EvoWiki/Discussions/Archive2004-01-28

EvoWiki/Discussions

Archive on January 28 2004

Style & Colour Scheme
What's your opinion?

1. The colour scheme should be:
 * Black text on white
 * Is it time consuming to change, Steinsky? If not, I wouldnt mind seeing black on white..at least provisionally. -- GFA 02:42, 31 Dec 2003 (GMT)
 * Not too time consuming, but I think it can have more than one stylesheet and users can specify their own, I'll take a look and see...
 * OK, those who want black text on white should try setting their preferences to one of the other styles in Special:Preferences . I'll make a black on white version of the default style as well... -- Steinsky 16:51, 4 Jan 2004 (GMT)


 * White text on black
 * Other
 * Don't care
 * Steinsky
 * IMO the current one is fine, so without a compelling improvement I support leaving it. Wikipedia and talkorigins.org look fine with black-on-white also, so whatever.  I'm not very good when it comes to colors. -- oplo 08:56, Dec 26, 2003 (GMT)
 * Actually, we could keep text white, but make the links yellow like http://www.talkorigins.org, if we were going for that look that is -- oplo
 * OK, how's this? -- Steinsky 16:37, 4 Jan 2004 (GMT)
 * Actually, we could keep text white, but make the links yellow like http://www.talkorigins.org, if we were going for that look that is -- oplo
 * OK, how's this? -- Steinsky 16:37, 4 Jan 2004 (GMT)


 * Egads, Steinsky, it burns us, it hurts us...gives us back the precious (JGK) 2:15pm EST Jan. 4, 2004


 * I think it looks sorta cool with the white, but terrible with the red, blue and green. -- GFA 19:47, 4 Jan 2004 (GMT)


 * hrm... ok then, any suggestions for different colours for the links? -- 81.101.71.52 21:45, 4 Jan 2004 (GMT)


 * Initially I had the "hurts us" reaction also, but after a few minutes I got used to the yellow links and now I kind of like them. It is very much like T.O.'s organizational pages, which is kind of neat (t.o.'s actual articles are the usual black-on-white, OTOH).  The green and red links seem pretty good, but the blue links do kind of clash with the yellow.  Maybe a kind of light blue-green? -- oplo


 * If after awhile we can't find something we like, we can always use the default Wikipedia look which is OK. One thing to consider sooner or later is a "look" which looks kind of "official" and helps readers take the material seriously. -- oplo


 * It's really the "Directory", "Useful Pages" and "Resources" colors that clash terribly with the yellow. If they were to be changed to a black on white, like the "About EvoWiki" thinger, the yellow would look really spiffy. I gotta agree with Nic about an "offical" look, and must say that the plethora of alternating, ridiculously bright primaries makes it look a little...shall we say..Fisher-Priceish? -- GFA 01:53, 5 Jan 2004 (GMT)


 * I'll give it a try, but it still feels like my eyes are being lasered out...(JGK) 9:42pm EST Jan. 4, 2004


 * Good God, who changed it from the yellow and black to this abomination!? For mercy's sake bring it back to how it was before, I beseech you! (JGK 9:59pm EST Jan. 17, 2004)


 * Silly syn, it looks nice. Very professional -- GFA 03:15, 18 Jan 2004 (GMT)


 * I've only just realised what you're talking about, because I had a cached version of the stylesheet (the software upgrade overwrote pretty much everything). I can upload the old one again if you want?  Or I could fiddle around and make it so that you can choose between this one or the old one... -- Steinsky 10:30, 20 Jan 2004 (GMT)


 * I've had to change a table I've created, my G1 creation-arrangement schematic table in Genesis . I tried searching for other instances of "table", but the search function is currently broken. So should I add font colors to fix them in case of future stylistic changes? -- LP

2. The font is:
 * Too small
 * Fine as it is
 * Steinsky
 * Just fine as is IMO. -- oplo 08:56, Dec 26, 2003 (GMT)
 * Fine with me also -- LP
 * Fine with me also -- LP

Ta. -- Steinsky 02:56, 26 Dec 2003 (GMT)

Nearly reached 1000 genuine articles
Yay. -- Steinsky 02:56, 26 Dec 2003 (GMT)

Promoting the site
Any ideas? I added it to Open Directory (google etc) the other day, and have been trying to get people to standardise links to use the evowiki.org domain so searches are higher up google... -- Steinsky 02:56, 26 Dec 2003 (GMT)
 * As much cross-linking as possible. It would be great to go around and ask pro-science sites. And maybe the folks over at talkorigins.org would move us to main links page if we asked nicely? -- GFA 04:42, 26 Dec 2003 (GMT)
 * Not sure what you mean by "main" links? Currently evowiki is listed here.  I agree that more tie-ins with t.o. etc. would be cool, although EvoWiki is still experimental.
 * Heh. Nevermind. If I remember correctly, it never used to be listed on that page, only under the "unabridged" one. Guess that takes care of that... -- GFA 19:35, 26 Dec 2003 (GMT)
 * It would be really cool if we got NCSE to link to us. Someone should consider sending off an email (not me, im too lazy ;) ) -- GFA 21:24, 9 Jan 2004 (GMT)

Front page organization
Our Front Page started out very nicely formatted but has gotten a bit messy as we add announcements, etc. to the top stuff. Perhaps we could emulate http://www.wikipedia.org/ with just a short and sweet introduction at the top of the front page, then the sectional links? Probably the very brief intro would need links to (1) a longer intro for newbies, including how-to-start-EvoWiki-ing, (2) A "what's new" page including both links to Special pages and links to articles we want to highlight, and (3) an EvoWikipedian news/discussion page which is the central place for us to bring up issues/announcements etc. IMO, other suggestions welcome... -- oplo
 * OK, I'm fine with this is you want to ahead and create maybee an News and How to start using EvoWiki page, and move things there (open to suggestions for better page titles etc...). I also think some of the more minor pages on the Main Page Directory could be removed and placed on pages like List of Evolution topics and List of controversies .. -- Steinsky 19:23, 26 Dec 2003 (GMT)

EvoWiki Logo
Our current pic of Charles is fine for the logo at the moment, but if someone thinks of a more exciting one they should post their idea.-- oplo

I like the current one also, but if I wanted an alternative logo, I'd want one that features the ultimate icon of evolution: the phylogeny or family tree. But I have trouble thinking of a suitable "archetypical" or "representative" one that does not look too graphically complicated. The problem is depicting the species at the tree's ends -- how to do that without consuming a lot of pixels. Imagine a tree with a beetle, a mushroom, a flower, an amoeba, and an Escherichia coli bacterium.

Or else we could honor one of our more prolific contributors and have a picture of an Archaeopteryx fossil. -- LP


 * I'd be honored, but I think for now the Darwin picture is all right. The main problem being I don't know what sort of Archaeopteryx picture to substitute.  (JGK 1:03pm EST, 1/19/04)


 * One of it perching, syn, just like a true bird ;) But seriously, I think Darwin is okay. It would be better though, if the colors were changed around a bit. Doesnt the big black box look sorta out of place? -- GFA


 * The Darwin picture is not out of place, def, what the hell...this is what comes of taking Greg Paul too seriously... (JGK 5:20pm EST, 1/20/04)

Good EvoWiki Pages
I was thinking maybee we could pick some of the best articles on EvoWiki so far and list them on the Goals page as the kind of articles we want? Like, a selection of the best Essay articles, the best textbook/encyclopedia type articles and the best FAQ/Response articles? Nominations, anyone? -- Steinsky 16:59, 27 Dec 2003 (GMT)
 * I am going to create a Best of EvoWiki page to try that out. -- oplo

Search
Couldnt find the bugs page. Steinsky, do you have any idea whats going on with the search function? Is it a problem everyone is having, or just we lucky few? -- GFA 05:51, 6 Jan 2004 (GMT)
 * I had this fixed the other day :/ I'll talk to jamie (acting server admin) and see if he knows what's doing it -- 81.98.87.238 18:57, 6 Jan 2004 (GMT)
 * OK, it's fixed again, but it's quite possible that it'll do it again. The version of mysqld we're using has a bug that keeps messing up the table headers, it will be fixed shortly when neil (server owner) gets back so we can upgrade to the latest version of mysql -- Steinsky 16:39, 9 Jan 2004 (GMT)

Backups
How are we on backups? The brief crash recently maketh me a bit nervous... -- oplo
 * Don't worry, the server's alright, but mysql does have a bug which is worrying me at the moment. Once again one of the table headers (recentchanges) is broken.  This won't effect what's already in the database, but it will stop this edit showing up in recent changes, it stops the recent changes page working and it stope me making a backup!  I'll have this fixed and then take a backup.  After that I give up, and stop fixing the tables until after mysql is upgraded - so the site may stop working altogether for a few days.  Anyway, basically, everything will be alright in the end ;) -- Steinsky 12:31, 13 Jan 2004 (GMT)

Image upload
Is fixed! -- Steinsky 10:53, 15 Jan 2004 (GMT)
 * [Special:Upload] seems to be down today, although I haven't used it in awhile -- oplo


 * It's been down for awhile. I've just been uploading things to my FTP, creating a page, and linking to the images. -- GFA 23:16, 27 Jan 2004 (GMT)

Traffic
Wow. Have you guys checked the number of page views recently? We're getting a couple thousand a day! Woohoo! -- GFA 22:24, 20 Jan 2004 (GMT)


 * Looking at Alexa traffic rankings, the old URL is ranked 1,092,338. TrueOrigins is ranked 960,272, and Mike Gene's idthink.net is ranked 1,364,698! Take that! -- GFA 08:16, 26 Jan 2004 (GMT)

Email
I finally bothered to add evowiki.org to qmail, and have set up the following aliases: So you can now have email sent to those accounts if you want. If you want any more, or the destination address changed just ask! -- Steinsky 14:30, 28 Jan 2004 (GMT)
 * jgk & vindexurvogel => your hotmail account
 * gfa => your aol account
 * lpetrich => to your panix.com account
 * oplopanax & nic => your yahoo account