URGENT: create landing/splash page

Oh and having the headline container the same size as on the main page would be nice.

Hi Jonne, all those things you point out are elements of the original design (by the founders). It's not how I would have set about writing a page, but it's what I got handed. I agree it's a bit of a mess. I've done what I can to sort it out. Yes, of course they can and should be ironed out, but for now my main concern is to get some up-to-date, accurate and easy to digest content out there so that newcomers can know a bit more about Diaspora - and particularly how to sign up without all going to joindiaspora.com. Thanks for your useful comments.

I've been updating links and the contributor lists this morning. The contributor lists are of course incomplete, but I've removed people who haven't been involved for a year or more.

Fla, agree that 'features our community loves' should be included, but on a separate page, 'more about Diaspora' - not on the front page. The front page should contain as little text as possible. I think there's a bit too much text as it is, but it will do for now. I had originally added 'more about this' links at the end of the various elements, but I have removed these just so we can get this page out. Once it's up we can write supplementary pages and add links to them.

Sean, I see you've added text from the old project site on to your copy-ed doc. Some of that is good, but please don't let's reintroduce horrid phrases such as 'Diaspora won't force your awesomeness'!

I think links and information are at least up to date now, even though incomplete (in case of contributors and supporters), and there are design issues, but I think it's right now to get these three pages (index, contribs, supporters) up there on diasporafoundation.org asap and then people can edit them afterwards.

Sean, I'll email these files to you. Let me know if you don't receive them.

Is https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora-project-site the current website on diasporaproject.org? We need to put the website on github to work on it.

For the moment, I'm for removing everything on the get involved page from "Diaspora*'s Contributors The people who work on Diaspora* every day " because it's not really useful and not up-to-date, we'll work on that later.

About the home page, I agree it should contain the minimum, but just adding the description of some features is important. Most people coming in this page don't know what's Diaspora*, it's even not indicate that Diaspora is a social network! If we want users to register, we have to explain how they can use Diaspora.

I'm for replacing the "Want to help?" part (which is a summary of the "get involved" page) by "features our users love" :)

@seantilleycommunit and I are working on a relaunch which will be live in the next days. stay tuned.

Good thinking, @flaburgan . I've added the features section.

Have sent the files to Sean. If you can work out a place on Github where I can upload them, I will, although if that involves cloning the repository I'll leave it to Sean to do it.

Right, must rest now. Silly of me to do so much work when I'm not well, but it needed doing. At least there's a base on which others can build.

Thanks everyone for your comments, very useful.

@seantilleycommunit , let me know if you don't receive my email or can't download the files.

Thank you for your amazing work ;)

Awesome stuff, looking forward to seeing the site live and the code on github :)

Thanks everyone for all your feedback. I've been making revisions, using some new copy from Sean, and writing fuller explanations of various elements.

There are updated files back at http://diaspora.goob.me.uk/

I think at this stage I need to pass it on, once @seantilleycommunit has OKed it @dennisschubert will work his magic on it, and I'll try to find a way to get it on GitHub so others can build on what I've done, as it's only really a stop-gap measure.

I had to create some graphics for things like Freedom and Aspects, tried to respect the existing designs, hope mine fit in OK. I've also created a new logo, with a slight gradient on it, as the 'THE DIASPORA* PROJECT' logo was a real alpha logo from way back. Hope it's OK, but anyone else is welcome to create a better logo.

Thanks again for all your help.

@goob nice work. On the supporters page one link to the wiki misses the http:// prefix. Also I think we have to revisit the text about Ilya :/

Well spotted! Thanks. Have fixed.

You're right about Ilya. I didn't really feel like writing an obit. In fact, the whole contributors page needs a big overhaul. All I did was remove people who haven't been involved for over a year, and add a few I knew about. But my knowledge of contributors is not extensive, so others will need to give their input, I guess you or Florian for developers and Sean for other contribs. It definitely needs further work once the pages go up. Likewise, I haven't touched the supporters page, and that only lists the original Kickstarter funders.

There are two options: either put up these versions for now and collate and upload new data as soon as possible, or replace the 'get involved' and 'supporters' pages with a 'coming soon' placeholder until the pages can be improved.

@dennisschubert , can I get these files to you? Or can someone help me get them onto GitHub so others can pick them up? I'm keen this updated information get on to the site asap.

@goob I think this "contributor" part should be added later when it'll be clean. I'm also not really in favor of your new logo (sorry :p), gradients...

I have other remarks too: there is too many things before "Want to get started". What about put it at the top of the page? If people wants to know more, they'll continue reading. Also, although "Welcome to Diaspora" and the earth image are great, it takes too much place (the screen contains only that when you are at the top of the page).

I propose to reduce a little bit the height of the image and superpose the text on it, and also use this image for the logo, this would allow to reduce the height of the black header.

Fla, I'm happy to change the logo, but I really don't think we should go back to the old logo from the pre-alpha days. I remember the core team changed the font to Roboto a while ago, so I've made a logo in that font. The one you link to below is horribly pixellated when I tried to use it, as it's too small an image.

Remember that these pages are simply something to replace immediately the almost-two-year-old diasporaproject.org site, which is where diasporafoundtion.org currently redirects. These pages aren't perfect, but at least they are a lot better, in terms of the information they present, than those ancient pages. I'm still waiting to hear from @seantilleycommunit or @dennisschubert about getting them on the site. Once they're there, we can discuss a more long-term solution, but I think Sean and Dennis are already working on that. These are simply to have up-to-date information available to new and prospective users NOW, while there's a massive influx. A lot of new users are confused, and about 95% of them are signing up to jd.com because they don't understand about the different pods and decentralisation, which is why these updated pages are so necessary right now, not in a few weeks' time. jd.com is groaning under the strain of new users signing up - I keep getting the 'we're over capacity right now' warning - and proper information is needed to encourage people to sign up to a range of pods, so that the network is more balanced and no one pod is over-stretched.

For this reason I think it's important to have the decentralisation explanation above the sign-up, but for those who want to go straight to the sign-up information, there is a 'Sign up' button in the header bar. Reducing the image height and therefore the black bar height is fine, but this requires fiddling around with the CSS files (simply reducing the bar height creates a nasty line under it as the masthead doesn't move up). I simply don't have time to do that at the moment.

I took off the 'getting involved' and 'supporters' pages, but Sean asked me to reinstate them.

Let's get these short-term pages up NOW so that people at least have access to proper information before signing up to Diaspora (usually to jd.com), and then we can discuss what to do for a brand new site for the future.

Hey @goob

@dennisschubert and I are working on the project site. We should have the copy-editing infused into the new project site this week. If all goes according to plan, hopefully we can have it up either by the end of this week or sometime next week.

Either way, I don't think it will take very long. :)

Hi @seantilleycommunit , I know you and Dennis are working on a new site. But is there any reason not to put up these pages for the thousands of people who will come to Diaspora in the meantime? (It's several hundred per day at the moment, 95% of whom are signing up to jd.com, going on the numbers of those who 'start sharing' with the DHQ account each day.) If we have something available for those people while you and Dennis put the finishing touches to your new site, it will be a massive help and help to take the load off jd.com.

I also think this should be on line now and not in few weeks. It's not hard to upload that, what's the problem?

UP!! This is urgent..

@dennisschubert @seantilleycommunit

Indeed. It's been two weeks now since I put up the updated pages, and still diasporafoundation.org is pointing to the disastrously out of date diasporaproject.org site...

@fla @goob: I am happy to report that all of the updated content is in the git repo for the Diaspora project site rewrite that DenSchub is working on. I'm currently waiting on @dennisschubert to merge it into the main code.

Due to the delay, I'm going to update the existing project site while we wait to hook up the new one. Sorry for the delay, everyone. :C

Great! And I'll be very happy to see my temporary pages superseded by yours and Dennis's new (and better) site soon!

The foundation site is still redirecting to the old project site. No sign of the new pages yet. Is there a problem? And if so, can I do anything to help?

@seantilleycommunit , can I help you get the temporary pages up?

I'm sure Sean does his possible, but the website is still not on line. I think we have to learn from this story: one people with the keys is not a good thing for a group of volunteers. What about sharing the access to the domain name / the server with someone else? @jonnehass or anyone else we can trust in?

The main reason for the delay is actually because Dennis is almost done putting the site together. There's no sense in duplicating effort. Site will be up soon.

Well, the effort to create these temporary pages had already been made by me, and I gave you the files. The effort to upload them via FTP is, if your access is anything like the access I have to my site, a matter of less than five minutes.

And it would have meant that users and prospective users would have had access to up-to-date information for the past two weeks or more.... and jd.com may not be getting quite so overloaded ..... and I might not be having to put in quite so much effort into explaining time and again to new people about the decentralised nature of Diaspora, using the DHQ account.

So actually, the small amount of effort needed to upload those files would have saved a lot of effort elsewhere.

I must say I've found this to have been a rather dispiriting experience.

You know what, you raise a good point. I was just more interested in getting the actual app done. I've uploaded the pages and assets and turned off the redirect in DreamHost's panel. Currently, it is still redirecting to diasporaproject.org, but hopefully that will clear itself up within the next hour or so.

Oh so we have two project sites now? Great.... if you need a redirect app to push to Heroku... my XMPP handle is [email protected]

Thanks Jonne. Once the DNS propagation is done for diasporafoundation.org, I'd be happy to have a redirect app set up on diasporaproject.org. :)

working right now.

Sean, many thanks for doing this. I appreciate, and I'm sure it'll help.

You're absolutely right that it's important to finish the new site that you and Dennis have been working on, and I'd still like to help with that; if I can doing anything more in the line of copy-writing or copy-editing, I'd be happy to. Please just let me know if so.

Best wishes, Goob

current state: the new version (the static content only atm as I runned out of time) is deployed on the targeted servers. DNS changes are made and we're now waiting for them to roll out. As soon as 'everybody' is able to visit the new site, we'll push a redirect-app to Heroku to redirect everyone to the new site.

(after that, we'll work on the wiki as it is really slow at the moment)

Good stuff guys.

I get this SSL warning:
diasporafoundation.org uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown.
The certificate is only valid for the following names:
schub.io , *.schub.io

Edit; I guess it's because DNS has not propagated and I get Schub.io content :)

Just a question, on which server all the sites are hosted? Who has access to it?

What about create a wiki page where we list "all" the web sites about diaspora* and the contact? It can be very useful if we want to warn or point a mistake or anything else.

Okay I created this page, I think it could be great if everybody fill it with everything: http://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Diaspora_websites_contacts

Hm, http://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Project_assets was already about that

@flaburgan yeah the project assets page was for this reason

@dennisschubert - Nice work. I can see the site fine.

This is great, and I'm sure it'll be a big help in effective communication with the wider community and prospective members.

@flaburgan i editied the table because I didn't saw the assets site. Please move the information... :)

Right now, I'm donating the servers. If somebody has problems with that, just ping me, we can talk. We also will move the wiki to my hardware 'soon' because it's really slow at the moment... shared webhosting... :)

@jasonrobinson is it working for you now? If not, what do you see?

Oh, well. There is no SSL certificate for the foundation-site. I doubt we have one, so I'll create a CACert this evening. :)

@dennisschubert still see your site, could just be DNS cached on my machine hmm... ponders how to clear or to wait

I think it would be good to have the site under https - advertising Diaspora* with the word privacy and not enabling SSL is kinda wrong :) Even if we process no user information. At least for the wiki it is needed.

I needed to clear Firefox cache but now I see the new site too. But nothing at www. and https is redirecting to denschub website.

@dennisschubert what about a StartSSL certificat? I don't like the validation step needed by the cacert one: people who is going to see this site are not nerds...

@seantilleycommunit did you set up the wildcard-subdomain-A record too? If not... please do it...

@flaburgan I don't like StartSSL too much. But I'll... obtain another (non-CACert) certificate asap.

Any reasons for that?

@flaburgan Yes. We'll have a non-StartSSL but globally trusted SSL certificate in 24 hours. I'll add a cacert later as a temporary workround. ETA: 3 hours.

(i'll also work with @seantilleycommunit to get the DNS done.)

Hey all, I've been traveling for the last month and have been out of the picture because of it. After reading this whole convo history and finding a repeating trend of having "the keys" in the hands of a couple people from the Old Guard original crew, I wanted to clarify: Have we now spread the access and control around? Or are we still in a sub-optimal setup where a couple people have unelected non-transparent control of everything?

Cheers,

T

Hey all,

as you already know, we don't have a SSL certificate right now. As we want to have multiple subdomains (for a blog, a planet and other stuff that's coming), we would need a wildcard certificate.
Wildcard certificates are expensive so that's a small problem. But! I'm working for a German company developing web applications and my boss likes the Diaspora idea so he'd be happy with donating a real and trusted wildcard certificate to us. I don't want to go and say "yes" without checking if somebody has a veto. Also, I'd like to say "Thanks" via the projects Twitter account, if that's okay for everyone. Thoughts?
Unfortunately, I cannot create a poll here as we need a decision fast...

Personally, I'm all for it. I have no problem with giving thanks, and we honestly could really use a good Wildcard SSL. :D

Sounds great to me, Dennis. I can't see anything wrong with the project thanking the company - after all, the project site used to thank all the crowd-source funders. As long as your boss isn't expecting Diaspora to officially endorse his products ;-)

Thanks for finding this resource, as it'll be a real help. And thanks from me to your boss too.

Alright, I think this 'vote' passed. As all Germans are sleeping now, I created a temporary CACert to show up until I have the final certificate ready tomorrow (thursday).

I'm going to post a quick update as soon as I am ready!

Just a thought, if you feel you need more people's OK, you could @-mention them in this thread so they get notifications.

Thanks, @goob, but remember we always can decide against using that certificate later. I just wanted a quick 'okay' from a few persons as we are in a hurry. :)

Awesome @dennisschubert - great idea to get the cert donated and of course any donating organizations deserve a thanks :) Site looks absolutely awesome, good work guys, especially @goob of course :)

@dennisschubert I'm okay too, let's go!

@taylormcleod hi, nice to see you back. The current situation (about who own what) is better than the previous one. The github organization grew, the access to the diasporaHQ account was shared by Sean with goob and me, and nothing is done "in secret". But we still have person owning things, and this could be a problem. However, the only solution to that is to set up a foundation.

Aaaaaand there we are! Globally trusted wildcard ssl certificate on diasporafoundation.org. And I just set up an auto redirect to ssl. :)

Great stuff! Thanks a lot to you and your boss.

@dennisschubert , I've just noticed a small error that has crept in: on the About page, under Freedom, on the blue 'Find out more' button the HTML code for the right angle quotes is appearing in the page as »

Also, when you click the 'Join Diaspora*' button, it jumps to the sign up section fine, but the title is obscured by the black bar. All the other intra-links seem fine.

And I wonder whether some different wording might be better rather than 'Join Diaspora*' for the sign-up button - simply because it's too close to joindiaspora.com, and one thing we need to do is move public perception of Diaspora, and joining Diaspora, away from thinking exclusively about joindiaspora.com towards awareness of decentralisation and the range of different pods.

@goob i'm working on the wiki right now, so I cannot work in the project site. the whole site is open sourced on github, so you can submit a pull request, if you want to: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora-project-site

if you don't want to fix it, please open an issue at github or nobody will remember your points tomorrow. :) thanks!

Ah, OK, I didn't realise it was on Github. I'll try to fix it myself. Thanks.

I did some small internal change: the html syntax was not valid.

Is this solved?

diasporaproject.org does forward to a revamped https://diasporafoundation.org/ even with SSL. What other actions are there to be taken and where can those action items be seen?

Yes, Wilhelm, it has been completed by Dennis.

So can this discussion be close?

You can't close a discussion on Loomio, as far as I'm aware - only proposals, and there is no open proposal.

If people don't bump the discussion, it will sink down the list (as it was doing until you bumped it).

Why are you so keen to close it?

Please don't close until we finished the blog and the planet. :)

Hm, blog.diasporafoundation.org now redirect to the main page, there is a lot of website outside which link to the blogposts, we should let it in place...

I agree, definitely something that needs to be fixed. I do believe we are in the process of getting the blog system put in place.

@dennisschubert, any word? :)

The old blogposts can be found on github, they have to be restored.

(and at the same url, if possible)

Those are ancient blog posts. There are many more recent ones, which seem to have disappeared now blog.diasporaproject.org has been taken down. Hopefully Sean or Dennis has kept copies.

Don't worry, we've got blog backups. Should be rolled into the project site's blog whenever the blog module is merged in.

That's what I thought. Good news.