The first stage of the new http://thi.ng website is live, an up-to-date & hopefully more useful springboard to the 250+ projects and overview of my opensource activity since 2006...<p>Work is ongoing, collecting & re-organizing projects, assets, documentation and extracting interrelationships (incl. older work & music projects (e.g. http://thi.ng/synstack related), clients/people...). Aim is a proper archive of the past 20+ years of outputs & encounters.<p>This is the first website update since 2015. As the timeline visualizations show, building(http://thi.ng) > marketing(http://thi.ng) - maybe unusual these days, but hey... :)<p>The entire site is generated w/ tools from the http://thi.ng/umbrella collection, e.g. http://thi.ng/egf (graph file format), http://thi.ng/csv (semantic CSV parsing), http://thi.ng/transducers (functional data transformations), http://thi.ng/defmulti (multiple dispatch for template engine), http://thi.ng/hiccup (HTML/SVG generation), http://thi.ng/viz (timeline visualizations), http://thi.ng/color (heatmap gradients)<p>There's also a massive spreadsheet (148k cells adjacency matrix) to centrally define & manage the 570+ tags used to categorize the 257 projects/repositories and to batch update their package files (edits ongoing, much fun!). The tag/project relationships are compiled into an HTML list with project IDs stored as base90-encoded data attributes for each tag in the tag cloud (http://thi.ng/#tags)<p>The timeline visualizations are generated directly from local Git repos, package files and associated metadata stored in a number of linked http://thi.ng/egf graphs. The site toolchain will be released in due course...<p>Last but not least, any constructive feedback (good or bad) is very welcome! The next phase will include more individual project details, images, making-of docs, videos, xrefs etc. Currently, just a step in the right direction...
Aah, <i>thi.ng</i>! The creative coding framework I've been meaning to check out for years but never have! But the things (hah) made in it have always amazed me!<p>So one bit of feedback on the site: it's fantastic as a portfolio site. However, while it's great for getting an impression for everything made with this framework and how large the framework is, what is missing is a big "START HERE" button.<p>I get why that might feel like something you don't need: th.ing is set up differently than Processing, p5.js, OpenFrameworks or any game-loop based creative coding framework. So there is no real centralized starting point. Which is fine, but then <i>that has to be clearly communicated too</i>, and it isn't. It's mentioned in very thin fine print under the <i>How?</i> section, which is hidden under a "read more" link when viewing the website on mobile (also, I do get that <i>thi.ng/umbrella</i> is kind of emphasized as an implicit suggested starting point, but it's still a bit confusing).<p>So basically, the discoverability for how people should get into the framework could use a lot of improvement. It could use a bit more awareness of expectations of your visitors and how you either meet or break those.
I've used Processing extensively, including toxilibs, and follow the creative coding community relatively closely. When I look at projects like openFrameworks or libcinder or Processing/p5.js, it's pretty clear to me both what those project are and how to get started with them.<p>I've kept an eye on thi.ng for years. I like the visuals on the former and current homepage and it seems like something that I would like to understand better. However, exactly what thi.ng is or how I am supposed to use it -- that always remains ever so slightly out of reach to me. The messaging is so focused on cobbling micro-libraries together that it feels like it is left to the reader to understand the possibility space of what you can achieve by doing so. For me, at least, that introduces enough friction to trying the tools that I feel tired and move on to something else.<p>If you can, I'd consider creating a few very straightforward Shiffman-esque tutorials (a la Nature of Code or something) that drop the discussion of why things are structured how they are and focus instead on helping the reader create something. I feel like if you help draw the line between the capabilities of the libraries and using them in production that the entire project will be more accessible.
I know you did a lot of work in Clojure(Script) originally, and IIRC you mostly switched to Typescript. Is that correct? How many of your projects are now designed to be consumed from CLJS vs JS/TS?
This site is a bit confusing at first, originally I thought they were modular libraries for writing general software.<p>But it seems to be a collection of tools specifically for generating computational art/design. Still impressive and useful though!
You posted on a full moon day, and this is exactly the vibe I get from your projects. Thank you for the wonderful libraries! I've been using thi.ng/geom and thi.ng/color before and the code is easy to use and modify.
I used thing/color on a project where I needed to generate color palettes and ensure contrast.<p>I was blown away by the scope of your work, and really appreciate it.<p>Personally, I've been trying to figure out a literate programming style for clojure, but when I saw that you had given up on it, I figured that if it was a barrier to entry for thi.ng contributions, then I might not stand a chance with my smaller projects.<p>1. Do you have any advice on building community around your projects?<p>2. Or thoughts on the more recent advances in literate programming like <a href="https://github.com/scicloj/notespace" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/scicloj/notespace</a> ?
One suggestion would be to make the carousel a bit slower to switch... I read pretty fast, but I was only able to read a few sentences in each one before it flipped to the next page.
A lot of what I see on hackerne.ws gives me the emotional feeling of the industrial revolution.<p>Looking at a thi.ng project is closer to the feeling of the renaissance, a period of experimentation and discovery in the arts. Learning, and mastering, a medium through projects over time.
yo just adding my two cents here regarding the presentation.<p>I am sure this is the coolest thing going because we all know the quality of your work.<p>If the idea is to get new people playing with the library it would really help simplifying everything. I do actually like the idea of adopting a landing page style design... (hinted at in some of the other comments_ there are reasons why they work.<p>the website feels cryptic and doesn't give a point of entry ("start here", "look at this thing doing something")<p>there is way too much text in my opinion, its more of a showcase of commits and terminology than of the project.