Introducing FontStruct Live
Every day, every hour, FontStructors all over the globe create and edit FontStructions and discuss their work with their peers. Every now and then, we – the FontStruct Staff – select Top Picks, tweet about updates and other topics or post content here on Brick-By-Brick.
As the size and productivity of our community increases, keeping track of all these different things was becoming increasingly difficult. We started to think about ways to improve the FontStruct experience and came up with FontStruct Live, a new website feature which we are proudly launching today.
FontStruct Live is a super-feed that shows all recent activity in the FontStruct community in one single place. New and updated FontStructions, comments on FontStructions and on the blog, updates on Twitter, Top Picks – everything is there. Users can individually select which types of activity they want to view, and can go multiple pages further back in time to see what happened since their last visit.
Another new feature on our homepage is the Tag Cloud, an alternate entry point to the available collection of FontStructions. Having trouble finding that cool FontStruction? Try searching with tags!
We are very excited about these two new features – everyone visiting our website can now have a taste of how it feels to be a FontStructor.
As always, we look forward to hear what you think.
By Gustavo Ferreira (gferreira) | link | 10 Comments
Wow… the live feed is a cool feature! Certainly great for people like me who tend to miss all the important discussions going on here and have some trouble remembering where they posted comments. It can get messy though if you edit comments… I had some trouble with one of my comments yesterday so I had to edit it several times, and that makes me pretty present in the live feed. hope this won’t encourage any spamming.
The tag cloud… fancy and cool too, but I doubt I’ll ever use it. I hardly ever search by tags (more by users), and in case I do, I know what specific tag I’m looking for and can type that in myself. But that might just be my way, and for people just browsing by the cloud can certainly be of some value.
And ok, I know it’s stupid to criticize good things just because you could have done better things, but in my opinion this doesn’t resolve the more urgent problems like the need for a forum for the more general discussions or a reorganisation of the top-pick/rating system…
But as I said, this attitude is stupid, so thanks for your work! I’m always very impressed by how much energy you people invest into this project, and the constant improvements you make to this already way-too-good-to-be-for-free application. Great work!
Comment by shasta — July 24, 2009 #
great work, guys!
sometimes it’s hard to remember where one comments, but this encourages more community action.
Comment by cayo — July 24, 2009 #
@shasta: the duplicate, edited comments shouldn’t appear. that’s a bug. we will also try to block spam.
i know everyone won’t use the tag cloud but some will – it’s just an alternative way to find designs, maybe in a more random “stumbleupon” way than a purposeful search.
Comment by Rob Meek (meek) — July 25, 2009 #
Sweet, Rob. With Fontstruct Live I can now follow the action on my iphone. This is dangerous.
Does it make any sense to include ‘tweets’ from others besides @fontstruct? Perhaps using #fontstructlive could send a tweet to the live feed from anybody? Would the spam be too unruly?
What’s the diff between FontStructing (selected) and FontStructing (all)
Also, looks like the Tag Cloud searches more then just “tags”. What else is included? Description? Name? Comments?
Comment by afrojet — July 25, 2009 #
@afrojet – ;-) We’re definitely thinking about other tweets. I can also imagine tuning “Live” and adding other info sources as time goes on – like the Flickr group for example.
The difference between “selected” and “all” is that only updates or releases from “top-picked” FontStructors are shown in the “selected” feed.
At the moment the tag cloud links are to standard gallery searches which search tags, FontStruction names, usernames and descriptions.
Comment by meek — July 27, 2009 #
Great work with the new features! Keep them coming!
Comment by Jen — July 27, 2009 #
Nice one :-)
Like Shasta I often forget where I have posted comments … so much to do and say: so little time! This will be really useful.
I also thought about the usefulness of an FS forum – it would be great for discussing specific problems, sharing ideas, getting feedback on aspects of a design etc. The only downside is that forums (forii?) can end up pretty time consuming … and that would take up time better spent in ‘Structing. Hmmmm, that reminds me, must stop sometime soon and say hello to my wife … now, where did I last see her?
Comment by p2pnut — July 31, 2009 #
Very nice! The feed is cool to stay up to date, and I like the tag cloud, too.
Comment by Magic Sam — July 31, 2009 #
Hi, Is the site undergoing maintenance? I can’t login … and withdrawl symptoms are setting in.
Comment by p2pnut — August 11, 2009 #
We’ve had some technical problems yesterday, but everything is working well again.
Comment by Gustavo Ferreira — August 12, 2009 #