On 2013-07-15 14:46, Dicebot wrote:

> That is actually a good call. No reason why documentation part should be
> done in same way as rest of the website if styling stays the same.

Yes, exactly. Consider Ruby on Rails:

Main page: http://rubyonrails.org/
Guides: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
API reference: http://api.rubyonrails.org/

They all look different. Different content works with different styles.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 7/14/13 6:18 PM, Val Markovic wrote:> 3. Ruby on Rails (or Django or any other web framework that dynamically
> builds a server response) would be a terrible choice for a static
> website. It would be nothing but overhead for no benefit. Nothing on
> dlang.org <http://dlang.org> is dynamically generated, nothing talks to
> a database (nor should it). The site can and should be generated from
> some simple markup language. The end result should be HTML, CSS, JS and
> image files that are then just served by the simplest of servers. For
> these types of sites, the industry standard is quickly becoming to serve
> the files directly out of Amazon S3 with a CDN (like CloudFlare) in
> front of it. The end result is an incredibly fast browsing experience
> because everything is just served directly out of the CDN edge servers
> without any kind of dynamic response generation. Requests come in for
> files and the CDN just echoes them out of memory to the network.

You can also try GitHub pages. And since D already has its code in github it's very simple.

http://pages.github.com/

It generates a static site from a bunch of files. Under the hood it uses Jekyll: http://jekyllrb.com/

It also comes with automatic blogging support, which would be a nice thing for D (having an official D blog reporting new, awesome stuff, anouncing new releases, etc., instead of relying on people to suscribe to the newsgroup).

If Walter wants to modify the copyright notice, he could modify the file _includes/copyright.html. No need to search for a macro named copyright.

If he wants to highlight D code, he can do:

{% highlight d %}
void some_code() {
}
{% endhighlight %}

because GitHub already colors D code.

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 02:33:53PM +0200, Flamaros wrote:
> On Sunday, 14 July 2013 at 04:56:46 UTC, Val Markovic wrote:
> 
> >There's some low-hanging fruit with the site that shouldn't be too hard to fix: there's an incredibly annoying "content flash" after any page is loaded (it loads fine, you see the text, then the text disappears for a second, then appears again).
> 
> The flash content bother me, because it breaks my scroll.

I turn off JS for dlang.org, and it's much more navigable. Seriously, whatever it is that's causing that, needs to be removed. AFAICT, it's just to generate the useless blob of links at the top of the page. We need a *real* index, not a blob of links.


> I think this web site is too much oriented on documentation. The home page must display news about D language, it will be great to have videos of DConf on it directly.

I agree that news should be posted on the front page. I disagree that it's too documentation-oriented, though. It *should* be documentation oriented. Too many websites these days pay too much attention to frills without delivering real content. I don't want the D website to turn into that.


> The documentation need to be a specific section that allow us to browse all versions (documentation is related to a specific version of the compiler).

+1, docs for past releases should be available somewhere. (And by that I mean somewhere navigable on a browser, not a .zip file download.)


T

-- 
Жил-был король когда-то, при нём блоха жила.

On Monday, 15 July 2013 at 14:42:17 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> AFAICT, it's just to generate the useless blob of links
> at the top of the page.

I'm pretty sure the flash is hypenate.js. The links can mess up scrolling though as they appear.

> We need a *real* index, not a blob of links.

And, of course, it should be done server side. A while ago, I had a little program that generated one from the html.

It would end up looking like this:
http://arsdnet.net/d-web-site/std_stdio.html


This just takes ddoc generated html, parses it, and modifies it to add the table, so it can be done as a simple post processor in the makefile. It is probably out of date now, but if someone else is willing to go through the pull request and makefile editing hassle, I'll update the code and give it to you.

> Too many websites these days pay too much attention to frills
> without delivering real content.

Speaking of frills, that same folder on my box still has the code to add recent  (cached for 8 hours, so not 100% up to date) commits and announcements to a site:

http://arsdnet.net/d-web-site/site

(This predates the new dlang.org design). If we want the html to remain static, a way to do this would be to just link a <script> to the main site and have containers with fixed heights and static links. If js is enabled, the containers get filled up, and the fixed height ensures the page doesn't jump. If not, the static links still show so the space isn't wasted.

idk if it is worth it, I lean toward meh, but it would be pretty easily doable.

On 7/15/2013 1:20 AM, John Colvin wrote:
> On Monday, 15 July 2013 at 03:22:59 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> For example, if I want to change the copyright notice, I can:
>>
>> 1. edit hundreds of files
>>
>>    -- or --
>>
>> 2. edit a Ddoc macro
>>
>> It's no contest.
>
> Even the very simplest roll-your-own framework would remove this necessity.

Please note that I wrote this in response to Ary's suggestion to just write raw HTML.


> Even simpler, you just split the contents of the site in to components and load
> them via your favourite scripting language, e.g.
>
> <?php echo get_file_contents("copyright.html"); ?>
>
> I don't necessarily think using ddoc is a bad idea, but web development has
> moved on a long way from editing every file separately.

Yes, and Ddoc has also moved on from that. That's why I wrote it, in fact.

On 7/15/2013 6:12 AM, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
> If Walter wants to modify the copyright notice, he could modify the file
> _includes/copyright.html. No need to search for a macro named copyright.

Are you also going to fix all your .c files to replace:

   #define ABC 3
   #define DEF(i) ((i) + 3)

with a separate file for every macro:

   #include "abc.h"
   #include "def.h"

?

On 7/15/2013 3:08 AM, Dicebot wrote:
> Yeah, sure, I have no problem having website itself maintained via GitHub - but
> in my opinion it makes it much more static than it should be. For example, I'd
> absolutely love to see news & announcements added to the main page but don't see
> how it is going to happen if adding single piece of content goes through pull
> request procedure. Latency issues, by the time it is merged, information is
> likely to become irrelevant.

That's why the d_programming twitter feed was added to the front page.

In any case, Ddoc can be used to insert the contents of an "announcements" file into the front page. The problem, however, is someone has to write those announcements on a timely basis. Nobody has shown any interest in doing so, and although I've tried to do it on numerous occaisions, I just lose steam rather quickly because it bores me to tears.

The twitter feed is as easy as it gets, and I still don't regularly post to it. (Andrei also posts to the d_programming feed.)

On Sunday, 14 July 2013 at 04:56:46 UTC, Val Markovic wrote:
> There's some low-hanging fruit with the site that shouldn't be too hard to
> fix: there's an incredibly annoying "content flash" after any page is
> loaded (it loads fine, you see the text, then the text disappears for a
> second, then appears again). I've cursed at this more than a dozen times;
> it's especially annoying on any mobile browser.
>

https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/pull/352

On Monday, 15 July 2013 at 19:20:00 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> That's why the d_programming twitter feed was added to the front page.

Twitter is incredibly restrictive in its format. People coming to front page want to get a detailed explained overview of latest news, not 140-symbol mysteries. Also it ties important information channel to an external closed service which is never good for the reputation.

And as cherry on top - I don't see and embedded twitter feeds on dlang.org right now ;)

> In any case, Ddoc can be used to insert the contents of an "announcements" file into the front page. The problem, however, is someone has to write those announcements on a timely basis. Nobody has shown any interest in doing so, and although I've tried to do it on numerous occasions, I just lose steam rather quickly because it bores me to tears.

And how do you expect someone to show the interest? :) Currently there are no tools for proposing front page news other than making pull requests which has unacceptable latency for news anyway. Dead end!

One of best ways to have lot of contributions is making each single one as easy as possible.

On 7/15/2013 12:39 PM, Dicebot wrote:
> On Monday, 15 July 2013 at 19:20:00 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> That's why the d_programming twitter feed was added to the front page.
>
> Twitter is incredibly restrictive in its format. People coming to front page
> want to get a detailed explained overview of latest news, not 140-symbol
> mysteries.

Given how enormously popular Twitter is for breaking news and announcements, I think you're wrong about that.


> Also it ties important information channel to an external closed
> service which is never good for the reputation.

I don't understand that comment. The twitter feed only shows d_programming tweets.


> And as cherry on top - I don't see and embedded twitter feeds on dlang.org right
> now ;)

I don't either - I don't know what happened there.


> And how do you expect someone to show the interest? :) Currently there are no
> tools for proposing front page news other than making pull requests which has
> unacceptable latency for news anyway. Dead end!

A large number of improvements have been made by someone showing enough interest to actually drive forward the changes needed to support their interest. For example, Brad Roberts and Bugzilla. Vladimir and the D forum software. Etc.


> One of best ways to have lot of contributions is making each single one as easy
> as possible.

It doesn't get easier than twitter.