Leatherneck Nation

So, I've done a significant amount of work on the front page for the site (it's not linked to from anywhere yet, so don't go searching for it).

I'm curious what people would like to see on the front page of the site...kinda an "entry portal" to the forum...news...info...tweets...etc.?

Thoughts?

It all sounds good I can't wait to see since you have already done well on the forum part.

The App State Game Day Chat sounds like an interesting feature to copy. I did not sign up for their board to see what it is though. Front page could have events schedules for upcoming games. Tweets about games in progress would also be rather nice. Maybe a piece of the front page could be a "Coach's Corner" where we put their tweets. BTW, someone needs to get Coach Nielson a twitter account. LOL

sealhall74 wrote:The App State Game Day Chat sounds like an interesting feature to copy.

I remember the Appalachian State Game Day Chat that they have at their Message Board. It's a very nice feature to do a running commentary of the game. More practical than having to make separate entries onto the main message board.

I will see about getting some type of live chat going for games and stuff.

Also, I've been working on a "Social Media" page, but I need your help. I've got a bunch of twitter accounts linked and the twitter code loads "Follow" buttons for each one. Problem is, there's a lot of accounts and it actually take a bit for them all to load on the screen. It's not too bad for me, but I have a fairly fast computer. I'd appreciate it if you guys could test it out and let me know if it's too slow. I have options for speeding things up if it does end up being too slow (like just making them all links to the user's twitter page instead of having the follow button right there).

Anyway, take a look and let me know how it loads/runs (but remember, it's not at all close to what I'd consider "done" yet...just fyi).
http://www.leathernecknation.net/social.php

Thanks.

It was slowest on my phone but still only took like 10 to 15 seconds max to completely load

WIU0812 wrote:It was slowest on my phone but still only took like 10 to 15 seconds max to completely load

Hmmm...ok. I still may change it to speed things up. I was planning on adding facebook pages for athletics and for the teams on there as well, and that may be a bit much for some people's computers.

Ya you almost just need the little F and T icon that symbolizes both sites and have them direct you to the facebook and twitters

Sooner or later you run out of space for things and have to resort to links. It might help if we have some smarts programmed into the page which only display stuff appropriate for the season or even that day (e.g. JD's live twitter feed might only be fully visible on WBB game days, etc.). Hopefully the AD and coaches will comply and enter some pep rally type content to encourage people to show up to game or tune in to Rocky Vision. I would love to see this site become the main focal point for everyone to start from and then branch off to the official athletic site, or facebook, or wherever they want to go.

WIU0812 wrote:Ya you almost just need the little F and T icon that symbolizes both sites and have them direct you to the facebook and twitters

That's actually probably the better option. Is it important to people that we have twitter links for all the coaches? Or just the team itself and maybe the head coach if they have one?

Seal, if I can figure out a way to get tweets out of the Twitter API (as in, outside of their "user-friendly" widget interface), then I can program it to display certain team stuff at certain times of the year...football team during football season, men's and women's bball during bball season, etc. I know how to do the date-based programming aspect. Just gotta figure out how to make it work with twitter. I do also have the main athletics twitter account embedded on the new front page that I'm working on, and they quite often retweet stuff going on with the various teams and stuff anyway, so that's something that I have running already.