mattie_p paraphrases Barrabas, who uttered these words (mostly):
To everyone who contributed to the initial roll out, thank you! It was an amazing effort, and we couldn't have done it without you.
I've set down some notes, with an overview of where I see the project heading in the next few weeks. As always, we can stop and discuss if the community feels we should be moving in a different direction.
We have had a wildly successful launch, and can now proceed at a slightly more leisurely pace, at least for the team that handles code development. I have always intended to do development the right way; with a strong foundation of tools and with leaders to oversee and coordinate the effort between individuals and other groups. As a result, this upcoming week I've told our system administrator team to take a break. They can certainly do minor bug fixes at a leisurely pace if they feel bored, but I want a team that is relaxed and refreshed.
Speaking of a team, we actually have at least five of them. There is a systems team, which are primarily concerned with systems and server issues. There is a development team, consisting of people who contribute code to the site. There is a content team, consisting of our editors, artists, and administrators of our wiki, forum, and IRC channels. A fourth group is style, representing those who help determine how the site is presented. Finally, we have our business team, which includes marketing, legal, finances, and other such issues.
This has been an exciting time. I understand there has been some concern about decisions made during first roll out. I promised that we would operate by community consensus, and I will abide by that. Look for opportunities to contribute to the future direction of SoylentNews over the upcoming days and weeks.
(To read the full story in his words, simply go to Barrabas's Journal Entry. (internal hyperlink))
(Score: 2, Informative) by martyb on Wednesday February 19 2014, @12:42PM
Would you mind posting your changes here? I used stylish to add a left border and padding to a comment blockquote. It's quick and dirty, probably fails in some cases, but I expect to remove it when SN gets past the early roll-out challenges and they implement refinements on appearance.
(For those who may not know, stylish is a Firefox addon [mozilla.org] that facilitates creating and applying user styles that can be applied against a site or sites. I head there's a version for chrome, but I've not tried it.)
I requested your style updates as I'd like to look at them, personally, but also as SoylentNews is soliciting feedback, it might be helpful for them to see what areas are affected and how.
FWIW, here's what I have; I know it's crude, but it's intended to be temporary! WARNING: there are spaces inserted into the code here by the posting system (solution to the early days /. page widening troll)... cut-and-paste WILL NOT work
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1) by pmontra on Saturday February 22 2014, @09:00AM
Hi! Unfortunately Soylent News doesn't send mail for comments (or they are not as visible as the ones of the other site) so I missed your request. The file is here https://github.com/pmontrasio/soylent-green [github.com] :-)
It does a little more than changing red to green so you might not like everything I did but your blockquote fix is there
Feel free to fork it and send pull requests for fixes. Tastes are an extremely subjective matter so I don't promise I'll accept every change, but I'll definitely accept technical improvements.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Saturday February 22 2014, @02:22PM
pmontra (1175) wrote:
Hi to you! Thanks for making that available!
I regret to inform you that my "blockquote fix" has some problems. It seemed to work when looking at a first-level comment. For example, as I write this reply (in "Plain Old Text" mode), the blockquote markup seems to work.
OTOH,When looking at a nested and threaded discussion, though, I've seen it not work. :(
Don't have enough data to clearly identify what is happening, and don't want to pollute the site with tests... Hmmm! Just had an idea - vague and rough, so bear with me. Okay?
How do we know if fixes to SoylentNews.org actually fix things and don't break other things?
It would be helpful to have test articles, posts, replies, etc. that are known quantities. I have no idea at the moment about how that could be created, managed, and *maintained*, but I wanted to put the thought out there while I had it!
Thanks again for the feedback!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1) by pmontra on Saturday March 01 2014, @09:00AM
I think we can only hope that changes to this site don't break the Stylish patches. Alignment and color stuff are hard to check. Maybe a selenium test (or any similar tool) with screenshots and pixel per pixel checks? I don't even want to think about it :-)
I'll look into the nested quote thing as soon as I run into it. Maybe you can open an issue on the repository.