2014-07-31 Hello World

Great News! I'm observing reduced latency in accessing the website not that it was too slow or anything before, just a bit faster.

Feedback Regarding the web design:

By knowledge I'm no web developer but I have been messing with some color schemes lately so here's what I have to say, I think the total black background is not quite right, something like Zenburn would be nice (#dcdccc #3f3f3f if it helps :) ) and the green is ok but if you change the background you need to adjust the font colors too so go for the base16 colorscheme.

Check them out they are very popular and clean good color schemes:

https://github.com/chriskempson/base16

https://github.com/jnurmine/Zenburn

-- stark 2014-08-04 17:09 UTC

Yes, it is faster indeed. There were some problems with the server. Hopefully we will never see such latency again. :)

I am afraid that if we go with gray, some people will disagree and suggest to use completely black background. And there are even people who prefer white backgrounds. We will never get it "right" unless we search for reasoning. Do you have any arguments for using gray background? Yes, there are some gray-background themes, but you can find some other themes with black background as well.

The reason why I chose black is that the background itself does not provide any information, so I want it to be as irrelevant as it could be to my eyes. However, some elements have to stand out: buttons, edit fields and some others. That's how it is now on this website.

What do you think? Does it make any sense?

-- AlexDaniel 2014-08-04 19:49 UTC

I've temporarily set the colors according to base16 theme. There was no green so I had to choose blue. Let's see how it goes.

-- AlexDaniel 2014-08-04 21:30 UTC

Now it looks alot better, not distracting yet pleasant.And i'm also glad you picked blue, its really comfortable now to look at.Before i suggested grey but yes you have solid point about what you mentioned and it makes sense but we have thin for majority of the people and this color-scheme is great.And another thing is it possible for you to increase the font size of this comment box its a bit smaller than most people are used to so they might have to zoom the page or worse go closer to the skin.And some for features thats going to be needed in the future i guess are the usual formatting options with one click buttons for choosing font size,hyperlinking,font-colors(optional),bold,italic,underline,etc.

-- stark 2014-08-05 16:12 UTC

Shameful Rectification :

Line 4: *think for the majority (not *thin)

Line 7: *screen (not *skin)

P.S there are tons of grammatical errors in my comments.

-- stark 2014-08-05 16:17 UTC

Why don't you just edit your comments? :) There is one edit button at the top, another one is at the bottom. This website is a wiki, so any page is editable. Sure, there are some css tricks to make things look like they're special elements (like comments), but it is just a plain text anyway.

Some of the markup rules are listed on Page Editing page, but it is hard to list all of them. What I know for sure is that it is never going to fit on a small bar of buttons. For example, there is a bar on stackoverflow with such buttons, but it barely scratches the full potential of what you can possibly do, so you end up reading the help page anyway. And guess what, things like italics or bold are so easy to remember that you don't even need a button.

I don't feel like we should aim for "majority of people", instead we should try to attract programmers and just geeks.

We will definitely try some other themes, but it seems like we would have to choose some compromise as the default and give an option for each user to select a different theme.

I haven't tested it on different resolutions yet, so your font problem will probably remain for a little while :)

-- AlexDaniel 2014-08-05 18:14 UTC

A theme chooser would be really nice ;)

Ok so for the font size issue its looking alright in firefox but looking smaller in chromium here are some screenshots showing the difference:

Chromium

Firefox

And thanks for the page editing link and i think that should go into a FAQ which should be added to the top for easier navigation.

Also how about placing the links in the masthead in this order ? :)

H̲ome D̲evices Sour̲ce Recent Chang̲es Ask̲ About

And why are there underscores in some places ? :O

Some other suggestions :)

-A button for showing/hiding comments in posts like this which by default should hide the comments.

-A masthead with shadows don't know what call it but its similar to the masthead of #!'s home page

-Some drop-down menus to make it easy for others to find content quickly

-Also why no place the recent changes like a feed in the right with a button to show or hide ? ;)

For now i only have these proposals/ideas until... ;)

-- stark 2014-08-08 12:48 UTC

We appreciate your feedback and ideas! Keep them coming :)

1. Thanks for the screenshots. I am pretty sure that there is more inconsistency than we can currently see. I should spend some time refactoring the whole css file.
2. Maybe instead of writing about it in FAQ we should make "Edit" button more visible?
3. About must be the first button after Home, because it should describe project ideas and goals. This is the most important page for a project like ProgArm, because the general concept is probably unclear for most people. Currently there is not much useful information in About, but we are working on it. As for Recent Changes, that is a button that should be present on any wiki. I think that placing it on the right is a good idea, so I doubt that you will see any reordering any time soon.
4. Underscores indicate accesskeys. On most operating systems if you press Alt you will see underscores in most GUI elements, then by pressing Alt+character you can access these gui elements from your keyboard. There is the same thing on most websites, but because Alt is reserved for GUI elements, most browsers use Alt+Shift instead. For example, you can visit wikipedia and press Alt+Shift+e to edit the page. The reason why this feature is so unpopular is because most websites do not highlight access keys. I decided to underline them, this should be familiar to most geeks.
5. Show/Hide comments? What for? If you want to read comments, then read them. If you don't, then just don't. Am I missing something?
6. "masthead with shadows" ? Like a background for the menu? Yeah, why not!
7. I don't think that a dropdown menu makes it easier to find content. Instead you can just have a list of links on any page, with descriptions and stuff. If one day we will have so many categories or subtopics that dropdowns would become useful, sure! But not now, I guess.
8. Recent Changes in a feed is a good idea, although I am afraid of overcomplicating home page. We should try it and see how it goes.

Thanks for your suggestions! I will definitely check out this list again once I have time. For now I am a bit busy with website internals (now you can upload files!) and ProgArm itself (android client on its way!).

Maybe you should start a new page with a list of suggestions about website design?

-- AlexDaniel 2014-08-10 16:48 UTC

Thanks a lot for bringing the meta key function to light, i didn't know that you could do that in a web-page so i get its damn useful and i think this should mentioned in the edit and yes you can highlight the EDIT button more but a FAQ is always going to come handy don't you think ?

And for the other suggestions like show/hide comments, those are kinda basic necessity these days,sometimes people just want to read the main article rather than comments so it would have been a nice to have and for some people maybe its a must have ?

-- stark 2014-08-15 13:52 UTC