Buzzzzzzz!

[camping]

Buzzzzzzz!

[judofyr]

How about "Introducing Camping 2.1" instead? :-)

[busbey]

yeah, we need more of the demo / intro stuff done.

but i agree on how severe the marketing issue is. I have a "the little wheels" tag on my oscon badge. the one person who recognized it said they liked camping before it died.

:(

[techarch]

Once we launch the new promo site (see the mailing list) for 2.1 we'll be fine.
I need a bit more input and help based on the prototype I did at: http://rubycamping.monnet-usa.com/

[techarch]

The promo site launched a week ago at http://www.ruby-camping.com/

[pygy]

The new site looks very good. Simple, neat, the slideshow is very clear.

I have a few suggestions:

• The site is too large to be displayed on a 1024*768 screen like the one I'm using right now. The "next slide" button is out of sight when the page loads. Think of the poor shmoes using netbooks!
• I like the tone of the buttons at the bottom, but I'm affraid that they are too verbose for the current nettizens whose attention spans rivals the one of a gold fish. Personally, I had missed the documentation button at first glance. Furthermore, they also appear after the fold on this small screen. I'd stack simpler buttons (one word) in the bottom-left corner of a 1024*768 viewport corner, with a welcoming sentence at the top.
• I'm not fan of the picture of the gem inside the tent. Their graphic style are not relly compatible to my eyes. The big one in the slide is fine (but it would be better with anti-aliasing at the edges. http://omacx.com/images/logo.png is a good candidate to that end).
• You could add gem install camping and install camping-omnibus somewhere in the page.
• Pedantry: AFAIK, _why didn't capitalize the "w" in his name when using the short, underscored version of his name.

Here is a quick notepad draft of a proposition (I hope I didn't screw the Markdown formatting.

========   Camping a Ruby Microframework   ========




Let's go Camping:            +--------------------+
                             |                    |
gem install camping          |                    |
                             |                    |
[ Community ]                |     Billboard      |
                             |                    |
[ Code ]                     |                    |
                             |                    |
[ Documentation ]            +--------------------+

.

[pygy]

Yeah, It looks fine :-)

A few additional nitpicks:

• MongoDB isn't a ORM, but a non-relational DBMS.
• The IronRuby slide comes in the middle of the presentation between the "views" and the "controllers" slides. It would be better as a last slide

Oh,yeah, and did you know

that Camping could run on IronRuby?

IronRack, IIS and you're set up, Baby!

[techarch]

Thanks for the feedback! I made a whole bunch of changes and pushed them to my staging site: http://rubycamping.monnet-usa.com/
Let me know how this looks better this way. I will also ask on the mailing list. I will update the production site based on the consolidated feedback.
PS - Funny you mentioned the lower resolution for netbooks and iPad, this is what I originally wanted too.

[DaveEveritt]

Changes are for the better. Let us know when you push to camping/ruby-camping.com

[Bluebie]

This is terrible. Really terrible. It isn't even web design. It's just.. I don't know what it is. It's not a webpage. It's a strange art exhibit perhaps. But it's not a webpage. I promised you guys I'd try and figure something good out for a Camping web design when I had time, and I don't have time to do it before _why day. I understand why you'd want to get a website up before then, but when push comes to shove, I think Hackety Hack is more important. I'd like to urge you all to stop what you're doing here and scrap it for something very minimal in design. Simple typography on a simple page, full of content.

@judofyr: You're a brilliant writer and craft some amazing textual wonders. You could paint a vivid picture in peoples minds that would look much better than any of this rushed nonsense, just as you have in a recently circulated email.

@everyone: All you really need right now, today, is a tumblr hooked up to a domain. It does static pages, it does blogging, and it has a rich heritage related to Why.

If you put out something this horrible, the entire project will look amaturish, and nobody will take it seriously. Web designs will come with time, but only if we maintain the wonderful, artistic, creative essence that made Camping great to begin with. What matters right now is content, of which we appear to have none.

So how about this: http://campingrb.tumblr.com/ - we can plug any (single) domain name on to it we want, sort out a more full on website later, and have many contributors.

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

+1 @Bluebie. Seriously, that @techarch guy’s work is a travesty; I’m sorry, dude, I’m sure you’re good at something, maybe many things… but web design is not one of them.

Just hold off until something with a little more class can be put together; even if just as a placeholder for whatever @Bluebie’s planning to make.

[Bluebie]

Also, what exactly is wrong with http://camping.rubyforge.org/ ?

All it needs is some news (Tumblog anyone?) and perhaps a rewrite of the homepage (I volunteer) to be less How To Get Started and more You Should Be Excited Because.

[DaveEveritt]

@Bluebie + @ELLIOTTCABLE: bit harsh (but then I'm English ;-) I quite liked the quirkiness and at least Philippe has done something, but can see the argument for a more designery look. @Bluebie: challenge: throw a quick Photoshop mock-up together (incorporating the slideshow?) and I'll code it up prettily and stick it up on my fork before _Whyday. Then everyone might be happier. I don't have time either, but insomnia sometimes makes space and besides, Camping is worth it :-)

[Bluebie]

@DaveForeveritt: I accept your challenge. Except I'm using Acorn, and I'm not including the slideshow (It's dumb! Even slideshare is moving away from displaying content like that! I should know, I was one of the first people to popularise that annoying widget on the internet regret http://creativepony.com/archive/demos/auto-sliding-tabs/ ) Instead of a weird sliding widget thing, I'm putting actual content in my mockups. Mostly content from whywentcamping.judofyr.net, but also some of my own devising. It'll be awesome. BOTH content AND pictures of tents! You'll see! YOU'LL ALL SEE!

[DaveEveritt]

@Bluebie: LOL! You're on! (What's Acorn? I do try to keep up-to-date but...) and check out my annoying tabs here (except they only slide when they're asked to, nicely): http://martin-richardson.com/galleries.html

[Bluebie]

@DaveECrockett: Acorn is a Mac-only mostly raster editor akin to photoshop, but much much nicer, much much faster, and much much cheaper. It can export FXG files which photoshop can work with, or I can just do it all myself in Acorn + Fireworks and push the results to camping/whywentcamping.com when doneish. :)

And those are some mighty fine sliding tabs you have there, jQuery Traitor. :P

Down with Adobe! Up with inconsequential opinions!

[DaveEveritt]

Okay, that's like a plan - lemme at it when ready. Like the look of Acorn - better than Seashore. Tried Mootools but JQuery css-like syntax suits my cognition. Prefer DaveForeveritt, but keep improvising.

[Bluebie]

@Daveeverest: Okay then. :)

[techarch]

Wow believe it or not I am excited to see some feedback on this topic, since I have tried to get discussions going for months and asked for help since I am a developer and architect far from being a designer as you all can see! ;-)

I am looking forward for some true designs and will push the final one to ruby-camping.com when you guys are ready.

But I maintain that we need a promotional site like ruby-camping.com to attract attention to Camping. I like having a couple different sites hyperlinked together as they reflect different needs: promotion, documentation/training, blog.

[Bluebie]

Why? What's wrong with having everything in one tidy place? It's good for pagerank, branding, and brand recognition (as much as I hate using such capitalistic terms in relation to this).

Need more than personal preference as an answer.

[Bluebie]

Now that I've had a chance to play with this Webby thing a bit, it seems like a nice enough tool for generating the website's static content, but I don't feel it's a very user friendly option for a collaborative blog (git fork, git pull, jump in command line, manually add blog post, rebuild site, git push, send pull request to whoever, and play waiting game). I feel we should either whack some blogging software on the site, or just embed tumblr on one of the pages. That could either be a javascript embed of the Tumblr content, or it could be webby autogenerating the tumblr template for us, and just having the nav work over two domains (log.whywentcamping.net or something like that).

[judofyr]

Sure, I only used Webby because it's what I use for judofyr.net and I know how to prototype something in it. Maybe we need something completely different :)

The original idea was to turn whywentcamping.judofyr.net into a wiki (and don't use GitHub wiki), but now that the GitHub wiki has improved we might want to continue to using it. Anyway, I guess for now we can leave wwc.judofyr.net as it currently is (more CMS-y than wiki-y) and rather integrate the wiki later if we want.

I'm also 100% positive for using Tumblr for the blog.

[Bluebie]

Funky. I'll keep going with webby for now, maybe migrate it over to some kind of dogfooding of camping at some stage - especially if any hosted dynamic bits get added, like that app hosting platform I've been so keen about. I'd also like to see at some stage, a revival of the Why community. When we lost Why's blogs, we lost the comments section. The projects seem to have drifted apart a bit since then and it makes me a bit sad.

I'm really in to the idea of there being a central hub site, where all the old but still maintained Why projects can be linked off from, where we'd have something kind of sort of like a forum thing, but better in many ways and without the bad bits (I have lots of ideas for that). It could eventually grow in to a kind of Artists Retreat for Rubyists and related tech. A place for fun and whimsy, outside the clutches of commercialism. Almost like the demo scene.

Does that appeal to others too?

Passing thought: When you produce something anonymously, you can't have copyright or trademarks or anything like that to do with it. That's the situation with Why The Lucky Stiff. Maybe we should make that go all meta. V for Vendetta that cult of personality and take it over.

Meanwhile: Because of said anonymity, none of his licenses mean a thing. It's all public domain. Always has been. What does that mean for our derivatives though as we maintain things?

[DaveEveritt]

I can do CSS like magic. I've done Tumblr Javascript embedding before and the CSS is a right old pain <- so that's an offer. @Bluebie - looking fwd to the visuals...

Love the 'Artists Retreat for Rubyists and related tech' - a (kid-friendly) demo scene for Ruby :-)

Apart from this brief post I've gone quiet thinking about the options, looked back on previous posts re content etc., and am preparing a post to the mailing list on all the rest of the stuff. One area for improvement in the documentation is simple-as-possible deployment on the various shared, VPS and cloud options, if anyone wants to share their solutions?

Footnote: to revisit the _Why approach, read: http://aberant.tumblr.com/post/167375099/a-letter-from-why

[Bluebie]

Well, that's done.

[DaveEveritt]

Great. There it is - you did it all! Nice type-wrangling, love the design. Just needs a mention on the _Whyday blog... can this issue be closed now?

[minikomi]

Having recently fallen very much in love with the framework for "getting things done", I propose what would make a difference is a sub-blog of "cool little things made when camping" or somesuch .... simple, fun ideas which fit the ideology, and which can be used as a sort of jumping off point for those interested. Much like the blog.rb, but for other areas eg. twitter streams, flickr, tumblr... that show how easy it is to have a neat idea, and turn it into a (choosing my words carefully for weight) neat applications.

Hell, even get "celebrity" coders (is there such a thing?) in on the act..

[DaveEveritt]

@minikomi: good idea - would you like to contribute any you have?

Meanwhile, the former wiki here: https://github.com/camping/camping/wiki/Miscellaneous-Camping-links
has links to some of the things you're suggesting...

[Bluebie]

@minikomi That's super cool. Could you make a little camping app which could be a list of these sites and projects and all that, with a nice design and lots of ways for project makers to customize their pages and icons and things? Then we could build it in to the camping.io site and you could be in charge of making that all awesome. It sounds like you've thought about it a bunch, so I think you'd be the right person for the job.

Bonus points: we can use that app itself as an example camping app!

[DaveEveritt]

In case anyone missed it first time, I'm collecting links on a (design-free) Camping app on David's server, so please post links to anything new o the mailing list (or here if you're lazy) and I'll add them there for safe keeping/reference in one place for now.

[pygy]

Going through my backlog, closing things that are not relevant anymore :-)