URGENT: create landing/splash page

Well spotted! Thanks. Have fixed.

You’re right about Ilya. I didn’t really feel like writing an obit. In fact, the whole contributors page needs a big overhaul. All I did was remove people who haven’t been involved for over a year, and add a few I knew about. But my knowledge of contributors is not extensive, so others will need to give their input, I guess you or Florian for developers and Sean for other contribs. It definitely needs further work once the pages go up. Likewise, I haven’t touched the supporters page, and that only lists the original Kickstarter funders.

There are two options: either put up these versions for now and collate and upload new data as soon as possible, or replace the ‘get involved’ and ‘supporters’ pages with a ‘coming soon’ placeholder until the pages can be improved.

@dennisschubert , can I get these files to you? Or can someone help me get them onto GitHub so others can pick them up? I’m keen this updated information get on to the site asap.

@goob I think this “contributor” part should be added later when it’ll be clean. I’m also not really in favor of your new logo (sorry :p), gradients…

I have other remarks too: there is too many things before “Want to get started”. What about put it at the top of the page? If people wants to know more, they’ll continue reading. Also, although “Welcome to Diaspora” and the earth image are great, it takes too much place (the screen contains only that when you are at the top of the page).

I propose to reduce a little bit the height of the image and superpose the text on it, and also use this image for the logo, this would allow to reduce the height of the black header.

Fla, I’m happy to change the logo, but I really don’t think we should go back to the old logo from the pre-alpha days. I remember the core team changed the font to Roboto a while ago, so I’ve made a logo in that font. The one you link to below is horribly pixellated when I tried to use it, as it’s too small an image.

Remember that these pages are simply something to replace immediately the almost-two-year-old diasporaproject.org site, which is where diasporafoundtion.org currently redirects. These pages aren’t perfect, but at least they are a lot better, in terms of the information they present, than those ancient pages. I’m still waiting to hear from @seantilleycommunit or @dennisschubert about getting them on the site. Once they’re there, we can discuss a more long-term solution, but I think Sean and Dennis are already working on that. These are simply to have up-to-date information available to new and prospective users NOW, while there’s a massive influx. A lot of new users are confused, and about 95% of them are signing up to jd.com because they don’t understand about the different pods and decentralisation, which is why these updated pages are so necessary right now, not in a few weeks’ time. jd.com is groaning under the strain of new users signing up - I keep getting the ‘we’re over capacity right now’ warning - and proper information is needed to encourage people to sign up to a range of pods, so that the network is more balanced and no one pod is over-stretched.

For this reason I think it’s important to have the decentralisation explanation above the sign-up, but for those who want to go straight to the sign-up information, there is a ‘Sign up’ button in the header bar. Reducing the image height and therefore the black bar height is fine, but this requires fiddling around with the CSS files (simply reducing the bar height creates a nasty line under it as the masthead doesn’t move up). I simply don’t have time to do that at the moment.

I took off the ‘getting involved’ and ‘supporters’ pages, but Sean asked me to reinstate them.

Let’s get these short-term pages up NOW so that people at least have access to proper information before signing up to Diaspora (usually to jd.com), and then we can discuss what to do for a brand new site for the future.

Hey @goob

@dennisschubert and I are working on the project site. We should have the copy-editing infused into the new project site this week. If all goes according to plan, hopefully we can have it up either by the end of this week or sometime next week.

Either way, I don’t think it will take very long. :slight_smile:

Hi @seantilleycommunit , I know you and Dennis are working on a new site. But is there any reason not to put up these pages for the thousands of people who will come to Diaspora in the meantime? (It’s several hundred per day at the moment, 95% of whom are signing up to jd.com, going on the numbers of those who ‘start sharing’ with the DHQ account each day.) If we have something available for those people while you and Dennis put the finishing touches to your new site, it will be a massive help and help to take the load off jd.com.

I also think this should be on line now and not in few weeks. It’s not hard to upload that, what’s the problem?

UP!! This is urgent…

@dennisschubert @seantilleycommunit

Indeed. It’s been two weeks now since I put up the updated pages, and still diasporafoundation.org is pointing to the disastrously out of date diasporaproject.org site…

@fla @goob: I am happy to report that all of the updated content is in the git repo for the Diaspora project site rewrite that DenSchub is working on. I’m currently waiting on @dennisschubert to merge it into the main code.

Due to the delay, I’m going to update the existing project site while we wait to hook up the new one. Sorry for the delay, everyone. :C

Great! And I’ll be very happy to see my temporary pages superseded by yours and Dennis’s new (and better) site soon!

The foundation site is still redirecting to the old project site. No sign of the new pages yet. Is there a problem? And if so, can I do anything to help?

@seantilleycommunit , can I help you get the temporary pages up?

I’m sure Sean does his possible, but the website is still not on line. I think we have to learn from this story: one people with the keys is not a good thing for a group of volunteers. What about sharing the access to the domain name / the server with someone else? @jonnehass or anyone else we can trust in?

The main reason for the delay is actually because Dennis is almost done putting the site together. There’s no sense in duplicating effort. Site will be up soon.

Well, the effort to create these temporary pages had already been made by me, and I gave you the files. The effort to upload them via FTP is, if your access is anything like the access I have to my site, a matter of less than five minutes.

And it would have meant that users and prospective users would have had access to up-to-date information for the past two weeks or more… and jd.com may not be getting quite so overloaded … and I might not be having to put in quite so much effort into explaining time and again to new people about the decentralised nature of Diaspora, using the DHQ account.

So actually, the small amount of effort needed to upload those files would have saved a lot of effort elsewhere.

I must say I’ve found this to have been a rather dispiriting experience.

You know what, you raise a good point. I was just more interested in getting the actual app done. I’ve uploaded the pages and assets and turned off the redirect in DreamHost’s panel. Currently, it is still redirecting to diasporaproject.org, but hopefully that will clear itself up within the next hour or so.

Oh so we have two project sites now? Great… if you need a redirect app to push to Heroku… my XMPP handle is mrzyx@mrzyx.de

Thanks Jonne. Once the DNS propagation is done for diasporafoundation.org, I’d be happy to have a redirect app set up on diasporaproject.org. :slight_smile:

working right now.