2016-08-12 ~ Three Column Home Page

[theo-armour]

@jaanga/terrain

Terrain3 Home Page

Terrain3 is about mapping, but if the maps are hidden under a rock then do they actually exist?

A good part of the development to date of Terrain3 has gone into devising ways for maps to forked, edited and shared. If the project is to be successful then the repository must provide:

• Attractions for new visitors
• Status updates for returning visitors
• Easy navigation for both

The issue - as in so many FOSS projects - is that there is no marketing team, there is no PR and there's not even anybody doing any sales. There's just the coding.

Therefore the interesting question is: Can the code and normal maintenance of the code become its own marketing app? Requirements might include the following:

Updates are timely and easy to prepare

• There must be news items several time a week.
• Interested parties may subscribe and receive updates by email
• Blog posts are visible on the home page
• Blog posts have image, links and all the niceties of modern blogging
• Blog posts may be commented on

Tools are familiar

• Look and feel highly familiar to programmers
• Everything created within the normal day-to-day work environment using the same tools used too prepare, debug and maintain code
• Everything under revision control
• Everything editable - from mastheads to comments
• All FOSS
• All hostable on static servers - especially ones available at not charge
• All simple JavaScript - no dependencies

Designed for the future

• 3D everywhere
• 16 million colors investigated
• 60 frames per second played with
• As much interaction as possible in-world

The new home page is being coded to fulfill all these requirements and more.

Feature include

• The left menu uses the GitHub API to obtain a list of all files in the repo and updates itself with every load. Any time a new folder with readme is added to the repo, then a new link is added to the menu

• The center column read me file is written in Markdown and is easy to update

• The right side menu is created with the help of the GitHub API. All issues with the label 'status update' are read and attached.

  The home page is an ongoing coding project - very much a part of the whole Terrain3 project. Ditto updates like this one.