Proposed Website Reorganization

Developers
1

After some internal discussions I went ahead and reorganized the website to make each page shorter (so everything can be seen either immediately or after a quick swipe) and make the expected navigation of the pages more clear.

The reorganized site is on a branch, https://github.com/stan-dev/stan-dev.github.io/tree/reorg. Recall that details of how to render the website locally are at https://github.com/stan-dev/stan-dev.github.io/wiki/Using-the-Jeykll-Based-Website.

Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks.

1 Like
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Overall, I think this is a step in the right direction. I think you should get Andrew’s feedback and he’s not reading Discourse as far as I know (@andrewgelman — let us know if you see this!)

  • I would drop the first sentence on the web page, but even if you keep it, I hope you get rid of “sophisticated”. I never like people telling me how fast and sophisticated their program is.

  • I like the About page. I don’t think Rayleigh should be moved to the alumni list—he’s busy with his first year of grad school. I think Alp, Dustin, and Thel are all out for good, though. The ordering thing is messy in two columns; I’d actually have done them row major at that point. No big deal either way for me. You can put them in alphabetical order if you think it makes more sense.

  • I’d like to see the link to interfaces on the users page stand out more in that big block of text; I tend to pull out links like that into bulleted items just so they’re easy to see even if there’s only one item (but then the markdown’s broken and needs to be fudged a bit to have it not reduce the font if there’s just one item)

  • I’d pull the bug reporting into a separate header on the users page (I don’t know that we need those subtitles, either—they’re getting a bit stretched on the users page)

  • Developers page looks great as is

1 Like
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I agree that column major isn’t great, but it’s the easy thing to do with lists in HTML. I have no idea how to automate row major.

4

After incorporating comments from @Bob_Carpenter and @andrewgelman I pushed the organization to the main website. Note that due to files moving around some of the links are now broken, in particular the links to the case studies. Keep that in mind in the next few days.

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You mean the page of studies or the case studies themselves? Is there a placeholder in the old location to redirect people?

I also can’t find the BayesPlot doc any more. Google’s pointing into the wrong pages on our site. Hopefully that’ll die down in a couple weeks when they realize all those pages are gone.

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Just the pages. The content is all still there.

When it doubt, try to find a page from the new mc-stan.org. For example,
http://mc-stan.org/users/interfaces/bayesplot.html.

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I’m unable to open the page mc-stan.org/about/team/index.html. I doesn’t load and keeps eating the CPU forever (until Chromium automatically proposes to kill the page). I traced down the problem to a main.css property:

@media screen and (min-width: 62.5em){.dev-bio-photo{display:block;width:75px;height:75px;margin-right:25px;margin-bottom:10px;border-radius:150px;float:left}.dev-bio-photo:after{content:"";display:table;clear:both}}

I works fine if I remove float:left from the code above. I’ll try to reproduce on docker to check if it’s on my computer only.

Also, wouldn’t to be good to redirect the old pages to preserve Google rank and links people might have placed on other website (specially old the mailing list threads).

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+1 redirect old links; already had some people mail me personally about their broken bookmarks for e.g. the documentation.

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Hi, I agree with Bob’s suggestions. And, as I told Michael, I like the new structure.
Andrew

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@betanalpha: In the case studies, I’m seeing some that are at their old location:

./documentation/case-studies
./documentation/case-studies/dina_independent.html
./documentation/case-studies/IAR_Stan.html

Whereas most are at the new location:

./users/documentation/case-studies/curse-dims.html

Is this intentional?

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I think those are incidental from merging develop into the new branch. They should all be in users/documentation/case-studies and there shouldn’t be a documentation folder.