Create a more mobile-friendly website for CARTA on Github Pages

[jake-sl]

The CARTA website as it currently stands isn't mobile friendly in the slightest. It's unusable on a WAP phone, hard to use on an iPhone, and similarly counterintuitive on a desktop. The entire thing (minus the "mobile version") is based on flash. Without flash it's unusable.

http://www.carta-bus.org/

I feel like creating an open site on GitHub pages that anyone could contribute to would be beneficial to CARTA, the public, and work well within the scope of Open Chattanooga. Thoughts?

[seabre]

I think the biggest hurdles are:

• Are they open to the idea of this in general?
• If they are open to it, are they locked into some vendor specific contract?
• Are they open to learning markdown/github to edit their pages?
• Getting people to work on it (obvious, but still)

I think this a really cool idea 👍

[aplannersguide]

@jden Might have a better sense how they would react to something like this. My experience is that they consult out a lot of their technology projects and don't have a lot of internal capacity to support big tech projects. If the framework was setup and it was just them updating / editing markdown files that might work. Good documentation would be key here!

It might also be a good hacknight project to move everything over to a repo so that we have a rough "copy" of their website to demo and show them. I think they would me much more responsive to this than just us coming at them with the idea without being able to show what it looks like.

So rough estimate, how long would it take 4-5 people working together to move the current site over to github?

[junosuarez]

I know that @GiselleS was interested in something like this earlier in the year.

My initial sense is that it might be best to develop it independently for the time being, with a mind to keeping it easily editable, and then approach them and see if they'd be willing to take it on as their "official" mobile website. If you can demonstrate that it would be minimal overhead for them - and that there's sustainable help in the community for maintaining it - I think they'd be open to working with you.

[jake-sl]

@aplannersguide I don't think copying their current site to Gihub would help us. The entire thing is in flash. (I think that's what you were saying? Correct me if I'm wrong)

I agree with @jden in doing it independently so we have something to show them. I feel like they'd be open to it, but I'm biased. I have never interacted with them.

[aplannersguide]

I was talking about copying their content, not the whole site. About how long to move the content over to a github pages framework like Jekyll? Sorry about the confusion.

On Jul 21, 2014, at 4:34 PM, Jake Brown [email protected] wrote:

@aplannersguide I don't think copying their current site to Gihub would help us. The entire thing is in flash. (I think that's what you were saying? Correct me if I'm wrong)

I agree with @jden in doing it independently so we have something to show them. I feel like they'd be open to it, but I'm biased. I have never interacted with them.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[jake-sl]

I mean, there's no dynamic content on it right now. It could just be a static site without Jekyll? In which case we could put it together pretty quickly.

I don't have any personal experience with Jekyll. @kylegordy ? I know you had some thoughts on this too.

[aplannersguide]

Looks like with the non-flash version it should be easy enough to scrape content.

http://gocarta.org/alt-flash/index.php

On Jul 21, 2014, at 5:47 PM, Jake Brown [email protected] wrote:

I mean, there's no dynamic content on it right now. It could just be a static site without Jekyll? In which case we could put it together pretty quickly.

I don't have any personal experience with Jekyll. @kylegordy ? I know you had some thoughts on this too.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[junosuarez]

The flash version pulls in a lot of things via xml (?) - browse around on it with the network panel of your browser dev tools open.

[seabre]

@jden Yep, there is also a login for an employee portal. I wonder if that's where they edit content/settings?

[aplannersguide]

Taking @jden advice and started pulling content from the website into markdown files on my repo. Anyone is free to fork and update as needed (it is missing a lot of the links from the original content right now). @seabre @jake-sl What are the next steps once we have the markdown transfer completed to get to a minimal viable product?

[seabre]

@aplannersguide To move those markdown files into a minimal jekyll project to at least match what they have already closely on the "mobile" version of the site.

[aplannersguide]

That is what I thought it might be. @seabre here is what I have so far. https://github.com/aplannersguide/CARTA-Website

[seabre]

@aplannersguide Whoa awesome!

[jake-sl]

@aplannersguide http://www.myfacewhen.net/view/6393-vladimir-putin-clap

So great.

[aplannersguide]

@jake-sl @seabre All links have been updated in the markdown files. It is ready for some jekyll magic. I'll add you both to admins to the project so that you can move it to Open Chattanooga org account.

[junosuarez]

I still think this is a great project :+1;