Hi guys, Quick updates... As promised I've located all the damaged news items Winter talked about and completed the fixes to them. I've also fixed the oversized pages he mentioned too. Pull request is submitted and ready for you guys here:https://github.com/FreeCol/freecol/pull/50
Have also put together new text (using the better project description from your website) similar to the welcome thread for your sourceforge front page summary area with critical links included. I tested them on a sourceforge project front page I have admin rights on and it worked great. Obviously I need David, Mike or one of the other admins to implement these changes so I've put the text and demonstration images in a post here:https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/719661/thread/42b0844f/#a702/9e85 Also in that post I discuss how these days Sourceforge has a nice features list section (you can see it in example pictures attached to post) on project front pages where you can list all the cool stuff about the game. Listing what's great about FreeCol increases interest and convert lurkers to downloaders. Here's some I can think of off the bat but there's definitely more 'sexy features' we can all think of as you guys know your project better than anyone! Improvements to my wording could use some suggestions too (not sure what the character limit is in those little fields but hopefully the map one will fit). - Play classic Colonization games- Play huge extended Colonization games- 8 player games (12 with mods)- Multiplayer Support - Huge maps of America, Africa, Australia, and more! - Map Editor- Mod Support Once finalised this simple but 'sexy' feature list would probably work well in other places such as the welcome thread and on the freecol.org website front page too. That way everyone who visits the project on either site will quickly know (without ANY clicks) what its about, what makes it cool, why they should try it, where to go to try it, and how they can help make it better. Regards Blake On Monday, 9 December 2019, 07:15:33 pm ACDT, D Blakeley via Freecol-developers <[email protected]> wrote: David:> This means that we should have our nightly builds available: https://github.com/FreeCol/freecol/releases Thank you so much David this is great news. Now that we're changing all these places to tell people to about the nightly releases it's good that they'll see a nice new one there. I've downloaded it and look forward to mucking around with it. Thank you again so much for applying the sticky and announcement flags to the welcome thread. Mike you're off the hook for that job lol! (BTW I'm Australian too :) )https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/719661/thread/2d0063a3bc/I've put in a nice HD picture there and in the future will likely add some more multimedia there to show off the game when people are passing through. I've really gotta get off my butt and finish editing that FreeCol HD tour video I made a year ago. I've got some holidays coming over January so my plan is to get it sorted then and use it to market the living s*** out of your project across all the Col & Civ forums and social media groups I'm at. Anyway I'll keep looking at making improvements to the Welcome/Info text to make sure people are going to the right places. Let me know if you you guys want anything changed. Although presumably admins can edit other peoples posts so you can change anything you want in it anyway. Winter: > As for the website itself, every time I look at it I find more broken >things.> There are many old news items with missing text, but luckily there >are overview pages> containing the missing content.> The way to fix this is to >search files for pages below news/ containing:> "You are not authorised to >view this resource. > You need to login. "> Then search all other pages for the page title, >especially any named> "news/page-*.html" or "news/*/page-*.html" and >copy-paste the missing> html+text from each item into each broken single >page.> Blake, could you help with this? I would be grateful, if you did. Yeah sure mate I'm happy to help with that although I'll need some more hand holding from you on getting started with this to make sure I'm looking in the right places and do it the right way (I'll email you separately about this). Also I'll be busy the next few days at work but can be back on deck to help on friday.Also David's asked for my help on "spitting out the website code from the main freecol git repo into the dedicated Github repo so that we can make faster website updates" here:https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/719661/thread/42b0844f/#f215 However I'm pretty sure this one is beyond my limited talents being that I'm not a programmer and I only just started learning how Github works haha. So maybe if I can take most of this annoying broken links job away from you that'll free you up to help him with that problem? > The page navigation partially remaining from the former CMS is giving me >headaches. > I also found more broken and missing content and navigation links.> I'd love >to get rid of it and just have link lists to single news items with a >backlink,> but I don't have the time and it depends on the fix mentioned above >being done.> It might also be slightly worse from a user perspective to always >click an additional link? Yeah I haven't really complained about this as I'm >guessing one of you guys put this news system together but OMG are you making >life hard for yourselves. Or at least it looks that way. Eg when you add a new >news item do you have to then manually move other older news items across the >1-10 pages of news? Or is there some clever code setup that moves things >around for you? If not then OH MAN do we need to change things. Two ways to solve this.. 1 Adding a blog to your website using an existing 'pre-made' blog/news service (eg Wordpress) which then takes away all the news page list content, news categories, who posted the news (usernames), and link updating issues in the future as it does all that for you.https://www.shoutmeloud.com/how-to-install-wordpress-manually-web-hosting.htmlSo the only nasty time consuming job would be moving all of the old news content over to new blog service. However anyone can do that so I could do this for you guys. I've been using wordpress for years and I've just discovered they do allow backdating of new posts to previous months and years (which we'd need for all the old news). https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-back-date-your-wordpress-posts/It would just need one of you guys to set it up on your site and then 'let me at it' lol (I'd still need access to the old replaced news pages and I'd obviously be updating links in every news post while porting them over). OR 2 as Winter suggested we switch to simple 1 page with a list of news items with nothing but the titles and you click on them to see the news item (I'm sure they'll survive the horror of having an extra click step haha).Eg your counterparts in the opensource C&C/Red Alert remake world the OpenRA project use exactly that:https://www.openra.net/news/It's a huge site with very high traffic yet look at that news page.. Very simple and easy!!!! Once again if someone could do that first step of setting up a new news page with a couple of example/test news items in a format we all like, I could then do the long boring job of porting everything across from the old page 1-10 etc files (I'd still need access to the old replaced news pages and I'd obviously be updating links in every news post while porting them over). Also the each news item's html file REALLY should have a creation date in the file name so that they display in order when viewing the backend files. Whereas right now you've got 15 or more years of confusing mess in that folder lol. I took one look and nearly had a heart attack lol!eg news/production-depending-on-difficulty.html should/could be news/20100117-production-depending-on-difficulty.html Oh and last night I added the last stable release and the latest nightly release to the IndieDB page. Will add some HD pictures to it soon.https://www.indiedb.com/games/freecol/downloads Regards Blake _______________________________________________ Freecol-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freecol-developers
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