Play@YSDC

I decided to make a thread about our new front door since...

...I like making new front doors?

Here's a link to our new portal.

No, I'm making this thread because as I'm buildng that portal for us, I'll occasionally ask you, my players, for suggestions in deciding what looks good and what features are helping vs. not. Actually, I'm always open to suggestions, whether it's about this site or the other, so don't hold back!

I just finished tweaking the front page of our portal. It looks GREAT! Our homepage is surrounded by "bleak and blackened summits"! I've added a quote from H.P. on the homepage! I added our Google map and one of our videos to the homepage where they're easy to find.

And I think that I broke it. The site is down. Ah well, it was a good idea...

Job.

Its up again

Hooray! I didn't break it!

OK, here's what I'm thinking of doing next with the portal: There is an "Adventure Log" area of the portal that I'm considering for use to summarize what happened in each of our prior chapters. Some of you have previously requested that I summarize the early chapters, especially those were written long ago on EnWorld, so the portal would seem to be a nice area that can serve this purpose. I'm considering adding approximately a one-paragraph description of each chapter on the main page that links to a longer, one-page summary. This would also provide any new visitors with a nice, concise summary of what has already taken place in our game.

So instead of adding lots of NPC's to the portal right away, or adding maps and wiki pages to the portal, I think that the chapter summaries would be a great thing to use it for. The NPC's and the maps and other details all exist already on this forum.

What do you folks think?

Job.

P.S. I recently saved copies of all of the EnWorld threads to my hard drive, just in case.

I do like the idea of posting the summaries first. Adding links to the previous chapters to go with them would be great too, for people who want to read the whole thing.

It's good that you backed it up. The first game I ran online would have been lost forever if I hadn't crossposted the story threads to a more stable site.

Mr. Handy wrote:I do like the idea of posting the summaries first. Adding links to the previous chapters to go with them would be great too, for people who want to read the whole thing.

Yep, we're on the same page, Mr. Handy. I'd provide a summary that is hyperlinked back to the actual story threads as much as makes sense, so that any readers--or even players--who might want to delve deeper can easily navigate their way to the interesting bits.

This would be a somewhat sizeable project for a game that's been running for over two-and-a-half years (with an additional hiatus of 2 years in the middle) so I don't expect that I'd pull all of that together very quickly, but over time I'd keep adding to the summaries to get them in shape to draw in new readers. And the authors have been known to occasionally visit the long-running BtMoM games.

Job.

Wow, logging the adventure is going to be a challenging project - good luck with that. Being your player from the time when the adventure was played on ENworld I will try to help as I can in my very little free time.

Job wrote: P.S. I recently saved copies of all of the EnWorld threads to my hard drive, just in case.

Would like a copy of those

Anatomist wrote:Would like a copy of those

39 text files X roughly 50kb per file = roughly 2000kb = 2mbytes. Not too much memory. These files are only text files, though, and do not include jpegs or hyperlink info. Just straight text. I might be able to post them here somewhere... I'll take a look later. If not, I can email them to ya, Anatomist.

Hey, I added a "parchment" layout to our portal home page here. Take a look at it and tell me what you think. I think that it's just a bit too dark, not bright enough. I like the parchment look though. It's one of the few standard templates, so if I want something brighter, I'd need to create or edit it using photoshop.

Thanks,
Job.

I like the look. It isn't too dark to read, except for the hyperlink. Changing the link's color should do the trick if you don't want to lighten the background.

This weekend, I lightened the parchment background on our home page. I like it now. I also cleaned up the text on the page so that it's neatly formatted now, and darkened the hyperlink text that you mentioned, Mr. Handy.

Next, I have to create a custom navigation menu (for a couple of technical reasons that a few other GM's on that site told be about) and then I'll be ready to begin adding our chapter summaries. Hopefully I can get the first one done in a week or so, then get on a roll.

Job.

I've been testing box styles and brightness on our BtMoM Obsidian Portal site (I'll be adding brief descriptive text to these boxes for our chapter headings) and need your opinions.

Take a look at the 5 boxes on this page and tell me which box you prefer in terms of style and/or brightness. I've added a thumbnail image to some of the boxes so that I could see what the box looks like if I put a small icon inside it.

I'm also open to other suggestions.

Thanks!
Job.

I like 3 and 4 the best, as they have the right level of brightness and the text is easy to read. I prefer 4 to 3, since I think it looks better without a border.

Job wrote:I've been testing box styles and brightness on our BtMoM Obsidian Portal site (I'll be adding brief descriptive text to these boxes for our chapter headings) and need your opinions.

Take a look at the 5 boxes on this page and tell me which box you prefer in terms of style and/or brightness. I've added a thumbnail image to some of the boxes so that I could see what the box looks like if I put a small icon inside it.

I'm also open to other suggestions.

Thanks!
Job.

Just to answer the question. I like 1.

Thanks for your responses, Mr. Handy and Anatomist!

I've been playing some more with those boxes, and started a summary of the "Chapter 5 At Sea > NYC to Panama" trying to gauge how easy or difficult it will be to put together our expedition logs. I suspect that it will take a fair amount of time to do a nice job with the layout, and with key text excerpts, and hyperlinks, and deciding on the best photos. I'll start with the NYC to Panama chapter and work my way backwards (or forwards, when we complete another chapter).

I don't feel that there's any hurry in putting these things together, though. I plan to only work on this when I've recently responded to most threads on our Play@YSDC main forums, so that our main game keeps its momentum. If you folks (and the rest of the crew) are rather prolific, then it'll take a little longer to put together the summaries since I'll be focusing on our game. But our game is more important! You can't die on the ice until we reach the ice!

Job.

Does the site has some tools to help you on the layouts? or are you coding this stuff yourself?

The site includes functions that provide only the most basic creation of pages and text and inclusion of photos. If I want anything with a unique layout or image or background, then the site requires me to program it. For most of this, I'm learning as I go.

However, the site provides me with a singular advantage: a large roleplaying audience!

Job.

Job wrote:The site includes functions that provide only the most basic creation of pages and text and inclusion of photos. If I want anything with a unique layout or image or background, then the site requires me to program it. For most of this, I'm learning as I go.

However, the site provides me with a singular advantage: a large roleplaying audience!

Job.

Well im a programming dude havent done much front end stuff (as HTMl layout and such) but im rather a fast learner of all thing code
If you need some help you ask.

You're welcome!

I'm a programmer too. I have done front ends for web applications, but those were made using Visual Studio's design tools. Still, I know HTML and might be able to help.

Thanks for being willing to help with our portal! You guys don't really need to spend a lot of time on it, but if you feel like "playing", then below is a bit of information.

One GM (Wolfhound) wrote a few very good tutorials that I've been referencing to build things. Here's a link; scroll down to the miscellaneous section to find them. Take a look at those tutorials to give you an idea of the type of coding needed; this programming may be familiar to you, but it's all new to me.

I'm still getting ideas as to what we'll need to present and in what form, so it's all still being borne in my mind. The expedition logs are a must. Summaries of our characters (PC's and NPC's) would be helpful, but I'm not sure how far to go with this since we already have a lot of that info in our Play@YSDC forum. A few of these gamemasters have made some cool icons that link to the logs and character pages and maps. I also would like to add maps that have sections that can be clicked to get more information. But all of these ideas are just that; ideas right now.

If you get a chance, take a look at the tutorials and let me know how easy it might be for you to build things. If you guys think that you can lend a hand with some custom menus and linking, then I'll spend some time developing a (very simple) design document that outlines what I have in mind. With a design document, and the free accounts that you can set up, I think that you'd be able to pick an area or two to build buttons, or images, or menus to test in your area and that I could later add to our portal. It might be possible for me to grant authority for you to directly customize the BtMoM portal, but I'm not sure that's possible. However, I think that a design document would also allow us to bounce ideas off each other too, so we'd be able to cooperatively build the site without stepping on each other's work, each of us taking pieces to work on as time permits. Remember, this is not an urgent matter. Our game will take many more months, so we have lots of time to build this thing.

Here are two examples of game portals that seem very well done to me. I like Wolfhound's icon system in his Dresden Files Dallas game, but I'm not crazy about the themes and colors of his site. I like our background and colors much better. I love the look of Dlaporte's Violent Skies game, but I still like our look better for our Cthulhu game.


Job.

Here is a link to a site called the Westerlands that has an elegant layout with minimalist buttons and imagery, but it is beautiful in my opinion. I may follow his lead when I add our expedition logs. Simple, well summarized, easy to comprehend.

Job.

I have dealt with CSS before. I'm not sure when I'd have time to work on it, as I don't have all that much free time, so it's good that there's no rush.

Yes, no rush. I like that as well.

I'm still pondering a few design elements, and will piece together an outline of how our portal will fit together, but right now I'm at the very early stages of conceptualizing things. If you get any interesting ideas that might be fun to put into our game portal, please don't hesitate to offer them up. The more ideas at this stage, the better. In the meantime, I'll continue testing and trying different things, occasionally providing a link to any new elements that I add.

Job.

Job, you do get access to a folder where you got all these pages and code, right?
We could set up a https://github.com/ project and push the code from there to the site. That would make it possible for me and Mr.Handy to work on this, do it the proper way, with a repository.
I would use VS2010 to the design and such and push it from my IDE to github and from there ftp it over to obsidian.

Hmm, well, I wouldn't really call it a folder (although they probably have a folder structure somewhere).

If you create an Obsidian Portal (OP) account, you work within their tool which appears to limit your access to view and work on a single page of code at a time. I think that their OP front-end tool enforces these limitations to provide a "friendlier" way for non-programmers to set up a game site/portal.

The answer, I think, to your question is yes, I can copy the code for our BtMoM portal, page-by-page, into a site like GitHub where we can manage the code. When we're happy with how the pages look and operate, I can copy the code, page-by-page, back into OP to our site. I've never used GitHub, but I'm willing to try it so that we can collaborate on BtMoM. And I'm a sucker for trying out new techno-tools.

Job.

P.S. The Obsidian Portal site has a severe limitation (in my view) in that if we decide to change some code that is common to a number of pages, for example a background image, then we have to manually make those changes page-by-page. The larger our portal grows, the more difficult the maintenance of all of our pages. Would GitHub help with maintaining the code, so that if we change code for one page, we could specify that same change for a number of other pages?

Job wrote: If you create an Obsidian Portal (OP) account, you work within their tool which appears to limit your access to view and work on a single page of code at a time. I think that their OP front-end tool enforces these limitations to provide a "friendlier" way for non-programmers to set up a game site/portal.

Can you write them and ask for more access? It might they have just limited access due making it easier for the not-techie user.

Job wrote: P.S. The Obsidian Portal site has a severe limitation (in my view) in that if we decide to change some code that is common to a number of pages, for example a background image, then we have to manually make those changes page-by-page. The larger our portal grows, the more difficult the maintenance of all of our pages. Would GitHub help with maintaining the code, so that if we change code for one page, we could specify that same change for a number of other pages?

Github is just the repository. (that manages version of code and give the tools to do some collaborative coding). With the right uses of classes, interfaces and such, would facilitate making changes over all pages. It is excaclty why people like myself and Mr.Handy has studied programming, we are lazy and dont want to hardcode much of the code, it is way easier to make some generic layout and use <div> to dispaly content. Dynamic HTML programming FTW.

OK Anatomist, I've fired off the questions to someone whom I think can help (or who will be able to point me in the right direction for an answer).

Job.

So, this weekend I played around with another design for text pages in our portal. It's a more elegant design than the "Ice Box" designs of last week. I call it, the "Ye Olde Compass Watermark" page. Here's a link to the new layout.

Let me know if you think that this design seems like a better layout for our expedition logs.

I'm considering lightening the compass image slightly. It seems just a bit too dark for a "watermark" on the page.

Job.

The second one was a bit dark, but the first one looks all right. I like the compass, but I don't know if I'd lose the ice entirely. Maybe you should use the compass for logs and other text-based things and the ice background for pictures.

Mr. Handy wrote:The second one was a bit dark, but the first one looks all right. I like the compass, but I don't know if I'd lose the ice entirely. Maybe you should use the compass for logs and other text-based things and the ice background for pictures.

As Handy. Like the first one for the same reasons.

Thank you for your feedback, guys. I agree that each of the two layouts seems to look better with certain content so, depending on what I/we want to display, I'd use one or the other. As you suggested, Mr. Handy, the compass background seems to look best with text while the iceboxes look better with photos.

I have one more layout in mind that I'll be creating with photoshop this week, then once I've finished it, I feel that I'll be ready to focus on building our content (with links to our actual game).

Job.

For our Obsidian Portal, I'd like to propose a set of contests that anyone can win, and each of these contests will be for selecting photos or writing summary text that best represents the story of one chapter of our game.

Here are the first two chapters (4 contests) open. You can apply to any one contest that interests you, or to all of them--or to none if you're pretty darned busy in RL. No pressure here. Once you submit an entry in this thread, I'll post a link to it under these headings for everyone's consideration.

OUR FIRST CONTEST: Chapter 5: IC - Traveling through Panama (from sailing into Panama's harbor at Colon, through the canal, and into Balboa Bay)

• Best Photo or Illustration
• Best Summary Text

OUR SECOND CONTEST: Chapter 5: IC - Panama through Austrailia. (this chapter is not quite finished, but is moving along nicely)

• Best Photo or Illustration
• Best Summary Text

The rules:

BEST CHAPTER PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION: I've decided that, for aesthetic purposes and to lure Obsidian Portal (i.e. OP) readers into our tale, we should select a unique photo or illustration to represent the action and/or environment or defining moment of each chapter of our story. This photo or illustration will be posted as the introduction to the text, or perhaps it will be used as the background wallpaper image for that chapter. You or a friend or family member are welcome to find a photo or draw or paint or photoshop something creative and representative of the action during a chapter. Existing photos or illustrations that have already been used in our story are valid for submitting as an entry, but we'll have to consider whether submitting these merits a prize (I haven't really given it that much thought).

BEST CHAPTER SUMMARY TEXT: We will need two text summaries for each chapter of our game. 1) A short summary that will appear on our main index page, and 2) the longer well-hyperlinked synopsis that describes the adventure in much greater detail (but not a simple cut-and-paste of all threads). Anyone is allowed to submit a summary for either the short or the long version because the winner for this "Best Summary Element" can be either the short summary or a longer synopsis. You may submit a summary written expressly with the idea to present all key elements of the chapter in a logical or emotional order, or it could be a fictionally-written account of a single event that was experienced by a PC or NPC within a long chapter that may or may not have described in our actual Play-by-post writings. Or you may nominate an excerpt directly from the story, preferably of 2 or 3 paragraphs at a minimum (perhaps with a little editing...), but as with the photos and illustrations, we'll have to decide whether these excerpts merits a prize (perhaps for the actual author of the excerpt?).

WHO CAN SUBMIT PHOTOS OR TEXT? Any member of the expedition, or any interested RL friend or family of an expedition member, or me or any friend or family member of mine, may do so. The more, the merrier. If you have a professional author or artist who is willing to help you put together the winning photo or text, so much the better! It may attract more attention. However any assistance that you may enlist will not gain you any increase in winnings; that is, you won't get two prizes if you and an artist collaborated on an illustration or summary text.

WHO CHOOSES THE WINNER? Only actual members of the expedition can vote (and offer bribes for votes). I may amend this rule to allow any readers of our story to vote, but we should discuss this. You may vote for your own submission. Each member only gets a single vote. The Keeper (i.e. me) votes count as a single vote, but may also cast an extra vote to break a tie.

WHAT DO WE WIN? First, you'll win bragging rights on the Obsidian Portal for one month. Your photo or text will be prominently displayed on our homepage for a time, and also in the Expedition Log area of the portal. Second, you will get to select one item of note from the expedition that you or your character would find memorable for the rest of your days (for example, A photo that I would enlarge and frame for you, a certificate printed on special paper and framed, a handprint of blood on a piece of wood, or 1930's memorabilia) and I'll do my best to find one to procure or make one for you. The less expensive the better of course, since there are limits as to how much money my wife will let me spend. Or, another option would be for a winner to select a publication that you always wanted, such as a CoC scenario or handbook (within reason, of course; and unfortunately no, I cannot afford to send copies of the BtMoM scenario book to the winners). Or you can leave the prize entirely up to me, and I'll pick out something related to our expedition to send to the winner.

Please note: I'm open to comments or suggestions for improving these contests. Feel free to either send me a PM or to post ideas in this thread.

Thanks, and best of luck,
Job.

Hey, here's a new page layout that I created with the Starkweather-Moore logo as a light watermark. It also includes a fun little Cthulhu logo that I like.

I'm working on one more layout design, then I'll be ready to kick into gear with the chapter summaries.

Comments are welcomed!

Job.

P.S. Our BtMoM portal already have 7 friends who favorited us to keep an eye on what we add!

OK, I think that I've finally completed my design & redesign & re-redesign of our Obsidian Portal home page.

I liked the parchment look of my previous design, but it was not bleak enough. Nor snowy and icy enough. So now our home page is very icy and snowy and white.

Here's a link. I am interested in hearing your comments. I will use the other designs, for example the "ye olde compass" layout, and the "SME Logo" layout, when I begin adding our chapter summary pages and photos.

I made one other improvement that, I think, makes a HUGE difference in the home page. It's subtle, but dramatic once it's been pointed out to you. I recently purchased an actual photo of the BtMoM painting (instead of a scan of the book cover) that incredibly increases the resolution and depth of color of our background wallpaper. Take a look:

• Here's a link to the previous low-resolution image on the Comments page which was scanned from the printed book cover
• Compare that previous image to our new photo image on our home page!

It's amazing, in my opinion.

Now tomorrow I'll get back to writing.

Job.

Have you been working on this site lately?

Not lately, unfortunately, due to travels and workload. My first priority is to keep the game going and, at some point, I hope to get back to updating this site.

Job

I went back to our Obsidian Portal site for a moment and, wow, I am reminded of how I really like how it looks!

I won't have a lot of time to do much considering that the holidays are upon us, but if I can steal a bit of time at some point to start adding content to it, what would be more interesting for you, as players, to see added first?

1. Player pictures and character sheets?
2. NPC pictures and summaries and links?
3. Adventure summaries and links?

J.

Hi Job!
Being interested in OP I´d like to read some logs.
That´s just me as a lurker, though.

Nice set up over there!
/Dave

Wow! I didn't know that I even HAD a lurker!

Thanks for following along, Syrinx. As an admitted lurker, maybe I should count your vote as two votes.

J.

I'd be all for adventure summaries as an easy way to get caught up.

Adventure summaries and links would be my preference too.

Darn it! I just visited our Obsidian Portal BtMoM site and saw that the Google Earth map has disappeared. Apparently Google Earth upgraded their software and database and my expedition map is no longer available. *sigh*

J.