New homepage

Originally, I intended to finish up the homepage, leaderboards, and to make changes to the view new posts page this weekend. Only the first partially happened.

If you check out the front page, it's supposed to function as sort of an activity feed for the entire site so that you can get a good feel for what's happening right now. It also condenses all the information that used to be spread out all over the homepage into one area, so it should be easier to browse.

The two main sections are 'Recent' and 'Popular.' Recent is self-explanatory, but popular may not be. Essentially, 'Popular' is kind of like the featured works list, but with two twists. The first twist is that it now covers the entire site (although it can be narrowed specifically to literary works still). The second twist is that it doesn't just count up likes over the past 7 days. Instead, it looks at the time those likes were given. So the newer the like, the more valuable it is.

There's also a third section with the tentative title of 'Not Ready.' That'll be where the Leaderboards go, and it'll be pretty much exactly the same from the old YWS, which in turn was pretty much exactly the same from the old old YWS.

Across the top of the home page, you'll have three blocks. The first block will be the announcement block. The second block, occupying prime position, will be the leaderboard summary block. The third block will be the featured member block.

So there you have it! The homepage will be finished really soon. It would've been already but the 'Popular' column was extraordinarily difficult to code correctly and took me an unholy amount of time to complete.

I dunno man, it's kinda unattractive. The old Apollo homepage worked perfectly fine (problems with the featured works list notwithstanding).

Am I the only one having troube with certain links now? T__T;

BenjaminMichael wrote:Am I the only one having troube with certain links now? T__T;

It doesn't help if you don't say what the trouble is

Nate wrote:

BenjaminMichael wrote:Am I the only one having troube with certain links now? T__T;

It doesn't help if you don't say what the trouble is ;)

The Log in tab, the view likes link, the tab on the far left that looks like a person... They're all not working for me. Probably some others, too. I'm using a totally diffrent browser now and they still won't work.

Benj, try checking your flash. Make sure it's updated. Last time that happened to me, my flash wasn't updated.

BenjaminMichael wrote:
The Log in tab, the view likes link, the tab on the far left that looks like a person... They're all not working for me. Probably some others, too. I'm using a totally diffrent browser now and they still won't work.

I'm not sure why any of that stuff wouldn't be working, but it sounds like it may be a browser cache issue.

Try refreshing the page by holding down ctrl + F5. This will force the browser to update the cache.

Thanks guys! :D

Loving the new homepage already. I have to admit, the previous one was making some of my design nerves twitch, but this one is pretty - and it's nice having the feed of the whole site.

Are you dreaming in code yet, Nate?

The new homepage is looking pretty good. I prefer the look of the old one but I've no real complaints about the new one except for the colours (mainly the black) on the leaderboards.

Loving it! Loving that I can see my Leaderboard position so clearly- will convince me to review more, and like that we can switch between forums and literary works (and that we can narrow down literary works, since novels are my haunt and I don't really stray elsewhere)!

Also the temporary messages in the boxes made my day

StellaThomas wrote:Also the temporary messages in the boxes made my day

I laughed way too much at those.

Heh, glad you liked the temporary messages Cadi and Stella!


Anyhow, the homepage is now pretty much done except for a Load More button at the bottom of the page and for some minor tweaks to the coding.

The Leaderboards are pretty much the same as before. All that's been changed is how it's organized. I've also added three blocks across the top for announcements, leaderboard summary, and featured member. I experimented with a few ways of displaying them, but ultimately decided that text only was the best way to go. Everything else either looked uneven or tacky.

I think the recent feed takes over a bit more of the page than is warranted when you initially load it up. Discussion threads in the forums are always going to be more active than the Literary section, especially in Randomosity and the Lounge, and if something's going to be taking up the whole page it should probably be more oriented towards the Literary section.

I did like the smaller Featured Works section on the side that briefly popped up in place of the chatroom link, if the chatroom link was under that and you implemented the time-sensitive likes algorithm then Featured Works would be a pretty cool thing, making it harder for particular works to dominate the top 5 for weeks at a time and making it a more unassuming part of the page, but keeping the list of particularly appreciated works, to give good writers some kind of recognition, and others something to work towards.

Randomosity isn't allowed on the front page. The Recent feed is designed to ensure that all areas of the site are adequately represented, and for the moment at least, that's pretty much true. The one area that is over-represented are Storybooks, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing as we've been trying to reboot that section for a long time.

In total, there are 16 rows in the recent feed. As of this typing, 8 are currently showing storybooks, 4 are showing reviews, and only 3 are showing forum topics. The reason only a few forum topics are shown despite that being where the bulk of activity is comes down to two precautions.

The first precaution is limiting the forums recent feed to only certain forums: Info Desk, Lounge, Serious Discussion, Writing Tips, Writer's Corner, and Writing Activities. If any one of these begins to dominate, they can easily be removed, but I rather not until that actually happens. The second precaution is that a topic can only show up once in the feed. So even if a topic is frequently updated, you'll only see it once. This second precaution is also true for Storybooks.

The Popular feed, on the other hand, is somewhat problematic and it's still being tweaked.

Regarding Featured Works, they're in the Literary Area, and some more changes will be coming to them in the upcoming weeks.