Announcing evolt.org 2.0!

Posted on December 13, 2000

in News

by Daniel Cody (djc)

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Daniel Cody

Member info | Full bio

User since: December 13, 1998

Last login: September 17, 2007

Articles written: 146

Greetings and let me be the first to welcome you to evolt.org 2.0!

In conjunction with the second anniversary of evolt.org, we're proud to announce our completely redesigned website. Along with an updated look and feel, we've added - and are in the process of adding - a lot of new features for evolt.org visitors to improve accessibility, usability, HTML/CSS correctness, and overall sexiness.

We started out our website on the NT platform with Coldfusion 3.0 and MS Access as our database on a single T-1 line two years ago. As you see us today, we're running on a state of the art home grown content management system that runs on Linux, Apache, Coldfusion 4.5, and Oracle 8i to provide our ever increasing audience with the fastest, most reliable, accessible, and standards compliant website devoted to the Web Development industry you'll find anywhere on the Web!

We'll have some commentary during our birthday celebration from evolt.org members as they reflect and pontificate on the impact a group of Web Developers working for the common interest has had on their personal and professional lives. We'll also have tutorials and how-to's from the volunteers that built evolt.org 2.0. We'll share problems, techniques, and solutions that we encountered along the way to building evolt.org 2.0 with you, our fellow Web Developers... stay tuned!

There will be plenty more to come as our 2.0 celebration rolls on, but I'd like to take this initial opportunity to thank all the people that helped make it happen:

Rudy Limeback - Resident Database Expert, Massager of Data
Jeff Howden - Oregon's(and evolt's) #1 Cold Fusion Expert
Adrian Roselli - Keeper of HTML/CSS Compliance
Isaac Forman - Original Layout and Design
Seth Bienek - Master of New & Improved Features
David McCreath - We wouldn't have gone live for another month if it weren't for his hard work and dedication
Elfur Logadottir - Huge amounts of work on our HTML/CSS compliance
Marlene Bruce - General Managment and keeping us scatter-brained coders on-task :)
Walker Fenton - Laying the foundation with evolt 1.0
Dean Mah, Matt Warden, Joshua Olson, Scott Dexter, Matthew Haughey, Javier Velasco, and Martin Burns for all the testing, bug fixes, coding, and things we'll never fully realize or appreciate
Jennifer Miller - (awwww...) Not many girlfriends would put up with a person like myself who spends way to many hours doing projects like evolt for free. She not only puts up with my constant blabbering about evolt, but houses complete strangers when they come for a weekend to work with me on evolt 2.0 (codefest!). Thanks Jen :)

Again, welcome to evolt.org 2.0. We hope you like what you see now, and what you'll come to see in the weeks ahead! Thousands of hours of collective volunteer time has gone into making evolt.org a better experience for you the Web Developer... We hope you enjoy it!

.djc.

Dan lives a quiet life in the bustling city of Milwaukee, WI. Although he founded what would become evolt.org in 1998, he's since moved on to other projects and is now the owner of Progressive Networks, a Zimbra hosting company based in Milwaukee.

His personal site can be found at http://dancody.org/

9 comments on this article. Log in to add your comment | Rate this article:

Congratulations

Submitted by elfur on December 14, 2000 - 03:42.

I'm so proud of us all. Great work Guys.

no resizing of text?

Submitted by pedrito on December 14, 2000 - 06:47.

Great work, but why can't I resize text with my browser?

Hear, hear!

Submitted by marlene on December 14, 2000 - 09:59.

Dan, none of this would have happened without your vision and leadership. Thanks so much for bringing us all together. evolt.org is truly an accomplishment of which we all can be proud! Pedrito - Hmm...I seem to be able to resize in IE5 on my Mac. We hope to have personal customizable style sheet settings available in the future.

Scrollbar?

Submitted by Glyneth on December 14, 2000 - 10:32.

Love the new look! But I'm getting a scrollbar on the bottom of my screen, no matter what size I make it. Netscape Communicator 4.75, Mac.

style

Submitted by divinentd on December 14, 2000 - 10:53.

Love the '[Full article...]' link, much better than 'more...' (which was dangerously close to 'click here'). It's the details that make or break a site, you guys rock! Customizable stylesheets would be great! One thing that has always made Evolt stand out for me is that it's one of the few geeky sites not afraid to use larger text. Specifying the fonts in pixel sizes (11px?) is detrimental to your accessibility goal. (Mac IE5 overrules stylesheets and lets you resize) It would also be nice to have the ability to change the gray on gray text. Too low contrast. It's perfect if you're up all night, but if you surf during the day it would be better black on gray. The �Minimize Sidebar >>� feature is so slick! details details details, nyce!

Minimize Sidebar & Stylesheets

Submitted by Jeff Howden on December 14, 2000 - 12:14.

Thanks Nils. I was wondering how long it was going to take someone to notice that little goodie I packed in there tonight just before launch. To answer everyone's questions about the ability to change colors and font sizes - we already have this planned but have not had time to build the full set of tools necessary to implement it in the most usable fashion. The underlying architecture is in place and works. The biggest thing we're needing right now is a DHTML guru to step in and build a cross-browser interface for editing & reviewing all the possible style changes. I'd be more than happy to get someone started on this. If they will contact me directly I'll give them a run-down on all the particulars. Don't worry, to build the interface you'll only need to know or learn a very limited amount of cold fusion.

oops

Submitted by atdt1991 on December 14, 2000 - 14:09.

Apparently * Elfur Logadottir doesn't get his own bullet-point. *grin*

Congrats & Back Pats

Submitted by armccoy on December 19, 2000 - 11:44.

VERY slick, guys!! Love the new look!

meta vs meat

Submitted by ironclad on December 20, 2000 - 02:15.

love the new look. feedback (a usability comment) -- the "author: name" meta information is sandwiched between the meat of the article title and the article intro text, which just plain gets in the way of a quick read down the page. Perhaps it would be better to have it over on the left hand column along with the *other* meta-information (ie. date, category). There's room for it there. It's a small detail not a deal breaker, but also trivial to change (when you have time). another usability/readability comment ... put a *BR* tag in front of either the [Comments] or the [Full article...] links, rather than having it hang off the end of the paragraph of intro text as it is now. The problem is that the odds are that it just don't fit on the end of the last line of the intro text paragraph, and thus flows onto the next line. Not only ugly, but adds dozens of milliseconds to scan-reading the text, as well as target-aquisition for navigation ;-). Details details details.

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