Polishing the static website takes time

 I think the largest problems with building the new static website are solved and most of the structure is in place. I can render links, icons, text, lists and combinations thereof; I have a working template system and a split of the entries in games and frameworks/tools. Games can be filtered by letter, by genre, by programming language and by supported OS platform. Additionally there is a developer index and an inspirations (other games) index, all with backlinks. The layout is kind of looking well. I use icons in an icon-font to kind of improve the visualization. So far, so good.

Now the details are still to be filled in. Adding a bit more information here and there. Choosing more icons (for the genres), improving the layout (adjusting the size of the programming languages shown according to how many entries there are for each language), creating the statistics page, filling the contributions page with content, creating a cover picture as a collage from many pictures of OS games, ... and that will still take a couple of weeks.

My new dead line, beginning of November. On the plus side: I'm really proud of how nice it looks.

 

Icons and more

Everything always takes a bit longer than estimated before because there are always details that are missing in the beginning. One detail here for the new website for the OSGL was icon fonts. I started with bulma as CSS framework, then got to know fontawesome icons, then found many other sources like ionicons, material design icons, iconarchive.com or game-icons.net and finally came to "Optimize Font Awesome". From there I arrived at IcoMoon, a free service that allows you to create your own optimized webfonts by selecting only the needed icons from other fonts. I tried it and so far I'm very happy with it.

Now I use icons. The only problem is that I find the layout more confusing with icons. Will have to tinker more before it can be published.

Quite advanced in building a new website for the OSGL

 In the last days I got much more experience with the CSS framework Bulma and with the template engine Jinja. Bulma does the job quite nicely (some things of it I don't need) while other things like colors I need to add myself and sometimes I would wish for even smaller sizes (of tags for example). Jinja by itself has a certain way of doing things, but I think I figured it out by now and are capable of writing fairly efficient templates.

Now the big issue here is the wiring. There are games and there are frameworks/tools. Games are sorted by alphabet, genre, programming language and OS support, frameworks/tools are only sorted by alphabet. Both have developers and can be inspired by original software. That means there are additional developer and inspiration categories, which are also alphabetically sorted. The linking is also backwards, i.e. from a developer to the developed games or frameworks/tools and from the inspiration to the inspired games or frameworks/tools. The data itself is residing in the markdown files in the Github repository, but for the HTML output, I need to get this links right. While some of it already works, some more wiring still needs to be done.

And then I can start polishing the look and layout of the entries and the static pages. The internal data representation is dictionary / keywords based (in Python) and then Jinja templates and macros do the rendering as HTML with HTML tags and CSS classes.

Finally, I would like to get a few more images (using icon fonts for symbolizing the OS and other stuff, info graphics for the statistics page and maybe game images (but at least a collage of images for the main page). Then some additional text here and there and a dynamic JavaScript table (for searching). And then I'm done and it can go live and I can talk about it.

Two more weeks at the very least, unfortunately.