New Website Soon and a Call for Contributors

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Whew!

I’ve been a busy person this past year and I want to apologize for being semi-afk (or AWOL depending on your point of view :wink: ).

The Website

I recently had to update a link for the Lightzone project on the main website and @darix was kind enough to remind me that I needed to get off my arse and finish the Hugo migration and redesign of the website. I had made some good headway on a new design a few months back and then life hit me.

So I’m revisiting the site redesign again as I’m already working on some other web projects already anyway.

As a way to shame myself into actually getting the job done I’m posting about it here in the hopes that shame avoidance might be a good motivator.
To double down on that I’ve been thinking a little about the website.

It’s languishing a bit without fresh content.

The Content

I mean, we have the forums and there’s a ton of great activity here, of course, but Ideally I’d like to start publishing more articles, news, and even smaller blog-type posts on the main website.

So, do i have any interested takers in committing to writing some more content with me?

I’m really looking for any good content that we think the general community might be interested in. This can include, but is certainly not limited to:

  • Showcase and/or critique (or just sharing) of great photographs - preferably from the community but in general is fine as well.
  • Tutorials - self explanatory.
  • Reviews of software/hardware and thoughts on them.
  • Editorials - general posts related to the community in some way.

I know there are some of you that produce a TON of content and if you’re willing to, I’d love to amplify those contributors and their work.

Ideally we could have a queue of posts in the pipeline and try to get new content out on a (semi) regular schedule. Things like @rstein and the classic Meet the GIMP work he did/does for a long time. Finally getting @dmpop even more exposure. Not to mention others like @Andy_Astbury1 and @s7habo! Of course @betazoid and resurrecting the regular group meetings would be nice also.

Let me know what y’all think (and be as open/free with your thoughts as you’d like - not going to hurt my feelings over here).

I’m probably going to rope in the @moderators for help with content editor duties as well if they’re available for opinions/input.

I’ll also ping @darix and see about getting a CI/CD build for the new hugo branch of the website so we can have something fun to critique (maybe staging.pixls.us).

Thoughts?

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It all sounds great to me! I’m not sure that I’m a great content producer though… I might think about it.
By main website, I assume meaning pixls.us itself? As a newcomer, I thought it seemed a bit quiet :wink:
I’d like to thank you too, for the forum - it’s the best forum I’ve ever met!

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Great plan, Pat!

I think it’s necessary to carefully manage the boundary between what’s appropriate for pixls.us and what’s appropriate for discuss.pixls.us, I think showcase could fit on pixls.us, but critique belongs squarely on discuss.pixls.us. Anything that more or less requires feedback/comments is best suited to a platform built for that purpose.

At this point, it’s pretty clear that discuss.pixls.us has become the dominant member of the family, to the extent that it will probably be necessary to announce new pixls.us posts on discuss.pixls.us in order to get eyeballs over to them.

Looking forward to see what shakes out of this…

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Hi Pat,

First of all, I’m so happy to see that you and the rest of the gang is still around! :slight_smile: Huge thank you to you and everyone else for keeping at it.

I feel pretty bad about failing to deliver on my promise to contribute to the PIXLS.US blog. But I’m eager to rectify that! Your plan sounds great, and I’d be happy to help in any way I can.

I’m not sure whether it would be logistically possible, but maybe it would be make sense to set up a video call to do some initial planning? I, for one, would be very pleased to see your cheery faces again. :slight_smile:

As for me, I already have a few drafts that can be turned into blog posts, and I’m going to come up with a list of other potentially interesting topics.

Thank you for thinking of me, and thank you for steering the ship with your firm hand and unwavering dedication! :slight_smile:

Best,
Dima

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well I was a bit busy lately but we could make another live meeting anytime. I thought we are doing this together with @afre ?
Does the community want a meeting?

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I’d be more than happy to contribute! Count me in!

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It always gives me a little bit of a thrill when I post something before bed and wake up to find a bunch of notifications in my inbox. :slight_smile:

You’re super welcome! The thanks really belongs to the community in general just being awesome all around.

Great points. I think I tend to internalize what I think works for each platform and haven’t really codified anything in writing as a guide. Any posts on the site will have a corresponding post through the forum. This way I can have a “comments” section on a post that is technically a topic here (much like librearts, digikam, darktable websites).

But a clear delineation certainly makes sense. I guess I was thinking of posts that contain more substance and are worth posting to the main site. So a critique as an example should include a well thought-out and reasoned article to post about something that could then be bolstered by a continuing discussion in the “comments”/topic that is associated with a post. (But you’re right, a critique might be better suited as a regular topic post here).

I do think that all of the richness in this community is due to the people and discussions back and forth. The main site is mostly a way to showcase content we, as a community, would like to put out there and maybe even present to others on the internet that might not know about us or are free-curious. :wink:

I’ll start hacking more at the site and maybe we can get something together for a meeting after or around the holidays if folks have free time.

Excellent! We can start listing out what we have and what we’d like to cover soon. I’ll be in touch!

I guess keep an eye out on this topic for the moment until I can firm up some ideas and we’ll move on from there. Thank you all so much for getting back to me! :slight_smile:

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We should do another one sometime. Although I am super busy, I still prefer semiregular meetings. From experience, we either pack in too much or too little. I suggest we aim to have per meeting:

  • One primary facilitator
  • One presentation with Q&A (structured or conversational)
  • Free discussion (somewhat directed)

For the main website, I suggest we provide the video (live then recorded archive) and a written summary of highlights.

So far, the recordings exist wherever we upload them. It would be great if we use a consistent recording and publishing method. Perhaps with some (copy)editing magic - after all, we have multitalented people who have more time and patience than some of us!

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One thing I would like to see is a read-only forum thread that announces new articles / blog posts.

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Please don’t link to Meet the Gimp any more. I didn’t renew the domain some years ago and a spammer has bought it. Best not to give them clicks…

I have been out of content creation for 5 years or so. Life, as David said. Up to last August I worked my ass of in my school with teaching and a lot more in administration. Then my class took their exams and left the school. I had them as a class teacher for 6 years, they turned out well and it was a good moment to retire. But then we had to go flat hunting, move and unpack. Still not finished, the internet guy will show up on Friday…

So I am up to produce stuff again. No idea what, but something …

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Just loud thinking: To be honest, I’d prefer a physical meeting. I miss the tsunami of positive energy during LGM2019.

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Unfortunately, I cannot do that due to lacking the financial means and time flexibility. Still, I want to be a participant in in-person events, if possible. So, if we can set up something to accommodate that with hybrid or telepresence solutions, it would be amazing.

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Is the content still available somewhere? Archive.org misses at least some of the videos, and they are not on youtube anymore. Would this be something worth having on pixls.us, as I am pretty sure, many of the posts/episodes are still state-of-the-art … maybe in an archive/library section?

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Just some food for thought, but you are welcome to ignore my ramblings :wink:.

I never understood the differentiation between articles and blog posts. I mean, from an academic point of view, it can be easily understood. But especially with a limited number of updates per time, the extra structure given by this split IMHO does not contribute but makes things less accessible. Plus, the exact split line is not clear to the reader, e.g., is blog only meta content or does it also cover content (I know it is explained on the page, but still …)? I personally would prefer a flat structure that holds articles and blog posts in the same hierarchy and adds tags for the different categories. This would even allow to differentiate between content blog posts (such as software or image processing related) and meta content blog posts (such as site statistics analysis, community stuff, etc.), and even more categories.

Btw, that’s something that also bothers me on librearts.org. I understand that the topic-wise sorting kind of makes sense for those stumbling upon the site, but there’s definitely a chronological “feed” missing (I don’t mean RSS but just a chronological ordered list of all articles on the website that is easy to access) for the regular readers. Nevertheless, for librearts.org I would still see the topic order as the entry page, whereas on pixls.us I can see more benefits for a chronological order as default entry point.

Off topic: And why the heck does discourse recognize librearts.org as a link automatically, while pixls.us is not recognized?

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That reminds me i still have to send you the photos from LGM :slight_smile:

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well comments are done via the forums. so each blog post automatically gets a forum post.

and so on

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This is a good point and one that I think I’ll look into. For sure I can tag content and we can reach tag ‘pages’ (this is somewhat how librearts.org works with categories defined for each post, along with tagging taxonomies). I should see about adding a simple chronological “feed” page as well - I’ll ping prokoudine and see if he’d like that.

Hmm Weird. I hadn’t noticed that, but now it’s going to drive me nuts :wink:

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I had always thought we should have an evergreen section of tutorials, like camera calibration, white balancing, noise profiles, profiling your monitor, etc etc and the everything else is blog/news

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I’m wondering if we simplify all content types to just content/posts, and then use taxonomies to distinguish where/how they get listed and displayed.

It is a little cleaner/nicer to have sections clearly delineated in the source content, though (content/articles/... and content/tutorials/...). I suppose a combination of those two would be fine as well. I know we’ve talked about a good reference document to cover all manner of topics for photo-related work - this might be a good opportunity to start fleshing out that organization and perhaps folding that into the /tutorials/ section?

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I just noticed that they are gone from Youtube. I have backups - perhaps I’ll put them on Peertube. It needs some curation…