Bitcoin Unlimited - Visual Identity

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

I'm fine with mine for now, though I might ask to change it at some point if it's no trouble. I was thinking more of others who, for example, just referred their other statements elsewhere, etc.

All this may be moot, as I do agree with Peter that maybe not naming people is better. I just think it looks a little odd as it is, with a collection of many incomplete statements.

 

[Aquent]

Thanks for your comments guys.

I've updated the site taking into account the suggestions. And now we have three slides as requested by @Peter R thanks to @Graphics great work.

As always let me know your feedback comments

http://aquentus.github.io/BitcoinUnlimitedWeb/bitcoinUnlimited/index.html
[doublepost=1451316437,1451315666][/doublepost]Oh I've also added two/three paragraphs on the home page to explain what bitcoin unlimited is in a high level summary and clear way. Do let me know what you think, if I have generally explained it right and if there are any typos grama mistakes etc.

 

[rezzme]

@Zangelbert Bingledack as a mod of /r/bitcoin_unlimited, I think linking /r/btc right now is the way to go, and perhaps link both /r/bitcoin_unlimited and /r/bitcoinxt for purposes of highlighting implementation-specific forums. /r/btc is where the traffic and discussion is at.

EDIT: But the implementation-specific forums should have lower linking priority in general.

 

[Peter R]

Thanks for your comments guys.

I've updated the site taking into account the suggestions. And now we have three slides as requested by @Peter R thanks to @Graphics great work.

As always let me know your feedback comments

http://aquentus.github.io/BitcoinUnlimitedWeb/bitcoinUnlimited/index.html
[doublepost=1451316437,1451315666][/doublepost]Oh I've also added two/three paragraphs on the home page to explain what bitcoin unlimited is in a high level summary and clear way. Do let me know what you think, if I have generally explained it right and if there are any typos grama mistakes etc.

Love it! It is really starting to look awesome now!

The slide show with @Graphics pictures are super cool, and I just realized that you can actually click on the Satoshi quotes and be linked to their source. The headers/nav bars on all the pages look great too.

I'm pretty happy already, but here are my notes:

1. I'm not sure I like the green titles used in FAQs, Members, etc. I personally would have stuck with the orange/gray/black/white theme. (If I were to introduce a fourth color it would probably have been a shade of purple to tie in with the color scheme at this forum.)

2. I don't know if we want that much text on the homepage, although I sincerely appreciate your efforts. @Zangelbert Bingledack is probably the best guy to decide on this point...

3. Instead of calling the section in the bottom right corner "Articles," what about something like "News" instead. Something that makes it seem like the top link is also the most current. Something we could use to make "Announcements" and "Press Releases" too.

3.a. For example, perhaps when we launch the site, we should have a "Call for Contributors" to invite other developers to join our efforts. This way, other media outlets like CoinDesk could run with the story easier.

4. What about including an excerpt from this post by Gavin:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140233.msg1503099#msg1503099

@Gavin Andresen : does this post from 2013 still reflect your opinion?

That's it

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Yeah I think it's best to move heavy text off the main page.

 

[solex]

@Aquent The website is indeed looking superb. Great work all!
About the slideshow. Fantastic first off, but, personally speaking, large moving graphics quickly makes me want to close a web-page. Suggest that after one slideshow that it locks onto a random slide, even for subsequent visits (via cookie), but leave the 3 manual buttons to kick it into life.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@Aquent Looks great!

Note that the slideshow happens a little too fast to read the text, and it is not as high-contrast against the background as it could be. Also, some of the colors seem a little washed out - is that intentional?

 

[rezzme]

@Peter R @theZerg I like the idea of quoting Satoshi. However, all three of these quotes do not feel critical to me or necessarily representative of BU. Even that last quote is more attributable to XT scaling style. They seem like counterpoints to Core from the Great Blocksize War rather than charting/realigning bitcoin to its roots in the context of BU.

Perhaps a quote like this at the end of the whitepaper?

They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.

-Satoshi Nakamoto
​

Or from here:

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.

-Satoshi Nakamoto​

--------

@Aquent, I'm pretty turned off by slideshows on web pages these days. It screams dated fad design to me. I think it would be to our benefit to pick the most representative image that combines Bitcoin Unlimited's motivations for existing, how we see bitcoin, and how that was always communicated by Satoshi originally (given that we follow with quotes), wrapped into a single background image that is static.

On that note, I really like the background for In Crypto We Trust, slide two.

Vires in Numeris is still a good touch (not a fan of the font, though).

For the subtitle, I suggest get rid of the BU brand capture of the "p2p cash" bit and return it to simply: "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-peer Electronic Cash System" (the site is already branded up top, and Unlimited lest we forget is not Bitcoin itself, only an implementation/team).

 

[Aquent]

Guess we have some disagreement in regards to the slideshow? Some seem to like it... some don't... I guess perhaps a nice compromise would be to set the timing to be very slow, maybe 1 minute or something

 

[rezzme]

Motivationally, I don't see what the additional slides are selling me. This isn't a site for newcomers to Bitcoin. But it feels like a sales pitch for bitcoin in general when it starts sliding.

Edit: I do like the text from the last slide on Emerging Consensus. I think this is our big hook if we can frame it correctly.

 

[Peter R]

@Aquent:

I very much like having the option to display different pictures. I think this will be useful in the future to showcase cool images for our new work.

I am fine with making the timing slower, or even just having a "default image" and allowing people to click to see the others. We could switch up the default image once and a while to keep things visually interesting.

@rezzme:

Yes, let's explore adding some quotes that are less "pro big blocks" and more "pro original vision of bitcoin in general" (of course the two are complementary).

 

[theZerg]

Ok new site merged, pulled onto www.bitcoinunlimited.info, and working! Let me give a big thank you to Aquent for his efforts with this!

I had to make a few changes to get it to be served in a way that preserved the links we've been plastering all over the web. And I found a few issues and fixed them. You can take a look at my checkin if you want.

I also checked in the web server's config file "nginx-site.conf". Before making changes, please install nginx and use this config file to see your changes "live" on your local computer. This will save me from having to do any fixups.

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

@theZerg Looks great! A few things I noticed:

These two papers are not working in HTML as the formatting is messed up:

http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/feemarket.html
http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/bitcoin-whitepaper.html

Maybe just offer them in PDF for now?

Also, I noticed a missing space before "Therefore" near the end of your abstract.

Oh and some of the small pics load slow (on my 100Mbps connection...), like the one on the Proposals page. Probably the image is uncompressed.

 

[Aquent]

Wooohoo, we're live. Thanks for merging @theZerg. I'll try with the help of @TrevinHofmann to fix out all the stuff and add things, starting with changing the png filename of blockchain in the img forlder to a lower b from capital b. Can we have commit btw so that we can bring small changes to live much quicker rather than being a burden on what we can imagine must be an extremely busy time for yourself rite now?

Thank's for all your help guys and please do continue to provide feedback and @Graphics please keep bringing up supper cool images

 

[TrevinHofmann]

Yes, the site is looking much better already.

I agree that shared commit access would be helpful. Is there any change we will be getting the BitcoinUnlimited namespace anytime soon on GitHub?

Also, @theZerg what are you using to deploy the website?

 

[theZerg]

To be completely fair to any other people who want to run for secretary, I do not think I should give anyone commit or website access yet.

However, the hard part here was installing and configuring the web server, reviewing your site, and giving up on the idea of separating content from display (an issue that I think will plague us until we fix it -- but more important to "get it done" right now).

At this point it takes me literally 30 seconds to update the site. I just log in and run "git pull". So you'll get web updates a lot sooner.

AFAIK, as soon as we elect officers we can give BitcoinUnlimited to the President (its currently held by @seweso). And I have bitcoin_unlimited just in case...

 

[TrevinHofmann]

>To be completely fair to any other people who want to run for secretary, I do not think I should give anyone commit or website access yet.

That's definitely fair. I might choose to run for a position.

>However, the hard part here was installing and configuring the web server, reviewing your site, and giving up on the idea of separating content from display (an issue that I think will plague us until we fix it -- but more important to "get it done" right now).

Are you open to using Node.js / Express.js to serve the site content? If so, I could refactor the project a bit to use a simpler template language such as Jade. Then, I can also start to separate the content out from the display. I could put the data into separate JSON files for very easy modification, and the server would pull data from these JSON files to populate the templates.

Using Node.js has some other benefits, too. Tests for a website are probably low priority right now, but it would be very easy to add functional and unit tests to a Node.js project. We could also use Bower to manage front end dependencies such as Bootstrap. Right now, Bootstrap is actually committed into the project. With Bower, we could add it as a dependency in a bower.json file and install/update it locally without needing to commit dependencies to the project on GitHub.

>At this point it takes me literally 30 seconds to update the site. I just log in and run "git pull". So you'll get web updates a lot sooner.

Once again, a Node.js project would make this even simpler yet - I could put together a script with a webhook from GitHub to automatically pull merged changes to the project, reinstall dependencies, and restart the server.

Another side note, have you considered adding SSL to the site? It's really easy and fairly cheap to do. We could set the Node.js server to serve on a port such as 8080, and have nginx serve redirects on port 80 and proxy/encrypt from port 8080 on port 443.

 

[theZerg]

WRT node.js. Absolutely! The one I was using "Meteor" is a framework on top of node.js. But I don't really care what framework is used. I would love to have a more interactive site; at one point I was thinking of allowing people to dynamically annotate the white papers for example.

WRT easier script, I was thinking "cron job". I'm going to have to learn what "webhook from GitHub" is .

WRT SSL: How cheap is "fairly cheap"?


WRT secretary, your candidacy would be appreciated! You clearly have the technical know-how to manage the site. But before you decide to run, read the Secretary section (at a minimum) of http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/articlesOfFederation. There are additional requirements such as administering the voting process... regardless of who wins or whether you run I hope you (both) continue to contribute to the web site. Obviously it is a very important way to communicate the vision of this project.

And BTW, the new Secretary can give other people commit or server access... its up to him/her.

 

[TrevinHofmann]

> WRT node.js. Absolutely!

Great! I think I'll get started on this right now.

> WRT easier script, I was thinking "cron job". I'm going to have to learn what "webhook from GitHub" is .

A cron job could work, but the hook might be a bit more elegant and easier to maintain (keep everything in the project rather than having a cron job outside of it). It's basically a callback. Whenever the master branch changes, GitHub would call the server to notify it of the change. At that point, the server could react by pulling, installing, and restarting.

> WRT SSL: How cheap is "fairly cheap"?

I use Namecheap to get domains and SSL certificates. Certificates are $9/year for a single domain.

https://www.namecheap.com/security/ssl-certificates/domain-validation.aspx

 

[theZerg]

I'll do it... this domain is namecheap registered.