wwp@yahoogroups.com:
The state of the WWP
Yahoo Account 2015-Jan-20 20:25:00
Hi all,
I've been pretty quiet most of the time. In fact, the whole list has gone pretty quiet, so after some email back and forth with Landis and Bostjan, today I felt inspired to sit down (well, "stand up", actually ? I use one of those high desks for my computer stuff ? but I digress...)
You may wonder what's going on at the WorldWidePanorama, and the honest answer is ? in recent months, not as much as we all would've liked. Bostjan is otherwise occupied, Don is making great panoramas, but sadly mostly away from digital civilization, and Landis is busy with approving and checking the panorama contributions if he's not flying jet airplanes for a living (man, some people have glorious lives ... ;-) .
It's time to make a push for improvement!So I decided to put the thing that I've been working on (and off and on and off again) since 2013 into higher gear, and that thing is: a new WWP website! A big nod to Keith Martin who was a huge inspiration, looking at the rough working draft I had and setting me on the right path with a finger-painted mockup layout. What's it going to be? Leaner, "modern", "smart" (as in: adjusts to from desktop to mobile, supports flash, HTML5 and QTVR, mouse and touch, and scales/molds itself to sizes ranging from big screen to touch display). Still without annoying advertising, and the display focused on the thing we all care about: great panoramas. And do we ever have them! Since I'm currently building better thumbnails, I couldn't help but notice how huge a variety of locations, scenes and ideas we have in the WWP. More than 8000 contributions! And not only have we been around for more than a decade, we are moving towards the 50th Event (in the 3rd quarter 2015). So I'm not ready yet to give up on the WWP. I want to see at least the 10,000 mark. Please help me out there :-)The first priority right now is getting the shiny and new front-end fully operational, so uploading/editing may still happen in our old dark-gray version.
Can you take a look at the new site yet? Not quite, but I have made a huge amount of progress over the last three weeks. Also, I'm going to finally put the Twitter thing to use, and will be tweeting (ugh, what a word) tiny newsbits as I progress in building the website. I guess it's less annoying than plastering this yahoo group with mail. :-)
https://twitter.com/worldwidepano
Then there is our Google+ group, which goes by the rather non-intuitive URL of:
https://plus.google.com/communities/117016369644820881943
(that kind of URL is a thing that should not exist in the year 2015, now that I think about it). Oh well, it's there, and Bostjan has promoted me to moderator, so I'll be sharing things there as well, hoping for some kind of viral thing or other (but preferably only after the New WWP has gone live). In other news, I'm still not on Facebook. We do have a facebook ... "thing?" though, which I guess could use a bit of love and care, too. Here's the gateway to Zuckerberg's data warehouse masquerading as social network ...https://www.facebook.com/TheWorldWidePanorama
That's it from me, for now! I'm going back to the coding pits because I want to see this thing fly before the summer (summer on the northern hemisphere, that is)
-Markus