Talk:Main Page revamp

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This is an experimentation page, like a sand box, that is part of the tinWiki revamp.

The idea is to have a place where ideas can be tried out without affecting the normal pages every time someone wants to try out something.


This is a discussion page. Share your views on the Main Page revamping, by clicking the plus (+) sign in the tab above this text. Please sign your discussion posts by writing four tildes ~~~~ or by using the toolbar button second from the right (toolbar appears above where you type). Thanks.


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Main Page revamp experiments page

This page is a way to try out ideas for improving the Main Page. Experimenting on this page will naturally not affect the actual Main Page, so this is a bit like the sandbox. Hopefully this sandbox type page will be a good way to help improve the Main Page further.

I had some ideas a while back that I considered would improve the Main Page, that I tried out by pasting a screenshot in a simple paint program and moving around some elements and making some small changes here and there. So I guess my own first input to this project, to call it that, is that little paint frolicking.

The Main Page as it is now, and which I pasted a copied version of into this revamp project page as a natural point to start from, has naturally gone through some steps and a process already, before it arrived at how it appears now.

I think it's going to be interesting to see what may come of this next round of adjustments, both what inputs are going to happen and of course how long time it will take and basically how it will all work out. The Main Page is of course somewhat important in a website, it's like the front door or the face (?), or something like that. tinWiki, with its content and intention, is definitely worthy of consideration being afforded to its presentation, since the presentation does matter as far as which impact a website is going to have. Anyway, I'm quite looking forward to seeing what's going to happen in this fairly exciting project. :-) Optimist 01:14, 13 August 2007 (CDT)

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Started using this page now, tried out some ideas

It took a little while trying to understand how to alter some of these various codes and so on, but now I managed to achieve pretty much the 'look' I wanted to try out. One other thing that could be good that I am thinking of now but that I haven't done, is that perhaps a link to Help and also one to the Community portal could by added somewhere in the page there. Might be a good 'redundancy' to offer those two links right on the Main page even though at least the Help link can also be found in the sidebar.

Anyway, anyone else who might have ideas, feel free to show it in the page (tip: use the "Show preview" button until you are happy with the results, before actually clicking "Save page"), or post comments and ideas here in the discussion. Optimist 14:52, 23 September 2007 (CDT)

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Perhaps an image section?

Maybe some graphics would be good, there could be a section on the bottom called "From the tinWiki image archives" or something like that, where some interesting image was displayed for a period of time and then replaced. Next to the image it would be fitting to add a brief description of the image and also provide a link to the article where the image appears (if it appears in several articles then the link could go to the 'most relevant' one as far as the image). Optimist 21:27, 3 November 2007 (CDT)

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Looks like you are almost there...

The revamp page is looking great Optimist. The one thing that, at least visually for myself, that I do not quite like is the first table with the categories in it. I like the colors, fonts etc... but I do not like that it is filling the whole page. I like the way it sits on the main page as it is now, with the date next to it. However, this is only a suggestion on my part, I think you are doing a really wonderful job with all of your projects. So please don't take this as a critisism, but rather just the way it "feels" to me. William One Sac | tinWiki Master 16:37, 7 November 2007 (CST)

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The image table

I love the image table you have created Optimist. I think it would go really great on the main page. However I don't think we should have all of that empty space. Just food for thought, I am not quite certain myself how to improve it as it is now. Maybe if we used a light blue background color, the space wouldn't stand out? William One Sac | tinWiki Master 15:43, 14 November 2007 (CST)

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Changed the colors and more

I changed the colors to try and make this revamp experimentation page somewhat like what William One Sac mentioned recently. I also removed the borders, both inside the page, and also in the template message for Feature article (I created an experimentation version of the template to use, though). Seems some strange things happened that don't actually seem to be connected to changes I did... But, like I suspected, since it seemed there was a brief moment when the weird stuff appeared as expected, instead of looked weird, I mean, it turned out the issue has something to do with browser is used. I got some extra space between the two link boxes, but it seems it only looks that way in the Firefox browser. In Safari it looks normal.

Anyway, this color and other adjustments experimenting is quite interesting, and I think the colors look surprisingly good and 'right' like this. Of course this is still just experimenting, though, and anything can be done here in the page that anyone might think is an improvement. :-) Optimist 00:39, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

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Help me Obi-Wan Optimist!

I was wonderi what you think about moving the featured image up the on the page. Anyhow, the thing has me stuck. I'm not certain how to use the little arrows, or what they even mean, so at this point I think any more experimentation by me is not going to have good results. William One Sac 14:27, 4 August 2008 (CDT)

Liked the title. :-D It's actually totally correct looking, what you did, except for the arrows, which I have now fixed.
They are HTML tags that mean what's inside them won't show in the actual page.
<!-- comment goes in here -->
If you look at the difference made in my edit, you'll see something like one comment tag was missing the exclamation mark, which is why it didn't work, and the other comment that also showed in the page had the comment text outside the tag, like this
<!-- --> comment was out here plus a 'second' end of the tag -->
The page looks perfect after I made these tiny corrections. So, anyway, the commment tag is, larger than, exclamation mark, hyphen, hypen, and after that put any text you wish to hide, and then the tag ends with hyphen, hyphen, less than. <!-- hidden text in here -->. I 'discovered' that the tag works also with several line breaks inside the tag, which I then used to separate wiki code better... Anyway, except for the comment tags, your edit is perfect. Optimist 17:37, 7 August 2008 (CDT)
Sitting here thinking about this, while sipping at some tea, I guess < really is "less than", and > is "larger than", isn't it, not the other way around. Sorry for the confusion. :-) I'm not sure, though, I guess I should look those up... Optimist 17:42, 7 August 2008 (CDT)

Thanks for clarifying that for me Optimist. It seems very simple now that you have explained it the way you did. Thanks. William One Sac 14:40, 12 August 2008 (CDT)

By the way, why don't you make the changes on the main page when you get around to updating the featured image? I think it looks great. William One Sac 14:43, 12 August 2008 (CDT)
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Order of the 'box' colors

Now the order of the colors, from top to bottom, is of course orange - red - green. Is that alright, or should some different order be tried out? Optimist 17:48, 7 August 2008 (CDT)

I think the box colors are fine for now. If we want we can always experiment moving them around a bit. William One Sac 14:41, 12 August 2008 (CDT)
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The gray panel, categories, etc.

I notice the SETI category isn't in the gray panel here, unlike on the real Main Page. If it's supposed to not be there, I notice that the 'sub title' I wrote under the large letters that say "tinWiki.orG" makes the panel so tall that the categories could have five list items per column, and so could have just two columns instead of three.

WOS, how does the idea of a sub title seem, in general? The reason I came to think of having a sub title there, is some people may not really 'get', right away, what this site actually is about, and so 'spelling it out' like that would maybe be useful. As for the SETI category, I'm not sure if you deleted it, or just haven't added it, but should it be in the panel? Are there perhaps some other category that should be considered for the panel? Optimist 17:55, 7 August 2008 (CDT)

P.S. I noticed the wording maybe wasn't very good, so I want to just clarify that I don't have any opinion about the SETI category as far as it being in the panel, and also don't have any specific ideas for other categories to add to the panel, or have any opinion as to whether categories should be removed or added at all. So I'm just asking to hear what you think of the category list as it is right now. Optimist 17:59, 7 August 2008 (CDT)
I hadn't noticed that the link to SETI wasn't in this gray panel, I'm not really sure how that happened. I don't really have an opinion if it should be there or not. What I have been thinking lately is that we should put a link to "All Categories" or something similar, and link to the categories listing page. I think that generally falls in line with what you are saying. I am just not certain about the name we should give the link. I think we should add one more category to the panel as well, but I don't think we should let it get more cluttered than that. How does that sound? William One Sac 21:05, 7 August 2008 (CDT)
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Different web browsers display the page slightly differently

The Firefox web browser is what I'm probably using most often. Now I looked at the page here, and also at the actual Main Page, in the web browser that's the absolutely most commonly used web browser, namely Internet Explorer.

In IE there's a couple of things that look slightly different from how I think they should preferably look, ...which isn't to say it's that much of an issue, though. The spaces above and below the new pages and popular pages tables are slightly taller than what I personally would prefer. Also, there's seems to be some issue with the featured image's image title, the text line directly below the image. The space between the image and that text line is a little bit taller in the actual Main Page than I think it should be, ...although here in the revamp page, that space is the same in IE as in Firefox and Safari (I also checked in the Safari browser). Just wanted to write down a comment here about these issues. Optimist 14:22, 5 October 2008 (CDT)

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