[New forum] Website

[Guido Zambelis]

In addition to a new forum, we will of course have the potential for a website. IMO, Iain's micronations.net is quite good and has the advantages of a good Google ranking, and we can ask him to direct people to the new forum quite easily. I'm not sure what we might gain from trying to create and maintain a separate website, but it's an idea.

We aim to integrate the forumlist into the new domain, so that would be a major part of what we might do anyway.

[dr-spangle]

It would be nice if we could make the site more centered on this hub than micronations.net would be. The main splash could have a couple big links to the main parts, such as the forum, whatever else is integrated and micronations.net, maybe also wikipedia, I dunno, could make some stylish splash page based on the html map tag...

[Guido Zambelis]

A simple splash page sounds good, yeah, just not a full-blown website.

[siriain]

I'm happy for the new hub to be the official forum for MNN's purposes, but I agree that some kind of splash page is still needed here. Also, I think one or two of the admins here are still admins of the MNN site, especially Dr Spangle, and as it's Wordpress-based, there's still plenty of opportunity to develop it further if desired. On the subject of neutrality, once all the bureaucracy has been caught up with, MNN will be based in Elwynn.

By the way Spangle, is the MNN news ticker project for this forum anywhere near the top of your to-do list yet?

[dr-spangle]

@Guido: I might brief one up on some paper if you're lucky, but if anyone else wants to design one, please please do, relying on me is a bad idea, as you will see if you read Iain's post or continue reading this one.


@Iain: I'm an admin at MN? What does that actually entail? do I have powers or duties?

The news ticker yeah... I started work on it and it was a very easy project... but then work stopped because of various stuff, mostly combinations of my laziness and forgetfulness...

and here's the pat where I quite typically shift the blame slightly:
I put it forward before the MCS council and then no one said anything* so it fell gently into the admin discussion silt and get sedimented, the codes are still around though

*I should have nagged people, contacted each council member, asked them to vote on it and then it might well have gotten done...

and here's where i quite typically delay the issue:
Maybe it should be part of the updates? so when all this is moved around, add that in?

[Guido Zambelis]

That's great, thank you Iain! Wasn't sure how active you still were.

Yes Spangle, stop waiting for pointless approval, just do it!

[Orion]

I didn't even realize micronations.net was still up...

It would be nice if we could integrate the two sites together. Tho I'm not sure how amenable Spangle and Iain are to this idea.

Here's what I would like to see on a website:
- Divide the page into quadrats (meaning four equal boxes)
-- One quadrat holds a wiki feed
-- One quadrat holds a news feed
-- One quadrat holds a ForumList feed (top active forums or something)
-- One quadrat holds a utility feed (linking to main institutions like MCS, SCUE, OAM, etc, etc)
- Put a navigation bar ala micronations.net across the top that contains more specific pages providing additional resources

If you want me to I'll put together a quick test page to show the actual layout rather than trying to describe it.

[siriain]

That sounds like a rather promising concept. You might want to consider including feeds for things like tweets and videos like MNN does, so it be worth considering larger grids of 3x2 or 3x3. Ultimately, though, it really comes down to how much info is too much and what to exclude to keep a relatively simple cluttered design while giving people a good indication of what's happening.

[dr-spangle]

I like the idea of the different feeds, It seems good and very much doable...

2x2 should be all we need, tweets and videos are not that common or related to micronations, most videos will probably be in the news feed as some "nation X's ruler releases a video of his day" or whatever

I could try and make a little working mock up later, and It would give me a reason to finish the forumlist's RSS feed feature

[Guido Zambelis]

I like this idea very much.

[dr-spangle]

As a draft mockup, how's this:
http://dr-spangle.com/tests/-Hub/
I need to make the text not so transparent as the backgrounds, but I have to set off for uni in 5 minutes, so I can do that later

Also the transparency probably doesn't work in IE yet, that's also an issue for later today


EDIT: sorta fixed the transparent text but now there's a large gap at the top... :/ You get the idea of the thing

[Cairney]

I feel like I'm trying to 1up Spangle but none-the-less, my attempt;

http://www.freewebs.com/cairney/hub/index.html

[dr-spangle]

Please feel free to do so, I've spent all day on what I did simply because I hate CSS and don't understand it
Please save me from the agony of CSS

[dr-spangle]

Hacking about a bit with Cairney's design, I've made this:
http://dr-spangle.com/tests/-Hub/Cairney/1.php
All I've done is put the news feed in and change the link colours


Do we actually have a wiki RSS feed or a utilities one?
Can someone create one if we don't? I'm not really certain how to make them... I've roughly got the hang of it for this:
http://mnforumlist.com/updatesrss.php
but that's far from finished and I would like to make it work in multiple languages preferably...
Also it's coded from scratch based on what I could learn on how RSS works from looking at the source of the MNN one and repeated testing with the W3 RSS validator


EDIT: I presume wiki means microwiki? In which case can they even install an RSS feed mod or something? they're on a shared server?
If they can: awesomes.
If they can't: I'm working on making one, here:
http://dr-spangle.com/tests/-Hub/Cairne ... rowiki.php
It's a work in progress and takes a while to load, it should grab the recent updates page and hack the data out of it and eventually turn it into an RSS feed.
I think it could be ran with a cron job every hour (or more/less often?) on my server to make it update a stored RSS feed in another file which would mean the main page would still load very quickly, in fact, that RSS feed would load faster than the others

[Guido Zambelis]

Don't forget links to the actual sites!