Hey everyone. We’ve got several new features launching this week, just in time for the traffic from the Wired Magazine article – Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap. (The article was Dugg, boost it here).
The following are live:
- A prettier, simpler front page, implemented by volunteer Michael Dent, with support from Roman Hardgrave. Thanks Michael & Roman! It includes:
- (UL) Inspirational pic + quote from set, random each time and rotates slowly if page is left up (more to come!)
- (LL) A rotating module featuring text sections of the site, currently Blog Posts, Forum Posts, and Press Releases. We plan to add more modules, such as calendars (worldwide talks, Bay Area meetups), popular wiki pages, etc. This will allow the front page to serve as a tour of the whole site.
- (LR) A Flickr slideshow featuring seastead renderings (mainly by volunteers). We will continue to add selected images from the community Flickr group (to which anyone may post).
- A simplified and streamlined FAQ.
- Better usability for the media, including:
- An improved Press Page
- A downloadable Press Kit (37MB)
- Press Mailing List
- A separate Seasteading In The News page
- More detailed Staff Bio and History pages
- We patented a 4-spar suspension platform design last week, which was featured in the Wired article. It will take some time to get all the technical data online, but to start, we have:
- A 50-page Executive Summary of the engineering design
- And some images on the Seasteading Pictures Flickr Group. The ClubStead.2009.Jan photoset contains two groups of images: architectural drawings of the layout, and renderings of the 3d model. Here’s a slideshow of the whole set:
There are also some items that didn’t quite make it, but will come out in the next few days:
- More details on the platform and hotel design:
- An engineering report summarizing the design, structure, deployment, etc of the base platform.
- SketchUp models of the architecture for the hotel/resort built on top of the platform
- Flyby movie tour of the 3d model
- The full patent (text and diagrams)
- Substantial improvements to the forums:
- New “view unread posts” functionality
- Various bugfixes related to message formatting and other things
- Quoting functionality added
- Ability to embed images in posts added
- Breadcrumbs added to the UI (e.g. “You are here: Forum -> Community -> Feedback for TSI -> ThreadName”)
- Search functionality now available on all pages
- Improved RSS subscription UI. Unfortunately, it still requires two RSS feeds to subscribe to all of our forum posts; limitations in Drupal 5 make it hard to change this. However, subscription links for both feeds are now placed right next to each other.
- Link to subscribe to a particular thread via e-mail available on each thread’s page
- Other miscellaneous UI improvements
And we’ve got some other great stuff planned for the next month, so stay tuned!
Hi Patri, the webpage as I’m seeing it does not look like the screenshot above. The main picture is missing and different elements overlap.
If you’re still seeing problems, please send them to . I haven’t been able to duplicate them on IE, Firefox, or Safari. Thanks!
I can see the whole website from home..the earlier problem was probably specific to the system in the office. btw, at the “key areas” at top right of the screen, subtopics cannot be seen. You need to “select all” to turn the text blue to see them.
Perhaps the Wiki would get more action if it was listed under “Key Areas” in the home page. Could we do that?
Good idea, we’ll consider it. I also would like to add a module for the dynamic text boxes which pulls a semi-random wiki page (weighted by popularity, recentness, something like that) and shows a preview.