4?)
Go for it if you think it's useful.
Not for viewing forums on my phone app, but yeah, could be good.On topic of this thread, should we do some site visuals upgrades? (oh noes, every time I think of this I go down the "swap out the backend" rabbit hole...oh nevermind.)
Cleaned up the main site a little, removing dozens and dozens of "default galleries" auto-generated by the spam users.
Thank you... that was a daunting task.
I found the batch edit selection, and filtered by type. That was a LOT better than what I thought I'd have to do - delete each one individually! Still thinking about The Sevens?
For the image stuff yeah. And I just realized how ugly the main site is :-\
Yeah, it's bad, and hasn't aged well. I was thinking of mocking up some general idea in Balsamiq (http://www.balsamiq.com/) and discussing from there. A little Twitter Bootstrap (http://http:/twitter.github.io/bootstrap) could go a long ways.
That Balsamic thing looks cool. Not sure on the twitter thing. It looks clean, but how useful is it past a basic site?
Yeah, it's good for laying out simple ideas (like attached). I've been using it at work, and I like it.
As for the other thing, I don't know if we'd need it or not. I've only played with it a tiny bit, but it's easy to set up usable layouts (which also work well for mobile) and has a lot of handy components (alert sections, comboboxes, etc). Don't know if it'd help or hurt what Drupal already has.
Anyway, picture. Just a simple layout with a sticky navbar and a sticky right annoyinsharebar. Then use a grid layout for the promoted links. We could put an image and teaser text in with them too. Or be a little interactive, even.
Ok, I got drup7.randomland.net (http://drup7.randomland.net) running the latest build, plus a bare-bones image/gallery content-type setup. Galleries have no smarts yet (that'll take code). kgoodnightbye
That tired old idea of merging Randomland-proper's content into the forum has been rattling around my head again lately. Most of it is for want of consolidated content. And, except for images, there's very little content to actually port over.
[obnoxious comments redacted]
What do you all think? Yea? Nay? Go eat hay?
And hey: is the SMF database getting backed up regularly? Because it really should. I could probably get one of my ARMslaves to pull a copy every week or so too, for automated offsite backups.
There is a cron job...
I am cool consolidating everything. I am also cool playing with sevens more. All depends on what we want to do with the site.
That was quick. And yeah, I don't really know what I want to do with the main site. Randomland has always just been a dumping ground for silly adventures and the like. If there were some way to lay it out so our classic stories stuck out like a sore thumb (ie landing pages of sorts), but was still all hosted within some forum software, that might be ideal.
I don't know... just kicking around ideas.
EDIT: these might be of interest: Custom Pages (http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1347) and Pages Mod (http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1311)
Sadly all the stuff that Brad and I wrote here recently is lost forever. But....
There is not a default wordpress site up at test.randomland.net and it's all ready for some customizing. What should the layout style be? Separate blogs per user? No plogs and just dedicated project pages (a blog per project, I like this, but it could get crowded in a menu) What kind of landing page?
Does anyone have a site they have in mind as a model? Personally I like the Dwarf Fortress (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/) site for an example of a sigle 'project'.
I don't think I know how to wprdpress very well, as I am running up against the old problem of separating content and not having everything end up as just a big list of posts. But something like this (http://Something like this might be good for seperating everything. Display posts based on 'category' tags (that kinda what we did in drupal)) might work for seperating everything. Display posts based on 'category' tags (that kinda what we did in drupal)
I don't actually have a problem with the landing page being just a giant list of posts (obviously only showing a few posts per page) so long as everything is neatly chopped up into categories/projects in the sidebar.
Using a combination of static pages and tags we should be able to reach some kind of setup that isn't a total and complete mess. Not sure we have enough content to really warrant multiple separate blogs. The last post on our current site is from March 2012.
If we ever have a project with 1/10 of the scope of Dwarf Fortress we should really build its own site. Huge projects may never fit well in blog type format. But some of the things we do a lot of (or at least could do a lot of) dev/project logs would work really well. Following a project from conception through building and to a post-mortem wrap up. Or at least some examples of nifty things you figured out along the way. That is my vision anyway.
For larger/more permanent type projects way may need to utilize static pages which we can link to from the sidebar. This will stop them getting lost in the sands of time (i.e. our mostly useless jabbering posts). If necessary you can make static pages for each category with links to notable projects (and their own static pages if required).
This sort of thing doesn't really seem like a wordpress only type issue but really more of general CMS issue.
Do we have logins for the wordpress? I tried "admin" and our standard password but that isn't working.
Sorry about that. You have accounts now.