Website Feature Wish List

[kylegordy]

Hey everyone, we're working on throwing together a site for Chadev and would love some feedback and ideas on features for the site. What would you like chadev.com to look like?

Here's some features I would love to see included:

• List of local devs (not sure how best to go about this, any ideas?)
• List of local dev groups/meetings
• Link to/embed Chadev google calendar (Perhaps even have a short recap of the events taking place this week on the homepage. What do you all think?)
• Link to/embed IRC chat (We're currently linking to kiwirc on the subreddit. Any thoughts?)
• List of dev resources available around town. (I started a list of some in the sidebar of our subreddit earlier. I'm sure I'm missing stuff, if so please let me know 👍 )
• Mailing list signup? (Not sure if we would want to do a mailing list or not… I thought it might be cool to send out a weekly email listing all the meetups/events happening that week. Any thoughts?)
• Brief about Chadev on the homepage (Not sure we need a whole about page… Any thoughts?)

[vendion]

The list looks good to me! I know @spyc3r I talked about pull the list of
devs via JS/jQuery, assuming the list doesn't get out of hand then it
shouldn't be too bad performance wise. We maybe able to make use of some
kind of hosted redis service that periodically updates devs apart of the
Chadev org on Github, as well as a list of groups so it would be a matter
of pulling from there and parsing that data. We can work out such details
in another issue though.

By should recap I assume you mean displaying data like: event title, date &
time, and the description field? That would be interesting to see, I am
assuming we can scrap this data from the Ical file (I have never messed
with any ical stuff).

Kiwirc is fine for a web client, I have played with it in the past and
works fairly well. The only other one I know of is qwebirc which FreeNode
using on http://webchat.freenode.net/

+1 for list of dev resources

I wouldn't do it as a mailing list, the IRC and subreddit is already enough
ways to communicate at this point. As Chadev grows that may change, that
said I am for the idea of a newsletter. We could run it under a MailChimp
(free as long as you send less than 2,000 emails in a month or so), or a
read-orly Google Group. Would need to get a few people who are good at
coming up with copy (not me) to write the emails though.

I don't think we would want more than a brief on the homepage, we can
always add a page that has all the information that people would never read
anyways :P

That is just my $0.02

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Kyle Gordy [email protected]
wrote:

Hey everyone, we're working on throwing together a site for Chadev and
would love some feedback and ideas on features for the site. What would you
like chadev.com to look like?

Here's some features I would love to see included:

• List of local devs (not sure how best to go about this, any ideas?)
• List of local dev groups/meetings
• Link to/embed Chadev google calendar http://goo.gl/2pFn1p (Perhaps
  even have a short recap of the events taking place this week on the
  homepage. What do you all think?)
• Link to/embed IRC chat (We're currently linking to kiwirc
  https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/?nick=chadev-?#chadev on
  the subreddit. Any thoughts?)
• List of dev resources available around town. (I started a list of
  some in the sidebar of our subreddit http://www.reddit.com/r/chadev
  earlier. I'm sure I'm missing stuff, if so please let me know [image:
  👍] )
• Mailing list signup? (Not sure if we would want to do a mailing list
  or not… I thought it might be cool to send out a weekly email listing all
  the meetups/events happening that week. Any thoughts?)
• Brief about Chadev on the homepage (Not sure we need a whole about
  page… Any thoughts?)

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#3.

[acedrew]

I've got the calendar stuff figured out, I already refactored what @dryan wrote here: https://github.com/dryan/chadev-events once, and actually google's calendar api just hit v3, making it much easier to work with (json returned, vs gdata bs)

The trick will be figuring out where and how to store the list of devs that we want to use. I use google contacts for that stuff currently, where you would set a group with the contacts and whatever meta-data you wanted. It's essentially a little document database with a handy ui already written. I'm definitely not married to that, as I have to use third party tools to share management responsibility that way. I'm totally not opposed to just having a massive YAML file that either gets compiled into minified js in the build process of the site, or gets loaded using something like this:https://github.com/nodeca/js-yaml/blob/master/README.md
Either way, adding yourself would be as simple as a PR.

Thoughts?

[vendion]

That is good that the calendar stuff figured out, I just pushed a quick fix
to chadev.github.io site embedding the google calendar on the event page.
The sooner that can be replaced the better, but what is there now is
better than nothing.

As for the datastore I was thinking we could use something like Redis
Clould on Heroku, and have a script
that runs via a cron job somewhere that pulls a list of devs from here and
update the datastore, this method could also apply for dev groups if we
want to pull them dynamically. Google Contacts should work for just the
dev information as well.

Honestly didn't think of a static file to begin with, but if we go that
route YAML or Markdown (is there a good library for Markdown in JS?) would
be a preferred syntax, both are fairly small and should be common enough
that if you can't figure out how to add your name/group to the list you
probably shouldn't be on it to begin with.

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 11:11 PM, Andrew Rodgers [email protected]
wrote:

I've got the calendar stuff figured out, I already refactored what dryan
wrote here: https://github.com/dryan/chadev-events once, and actually
google's calendar api just hit v3, making it much easier to work with (json
returned, vs gdata bs)

The trick will be figuring out where and how to store the list of devs
that we want to use. I use google contacts for that stuff currently, where
you would set a group with the contacts and whatever meta-data you wanted.
It's essentially a little document database with a handy ui already
written. I'm definitely not married to that, as I have to use third party
tools to share management responsibility that way. I'm totally not opposed
to just having a massive file that either gets compiled into minified js in
the build process of the site, or gets loaded using something like this:
https://github.com/nodeca/js-yaml/blob/master/README.md
Either way, adding yourself would be as simple as a PR.

Thoughts?

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#3 (comment).

[kylegordy]

@vendion @acedrew Thanks guys for helping out on this project! I'm super excited to keep hacking away at this with you. I'll try to get some more work in tonight on the layout and such.

Also, for now could we just replicate the dev list layout from chattdevs.com with just pure markdown and css? At the very least this would allow me to start playing around with how we might mark all this up. Any thoughts?

[vendion]

@kylegordy No worries. Feel free to extend the default-slim layout I added last night, having the feature div on pages other than the home page just felt odd and took up a lot of space. Speaking of the dev list, do you have a favorite grid system that we could use for that?

[kylegordy]

@vendion Sounds good, will do. As for grids I'm using Bourbon Neat on the site right now. It keeps our markup super clean and is really flexible.

[dryan]

What's the use case for markdown in JavaScript?

Why not put the devs into a _data file and output from that?

On Wednesday, June 25, 2014, Kyle Gordy [email protected] wrote:

@vendion https://github.com/vendion Sounds good, will do. As for grids
I'm using Bourbon Neat http://neat.bourbon.io on the site right now. It
keeps our markup super clean and is really flexible.

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#3 (comment).

[acedrew]

ahhhhhhhh discussion on profiles is moved here: #5
Let's keep this for more general discussion of the rest of the items on the list.
@dryan see that thread for this exact conclusion :)

[vendion]

Speaking of, shouldn't these have been opened on the chadev.github.io repo instead of here?

[kylegordy]

@vendion I thought that listing all our issues here in the issues repo was the point of it 😉

[vendion]

Yeah maybe, and it is fine to have it here, I just figured issues and
discussions about the site would take place on that repo, and branding
related would be there, this would be a general or catch all issue tracker.
If I'm the minority then, forget I said anything :)

On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 5:36 PM, Kyle Gordy [email protected]
wrote:

@vendion https://github.com/vendion I thought that listing all our
issues here in the issues repo was the point of it [image: 😉]

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#3 (comment).

[kylegordy]

@vendion I'm just trolling at bit I guess 😉 We can continue these discussions on the site's repo. To help with confusion as to where to place issues should we delete this repo? Just brainstorming here.

[vendion]

I think this repo still has value though, like for community structure
planning, someone pointing out a developer group/event that we are unaware
of, etc. We should just update the README.md to make things clearer about
where things go.

On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 5:55 PM, Kyle Gordy [email protected]
wrote:

I'm just trolling at bit I guess [image: 😉] We can continue these
discussions on the site's repo. To help with confusion as to where to place
issues should we delete this repo? Just brainstorming here.

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#3 (comment).

[kylegordy]

@vendion That's a really good point, sounds good to me 👍

[vendion]

Are any of these still open, or is this issue good to close?