New website

[bkeepers]

This is a work in progress to build a new website for Signal K. Below are some screenshots, but check out the live demo for the full effect.

Why a new website?

A new user to Signal K–which I was just a couple months ago–gets the impression from the website that there is not much happening in the community. The last blog post was 3 years ago. The existing website is nice, but it's starting to show its age. Web trends and browser technology have evolved a lot over the past 7+ years.

There is also a lot happening in the community on Discord, GitHub, and even OpenCollective with sponsorships. I think it would be cool to highlight some of that. For example, this new site pulls in the top/latest sponsors from OpenCollective's API (no manual updating necessary). Eventually I think it would be nice to pull in release notes and change logs to the blog too (which can also be automated).

Notes

This new site is bootstrapped using AstroWind, a theme for the Astro content framework. Astro is really cool. Pages can be simple markdown, like this KIP 3.0 blog post placeholder, or they can be JavaScript-powered web components, like this component that shows the top/latest sponsors. By default, everything is rendered at build time into static HTML/CSS. You can tell it to render certain components on the client, or even back it by a real server/database if you want.

Overall, I think it strikes a pretty good balance between flexibility and simplicity (I have some gripes about the components that AstroWind generates, but that's not Astro's fault and I plan to fix those before I'm done with this PR).

To Do

• Finish porting over the old website content
  • Homepage
  • Info
  • About
• Redirect all old links
• Splash graphic
• Cleanup unused components/remove astrowind crud

[bkeepers]

I'm feeling pretty good about where this is currently at and would love feedback before I spend too much more time on it.

@tkurki @sbender9 @panaaj I would love your thoughts/feedback. Screenshot below or you can browse the preview.

[panaaj]

I certainly like the new look, and the focus of the content.

It appears (at least) that the content can be more dynamic which would be a good thing.
If it could be linked to a Discord channel that is specifically for display on the web site that would allow curation via a regularly used platform rather than extra effort.

[bkeepers]

Thanks @panaaj.

Here are the only pages I haven't ported over yet. I would love thoughts/opinions about what to do with them:

• Overview - there is some good content here, but maybe a little more dense than it needs to be for an "Overview". I'm considering either pulling a few bits of this into the new About page.
• Gallery - There is some cool things here, but it's a little out of date and since none of them link to information about what they are or how to use them, I'm not sure how helpful it is for showing people how to use Signal K . Going forward I would imagine the Blog being the better place for content like this. I also may look at automatically pulling content form the Showcase in Discord as a way to feature dynamic content.
• Solutions - These seems a little out of date and incomplete. I like the idea of having a "Works with Signal K" type of page, but I wonder if there's a way to make it more thorough and updated regularly. Again the blog may be a better place for temporal content.
• udev - feels to me like it maybe belongs on the GitHub Wiki or in the docs

A couple options:

1. Add these to the new site as-is and we can iterate on them
2. Remove them and maybe add any relevant info to where it belongs