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comp.lang.ruby

Ruby Visual Identity Team

John W. Long

2/17/2005 4:16:00 AM

Recently I've seen a couple of people mention how much they would like
to see a new look on the main Ruby Web site. I can't help but agree.
I've been wishing the same thing for a bunch of the main Ruby Web sites
for months now.

Here is what I would like to propose. Let's form a Ruby Visual Identity
Team, similar to the one formed for the launch of Mozilla Firefox
[1][2]. Our first project: to redesign ruby-lang.org. After that we
could offer our services for other projects. The Ruby documentation site
for instance [3]. Perhaps even get around to implementing a couple of
nice templates for RDoc [4].

I would suggest that the team be formed from people who have strong
design skills. _Why has been flirting with an idea for ruby-lang.org
[5]. I nominate him to be part of the team. I've also done my share of
design work for Web sites [6][7] and wouldn't mind being involved. Are
there others who can come forward and show evidence of there skills and
enthusiasm for this project? It would also be cool to have people with
strong coding skills, i.e. experience with pure CSS layout and XHTML.

Once we have a team formed (5-8 people) how do we get official blessing
for our endevours?

--
[1] http://www.spreadfi...
[2] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/...
[3] http://www.rub...
[4] http://redhanded.hobix.com/cult/rdocWithoutFramesACo...
[5] http://redhanded.hobix.com/cult/rubyorgM...
[6] http://wiseheartd...
[7] http://johnwlong.com/downloads/rubyred-rdoc-te...

--
John Long
http://wiseheart...
41 Answers

James Britt

2/17/2005 5:17:00 AM

0

John W. Long wrote:
> Recently I've seen a couple of people mention how much they would like
> to see a new look on the main Ruby Web site. I can't help but agree.
> I've been wishing the same thing for a bunch of the main Ruby Web sites
> for months now.
>
> Here is what I would like to propose. Let's form a Ruby Visual Identity
> Team, similar to the one formed for the launch of Mozilla Firefox
> [1][2]. Our first project: to redesign ruby-lang.org. After that we
> could offer our services for other projects. The Ruby documentation site
> for instance [3].


I nominate me to redesign ruby-doc.org. I appreciate the offer, but
altering the aesthetics without changing the underlying behavior is not
going to work.

You can see a beta version of the site with a bit of hosts file hacking.

Add this to your hosts file;

207.44.216.66 beta.ruby-doc.org

and browse to

http://beta.rub...

I'm unhappy with the series of boxes (too, um, boxy), but they'll do
while I sort out some other things. Adding neat curved box corners and
other visual treats has been put aside while I nail down behavior. Once
that is stable it will easier to apply the appropriate styling.

Each box shows resources culled from links posted to del.icio.us.
Clicking the resource name just loads that page. Clicking the little
'i' next to a resource shows you what people have posted it and their
extended comments. A modern browser is required. Haven't tested in
older browsers (or even many current ones), so field reports are welcome
so that it degrades nicely

The browse page is a variation on what I haphazardly described in my
RubyConf '04 talk. It organizes resources as tagged on del.icio.us; the
tricky part is automagically metatagging the del.icio.us tags so that
some higher-level grouping is feasible. In theory one should be able to
navigate through known Ruby docs and resources by drilling down via
facets, but it is not as clean as it should be.

Most other links and searching do not yet work.

There's other stuff I'm working on (URL queries into the API documents;
multilingual ri Web service; assorted data feeds and queries) but things
take time.

No assurance that what you see won't arbitrarily change; rational
comments and observations always welcome.

On a more general note, I'm all for people trying to clean up sites,
making suggestions, fixings links, getting things into better shape, but
I'm dead against any sort of formalization of the process across
multiple sites.

I really, really believe that things happen in the Ruby community as
well as they do because people feel they can contribute something in a
community spirit while doing so in a personal manner. Trying to enforce
a uniform anything could be trouble; things tend best to arise out of a
loose consensus and running code.


James Britt

P.S.

As long as we're discussing Web site: Can someone put a link to
*something* on http://www.ru... ?

Maybe to rubyforge?

I'm just sayin' ...

gabriele renzi

2/17/2005 8:34:00 AM

0

James Britt ha scritto:



> Each box shows resources culled from links posted to del.icio.us.
> Clicking the resource name just loads that page. Clicking the little
> 'i' next to a resource shows you what people have posted it and their
> extended comments. A modern browser is required. Haven't tested in
> older browsers (or even many current ones), so field reports are welcome
> so that it degrades nicely

(my two cents)
the [i] button is interesting, but It is not that obvious to me what it
does, I wonder if there is a way of making it more clear :/
Also, the boxes have too many elements, imo. Once you provided a nice
search/faceted browsing interface, you should not need all those
articles in the home.

Btw, I'd globally prefer listing some latest link (like in current
ruby-doc) and provide browsing links based on the (meta)tags

> The browse page is a variation on what I haphazardly described in my
> RubyConf '04 talk. It organizes resources as tagged on del.icio.us; the
> tricky part is automagically metatagging the del.icio.us tags so that
> some higher-level grouping is feasible. In theory one should be able to
> navigate through known Ruby docs and resources by drilling down via
> facets, but it is not as clean as it should be.
>
> Most other links and searching do not yet work.

cool stuff, thanks for working on it.

John W. Long

2/17/2005 12:45:00 PM

0

James Britt wrote:
> I nominate me to redesign ruby-doc.org. I appreciate the offer, but
> altering the aesthetics without changing the underlying behavior is not
> going to work.

I would definately nominate you to be part of the the team to work on
ruby-doc.org if we ever did anything to it. Hey, you would lead the
team. And I do appologize. In suggesting that we redesign ruby-doc.org I
was not meaning to degrade any of the work you have already done, which
is great.

> On a more general note, I'm all for people trying to clean up sites,
> making suggestions, fixings links, getting things into better shape, but
> I'm dead against any sort of formalization of the process across
> multiple sites.

The main thought is to give those who are open to it access to great
free design services. If that's not something you would want for
ruby-doc.org that is your call. It would be nice to join with those who
have already contributed a substantial amount to the ruby comunity, like
yourself, and help them with site design and aesthetics freeing them up
to do what they enjoy: write more code.

> I really, really believe that things happen in the Ruby community as
> well as they do because people feel they can contribute something in a
> community spirit while doing so in a personal manner. Trying to
> enforce a uniform anything could be trouble; things tend best to arise
> out of a loose consensus and running code.

It wouldn't necessarily be a "uninform everything." We would look at it
on a site, by site basis. The main goal would be to sell Ruby in the
best possible way. I know we all differ on what the best way to sell
Ruby is, but getting someone who specializes in design to jump on to
this project could really help.

By forming a visual identity team, I would hope to add more to the
community feel, not take away from it. Perhaps we could use a trouble
ticket system of some kind, which would allow people to post in one
place comments and ideas about team projects.

--
John Long
http://wiseheart...

Florian Gross

2/17/2005 1:36:00 PM

0

John W. Long wrote:

> Recently I've seen a couple of people mention how much they would like
> to see a new look on the main Ruby Web site. I can't help but agree.
> I've been wishing the same thing for a bunch of the main Ruby Web sites
> for months now.
>
> Here is what I would like to propose. Let's form a Ruby Visual Identity
> Team, similar to the one formed for the launch of Mozilla Firefox
> [1][2]. Our first project: to redesign ruby-lang.org. After that we
> could offer our services for other projects. The Ruby documentation site
> for instance [3]. Perhaps even get around to implementing a couple of
> nice templates for RDoc [4].
>
> I would suggest that the team be formed from people who have strong
> design skills. _Why has been flirting with an idea for ruby-lang.org
> [5]. I nominate him to be part of the team. I've also done my share of
> design work for Web sites [6][7] and wouldn't mind being involved. Are
> there others who can come forward and show evidence of there skills and
> enthusiasm for this project? It would also be cool to have people with
> strong coding skills, i.e. experience with pure CSS layout and XHTML.

While I'll probably not be able to spend a lot of time on this I would
still like to help out with XHTML and CSS -- I've done this kind of
stuff before and should still be fairly fluent in it.

Sam Roberts

2/17/2005 1:37:00 PM

0

Quoteing rff_rff@remove-yahoo.it, on Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 05:34:49PM +0900:
> James Britt ha scritto:
>
>
>
> >Each box shows resources culled from links posted to del.icio.us.
> >Clicking the resource name just loads that page. Clicking the little
> >'i' next to a resource shows you what people have posted it and their
> >extended comments. A modern browser is required. Haven't tested in
> >older browsers (or even many current ones), so field reports are welcome
> >so that it degrades nicely
>
> (my two cents)
> the [i] button is interesting, but It is not that obvious to me what it
> does, I wonder if there is a way of making it more clear :/

I didn't know that it did anything, and when I pressed it, i don't know
what I'm looking at... My vote - nuke it.

I like the overall layout a lot more. The stuff I want is more
prominent, suggestions:

RAA and rubyforge should be on top bar

nuke the ads, why do we need ads on ruby-lang.org?

at bottom of page, add the "news" section that is now the core
of ruby-lang.org's page

all the more... buttons end in an internal error, intended?

Cheers,
Sam

Francis Hwang

2/17/2005 2:26:00 PM

0


On Feb 17, 2005, at 12:17 AM, James Britt wrote:

> I nominate me to redesign ruby-doc.org. I appreciate the offer, but
> altering the aesthetics without changing the underlying behavior is
> not going to work.

Hear, hear. I think that the problem with Ruby's online presence is not
a matter of visual appeal or the lack of nice logo. The problem with
Ruby's online presence is much more about functionality. For example,
when I look at ruby-lang.org my first thought is not that the site has
the wrong colors or fonts, but that the last post to the front page was
in December ... which would make a newcomer think that Ruby is sleepy
little language, and nothing of interest has happened to it in the last
two months.

This isn't meant as a criticism of James or whoever runs ruby-lang.org,
just a suggestion that if you're not already involved and are looking
to help out, it might be more helpful to 1) put more Ruby-related
content on your own blog or 2) volunteer to help out with existing
sites to help add or debug more features.

> I'm unhappy with the series of boxes (too, um, boxy), but they'll do
> while I sort out some other things. Adding neat curved box corners
> and other visual treats has been put aside while I nail down behavior.
> Once that is stable it will easier to apply the appropriate styling.

So James, are you planning on moving away from the current blog-style
front page, with individual dated posts? Personally I think that's the
thing people want to see when they come to a front page: Plenty of
activity.

> Each box shows resources culled from links posted to del.icio.us.
> Clicking the resource name just loads that page. Clicking the little
> 'i' next to a resource shows you what people have posted it and their
> extended comments. A modern browser is required. Haven't tested in
> older browsers (or even many current ones), so field reports are
> welcome so that it degrades nicely

This can be done outside of a given web page, using the Tasty
bookmarklet:

http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2004/07/t...

Personally I'm not too hot about embedding these sorts of tools in the
web page itself.

> The browse page is a variation on what I haphazardly described in my
> RubyConf '04 talk. It organizes resources as tagged on del.icio.us;
> the tricky part is automagically metatagging the del.icio.us tags so
> that some higher-level grouping is feasible. In theory one should be
> able to navigate through known Ruby docs and resources by drilling
> down via facets, but it is not as clean as it should be.

Cool. You might find Topic Maps useful for this, or maybe that's too
heavyweight. I'm quite sure your not the only person trying to harvest
good taxonomies out of a folksonomy like del.icio.us.

> On a more general note, I'm all for people trying to clean up sites,
> making suggestions, fixings links, getting things into better shape,
> but I'm dead against any sort of formalization of the process across
> multiple sites.
>
> I really, really believe that things happen in the Ruby community as
> well as they do because people feel they can contribute something in a
> community spirit while doing so in a personal manner. Trying to
> enforce a uniform anything could be trouble; things tend best to arise
> out of a loose consensus and running code.

I very much agree. And I hope my comments above don't come across as
suggestions, not really criticism: I use ruby-doc almost every day and
am already pretty happy with it. Thanks, James!

Francis Hwang
http://f...

Michel Martens

2/17/2005 2:35:00 PM

0

Definitely onboard, as Raymond Babbitt (aka Rain Man) would put it. I
have been designing websites for the last 8 years, though most of them
have already phased out. Here is a small sample:

http://www.s... (personal weblog)
http://www.s... (my evil capitalist face)
https://visitorzone.e... (my latest work for Cisco Systems Argentina)


On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 22:39:49 +0900, Florian Gross <flgr@ccan.de> wrote:
> John W. Long wrote:
>
> > Recently I've seen a couple of people mention how much they would like
> > to see a new look on the main Ruby Web site. I can't help but agree.
> > I've been wishing the same thing for a bunch of the main Ruby Web sites
> > for months now.
> >
> > Here is what I would like to propose. Let's form a Ruby Visual Identity
> > Team, similar to the one formed for the launch of Mozilla Firefox
> > [1][2]. Our first project: to redesign ruby-lang.org. After that we
> > could offer our services for other projects. The Ruby documentation site
> > for instance [3]. Perhaps even get around to implementing a couple of
> > nice templates for RDoc [4].
> >
> > I would suggest that the team be formed from people who have strong
> > design skills. _Why has been flirting with an idea for ruby-lang.org
> > [5]. I nominate him to be part of the team. I've also done my share of
> > design work for Web sites [6][7] and wouldn't mind being involved. Are
> > there others who can come forward and show evidence of there skills and
> > enthusiasm for this project? It would also be cool to have people with
> > strong coding skills, i.e. experience with pure CSS layout and XHTML.
>
> While I'll probably not be able to spend a lot of time on this I would
> still like to help out with XHTML and CSS -- I've done this kind of
> stuff before and should still be fairly fluent in it.
>
>

benny

2/17/2005 2:45:00 PM

0

Francis Hwang wrote:

> The problem with
> Ruby's online presence is much more about functionality. For example,
> when I look at ruby-lang.org my first thought is not that the site has
> the wrong colors or fonts, but that the last post to the front page was
> in December ... which would make a newcomer think that Ruby is sleepy
> little language, and nothing of interest has happened to it in the last
> two months.
maybe we could reuse the Ruby Weekly News as news items on ruby-lang.org

regards,
benny

ruby talk

2/17/2005 2:49:00 PM

0

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 22:37:14 +0900, Sam Roberts <sroberts@uniserve.com> wrote:
> Quoteing rff_rff@remove-yahoo.it, on Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 05:34:49PM +0900:
> > James Britt ha scritto:
> >
> >
> >
> > >Each box shows resources culled from links posted to del.icio.us.
> > >Clicking the resource name just loads that page. Clicking the little
> > >'i' next to a resource shows you what people have posted it and their
> > >extended comments. A modern browser is required. Haven't tested in
> > >older browsers (or even many current ones), so field reports are welcome
> > >so that it degrades nicely
> >
> > (my two cents)
> > the [i] button is interesting, but It is not that obvious to me what it
> > does, I wonder if there is a way of making it more clear :/
>
> I didn't know that it did anything, and when I pressed it, i don't know
> what I'm looking at... My vote - nuke it.

The intent is to provide a way to give more information about any
particular resource to see if it is worth pursuing so that a user does
not have to load each remote page to see what it is about. Whether
or nor this particular implementation serves that goal is another
matter.

>
> I like the overall layout a lot more. The stuff I want is more
> prominent, suggestions:
>
> RAA and rubyforge should be on top bar

I don't see how they are immediately relevant to Ruby documentation or the RDP.

>
> nuke the ads, why do we need ads on ruby-lang.org?

Money.

>
> at bottom of page, add the "news" section that is now the core
> of ruby-lang.org's page

There is so little news that it isn't worth featuring on the main page
anymore. People interested in news from the site would do far better
to get it from an RSS feed.


>
> all the more... buttons end in an internal error, intended?

See my previous posting where I say that most links do not work
(unless you're talking about JavaScript or WEBrick errors). Most of
those will behave as they do on the current ruby-doc site.



> Cheers,
> Sam
>
>

Yukihiro Matsumoto

2/17/2005 3:08:00 PM

0

Hi,

In message "Re: Ruby Visual Identity Team"
on Thu, 17 Feb 2005 23:49:57 +0900, benny <listen@marcrenearns.de> writes:

|> Ruby's online presence is much more about functionality. For example,
|> when I look at ruby-lang.org my first thought is not that the site has
|> the wrong colors or fonts, but that the last post to the front page was
|> in December ... which would make a newcomer think that Ruby is sleepy
|> little language, and nothing of interest has happened to it in the last
|> two months.
|maybe we could reuse the Ruby Weekly News as news items on ruby-lang.org

I have just found that currently David Alan Black was the only English
speaking staff in the www-editors. James Britt and Chad Fowler were
members, but I think their accounts were vanished at the "site crash"
last year.

David, Chad, and James, can you organize recruiting a few more
submitter?

matz.