Fall Cleaning: simpler navigation, new server coming

Login with email works.

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Oh, because github migration sends you back to the official site. I’d have to get a separate login flow running for staging and move your login over.

DM me if you want me to change your login auth temporarily on the staging site so you can poke around. (The next time I re-provision the site will of course blow that away…)

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We have three top-level categories that are light blue, and two adjacent categories are the same shade of light blue. I’ll want to tweak colors before we go live!

If anyone has strong opinions on colors, let me know, otherwise I’ll pick what looks good to me.

I updated the conflicting colors using colors that went away from collapsing categories. I have updated the live site, and also updated the script so that the colors will be right the next time I rebuild the staging site.

If anyone hates the colors, please complain soon. :relaxed:

It turns out that neither github nor google auth work for the staging site. I guess that’s fair.

If you log in here using github authentication or google authentication, just DM me and I’ll set a temporary randomly-generated password for you on the staging site. And I’ll set things up so that I will restore that password on the staging site each time I build it only until we move for real, at which point that password will go away.

There is another aspect of the move that I haven’t yet implemented.

There are posts that reference categories by hashtags. For example, Getting Started with CO2 Lasers for the current K40 Laser / Getting Started category. That will not only change name to Lasers / Getting Started with CO2 Lasers but also change its hashtag. I’ll want to rewrite #lasers:co2-intro to #lasers:co2-intro as part of the migration. (That migration will make this comment look silly because it will also rewrite the references to the old tag name to the new tag name!)

the menu on the left invites the use of monitoring activity in a category over everything so I took a look at the laser category and while I like there being pinned items, the 4 items and their descriptions take up the majority of the first page. So not something which can easily be scanned for interesting discussions. Could the pinned items NOT show the description since a mouse-over does that?

Good point: revisiting pinned posts, especially after consolidation will be important. We had pinned posts in different categories that will now be pinned posts in a single consolidated category.

Pinned pages can be dismissed, but I don’t think we have reviewed recently whether we even need all our pinned posts!

I don’t actually know whether it’s possible to un-pin the category topic! We really don’t use most of them as “please read this before posting in this category” like some Discourse sites do. I should look into that.

@NedMan any objections to moving this to the Getting Started category?

Similarly, we have two places with alignment help.

Could we make the Getting Started post canonical, and unpin the other?

I think that pointing to @donkjr’s stuff is great, and we should consider where in Getting Started a link to this stuff should go! Or is the better thing to scatter more specific links throughout annotated “for more information”?

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Yes, we can un-pin them and even un-list them if we want, so that’s definitely something to consider for site cleanup!

Thanks for bringing that up!

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I have implemented this handling, so when I rebuild the staging site, it will fix up the tags to follow the site rearrangement.

they are handy to have pinned but with the description and the title they take up the whole page and require scrolling to see the first of the “last” posts.

Separating this out:

Most of the category topics (“About the foo category”) are really used only for the description that is visible otherwise, and I’m hoping that reducing the number of active categories reduces the need to go read category topics to figure out where to post to zero. For these posts, if any particular post still needs to be pinned, I would ask why that particular one. The main reason I can think of is a few that actually point to a project home page.

Some of those pinned posts still say this:

image

Those definitely don’t need to be pinned; probably most of then will go away in the migration but we can check…

For the three pinned posts in the combined Laser area, I’d love to promote the Getting Started with CO2 Lasers category more as a one-stop shop for information about getting started, moving the best advice we have there.

I’m not against pinned posts, I’d just like to make sure that each pin is the best solution right now. If there are too many, eyes glaze over…

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I have now rebuilt the staging site from a recent backup. Please let me know about problems.

As promised, that text now looks silly on the staging site, due to the successful rewrite.

With the rebuild, you can now choose whether the sidebar categories take you to the default view that shows all activity, or the “New/Unread” view that shows you only what has changed.

Of course, that won’t be very useful on a read-only site, so I’d encourage you to visit meta.discourse.org to see it really working.

However, you can choose to change which categories and tags you have in your sidebar; I just set up the site default.

I would like to wait until the categories are sorted in site order instead of alphabetical order before turning the sidebar on here, but if y’all disagree with me, go ahead and let me know.

That’s fine

@donkjr I was looking at Don's Laser Things: Click Here for the Index To K40 Conversion and saw:

or G+ me at:

+Don Kleinschnitz

memories… :grin:

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What else do I need besides my K40? Requirements and Recommendations now links to Don’s blog and I started a thread in Don's Blog Spot - K40 Mods about integrating his blog posts more thoroughly to integrate that information and help make it accessible.

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In a few weeks (maybe over (American) Thanksgiving?) I do plan to move forward with this.

I’ve just updated https://staging.makerforums.info/ so that it has an updated version of the sidebar. Now the categories that you chose to put in your sidebar will be ordered the same as they are on the site. Not only that, but subcategories will be ordered with their parent rather than sprinkled around alphabetically.

The overloading between the “Community” tab and the “Community” parent category are the main fly in the ointment here. I suppose we could talk about other potential names for the category, but we’re already using it now.

Does anyone find it just too confusing the way it is?

Update

I did not do this update over Thanksgiving. I was waiting for updated storage, which we just got in place this week for both the current and new servers. I do plan to do it over the Christmas holidays at some point. Our new system has 4 vCPUs and 16GB of RAM, and should improve performance even more than we got this past week from the storage update. :tada:

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This migration is complete. Thanks for your patience for the not quite two hours that Maker Forums was read-only, or if you encountered strange errors for a few minutes during a minor site misconfiguration during the migration.

I guess completing what I advertised as “Fall cleaning” on the winter solstice was about as far as I could stretch it! :grin:

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