Let's make a homepage for Toki Pona!

[slender carbon]

A little while ago, @atomic ridge, @silk cosmos, @sharp pier and I were discussing making a new homepage for Toki Pona, properly by and for the community, to serve the needs of those trying to learn about Toki Pona.
We do have pona.la, but it currently serves the very spartan purpose of providing a focused list of lessons, communities, and resources. You might send it to somebody looking for exactly those things, especially if they're only just becoming interested in Toki Pona, but that's the limit of what that page does right now. I think we could do so much more to reach out to newbies, connect them to spaces in the community, and engage with them directly.

jan Mika put forth the idea that the site could be interactive like the tokipona.net site that existed a few years ago, giving newbies something to explore and grasp onto as they discover the language. Examples include building in a dictionary, or providing a transliterator to play with, or similar tools. Mika has also put together a starting design for the site- see the image on the right!
jan Lakuse has already done some work writing content for the site that engages with readers, explaining what toki pona is and why you'd care.
I put forward the idea that we could include testimonials and proof-of-life from community members- the former being short statements from community members on what toki pona has done for them or why they care about it, and the latter being ongoing events and projects you can get involved in.

Overall, the goal of this site is to be the front page of Toki Pona: What is Toki Pona? Why should you care? Where and how can you learn and speak it? What's fun about it? And what's going on in its community?
In that, the site should focus on serving those who have barely or never heard of Toki Pona. Not to say we'll only focus on them, but showing newbies around is important!

Pinging those who have expressed interest in this idea recently, or who have already worked on the project:
@atomic ridge @dark bloom @slow sky @fathom pumice @sharp pier @silk cosmos
and others who might be interested: @modern forge @frigid stag @onyx kayak
feel free to invite others you think could help!

You're welcome to discuss, share more ideas, critique what's here, and so on. The code as it currently exists lives here, and the current writing content lives here. If you have an idea and the motivation to contribute, please do! Right now, we're between the ideation phase and the proof-of-concept phase.

I'll also plug #1418795514878492823 here since it's a very related project; maybe it'll go on to live at pona.la, or maybe this homepage.

[modern forge]

fun!

[slender carbon]

(also, just so this isn't left on the ground, i am gonna assemble a scratch version of what the final product might look like, and a todo list, within the next couple days!)

[radiant idol]

I’m just lurking, but the project is very important and warranted

Thank you for taking it up

[silk cosmos]

just had a galaxy brain idea, put an ucsur converter on the homepage. gives long time users a reason to open it regularly

[silk cosmos]

@slender carbon @atomic ridge currently trying to figure out content and layout

by no means any good yet

but we need to get moving, and making mockups is the start to that

[fathom pumice]

i think news should be the plaintext of the latest lipusin rather than a list of them

[silk cosmos]

i suspect it might end up being a bluesky embed

[fathom pumice]

from where?

[silk cosmos]

an account nobodys set up yet

[fathom pumice]

ah

[hushed jetty]

@slender carbon li toki e ni kepeken ala toki pona: ||

i have such an account already that we could use lol ||

[slender carbon]

mi weka e sona ni: ilo li lon .....

musi wawa

https://tokipona.org
https://lojban.io
https://lernu.net/
https://esperanto-usa.org

https://www.lifeprint.com/
https://www.handspeak.com/
https://www.signlanguageforum.com/

https://archlinux.org/
https://xraccess.org/

https://pennydreadfulmagic.com/
https://oldschool.runescape.com/
https://terraria.org/
https://archipelago.gg/
https://vrchat.com/
https://omniarchive.uk/

lipu ni ale li wile e ni: sina lukin la sina kama sona e ijo li wile ijo
mi wile kama sona e ni: ona la jan li lukin e seme li kama ijo tan seme? ona ale la seme li suli nanpa wan?
mi la ni li suli mute:
sitelen lukin o lon. sitelen toki li ken pona lon ni: jan li kama wile ijo. taso sitelen lukin la jan li ken kama sona e ijo li ken kama wile e ijo kepeken tenpo lili. sitelen toki la jan o kepeken wawa ona tawa sona tawa lukin.

mi wile sona e ni kin:
ona ale li wile pana e sona seme?

[silk cosmos]

i pushed my mockup to a branch, feel free to use or drop any part of it

[slender carbon]

pona

[silk cosmos]

added a widget that pretends to be discord

[slender carbon]

wawa!

[slender carbon]

@somber flax

[somber flax]

right

pona.la is not really that, it's a page for listing things hosted on pona.la, which is not the same thing as listing toki pona things

[slender carbon]

that isn't the only thing on pona.la anymore

[somber flax]

yeah, fair

I think you could make a page that is more focused on toki pona in totality

[slender carbon]

that's the idea with this initiative!

[somber flax]

I don't think pona.la is that though

[slender carbon]

pona.la is at least partly that
or i guess, it's the closest thing to that which is community-owned

[somber flax]

I think keeping pona.la specifically focused on, hey, we will provide a url for your project, and then making another page for toki pona might be better

[silk cosmos]

when this homepage project kicks off, we can excise information from pona.la that no longer needs to be there

[somber flax]

yeah, I think so too

[silk cosmos]

if we decide we need to

[somber flax]

I think this project makes more sense at toki.pona.la than on pona.la proper

[fathom pumice]

i still think tokipona.community would be super great for this

(assuming it's really for newcomers)

mi la, it gives of a kind of "we are nothing organized per se, just a community of people doing cool stuff related to this language. here is a summary and some cool projects related to it"

[atomic ridge]

those member counts can be dynamic with not much effort if you pull them from the real widget api!

Here's an example from a server I own, Internet Roadtrip.

If you turn on the server widget in "Engagement" settings on the discord(s), this url can be used to get the number of people currently actually online.
https://discord.com/api/guilds/1370059928185864242/widget.json

no api key or any bs like that

it works for ma pona!
https://discord.com/api/guilds/301377942062366741/widget.json

the widget url also just... gives you a valid server invite even if the vanity goes away or whatever

kama sona:
https://discord.com/api/guilds/969386329513295872/widget.json

ma mun:
https://discord.com/api/guilds/1208593165213245510/widget.json

and if a server ever changes its name you can display the new name from the widget api too

plus, since those widget apis give you a valid invite, if you really want to do everything dynamically and never have to touch it again
https://discord.com/api/v8/invites/mapona?with_counts=true

this'll give you offline member counts, server profile picture, the banner, the splash, the server description, a bunch of stuff

[fathom pumice]

elegant

[slender carbon]

woah that's sick

[willow mural]

it would be cool to do that serverside so that it doesn't make the page feel slower

[fathom pumice]

uhh

the server side is not

afaik

[silk cosmos]

serverside = build-time, for our purposes

[slender carbon]

ye, you can do anything you want when assembling pages in astro
though then the member counts and online counts won't be live
what you could do though, is build them in at build time, and update them at runtime

[fathom pumice]

or rebuild the site every five minutes /musi

[slender carbon]

lmao

[silk cosmos]

our biggest roadblocks are mockups and content

technical skill not required!

[slender carbon]

what exists: the repo is here and the writing content is here
what is needed: i haven't gotten to this fully, but i'll make a brief list. give me a bit.
re: astro: it's way less of a deal than you think! for the most part, you'll be writing standard HTML+CSS, and JS if you desire, and then primarily Markdown form content. the biggest difference between Astro and most other SSG is the ability to run JS at build time [which others do, but not as easily], so you can use that to fetch resources or calculate appearances or pre-generate lots of pages at once. but that's by no means a requirement.

[slender carbon]

in my opinion, the MVP of the homepage has these requirements and this approximate shape:

immediate landing page content

on the left: a video hook, out of the variety of such hooks that exist
on the right: a textual hook (a sentence or two making toki pona sound cool), and/or some initial call-to-action. "join the community" or "start learning" or such. (which we need to decide- do these link to a communities/resources page, or directly to some specific community/resource?)

landing page content below the fold

more thorough explanation of what toki pona is and why we care about it (i.e. the main content from the doc)
a list of more communities (placement TBD, but i like floating them left or right between contentful paragraphs)
a list of more resources (ditto)

quality of life and other desirable things

• goatcounter site visits tracking so we know how many people are seeing what pages
• SEO features like proper opengraph tags
• proper accessibility; not my wheelhouse i admit, but lakuse is familiar with the needs here
• a simple contact link, probably email, although a google form could work if preferred

---

and then later on, we'd like to add:

• a dedicated resources page which is more thorough
• a dedicated communities page, same
• an FAQ. this is a current feature of tokipona.org that we'd like to mimic, and has a start on the doc
• an event calendar, a recent publications list, general proof-of-life from within the community
• a dedicated page for sitelen pona
• support for translations like wasona

tools

... which may also get its own page, but. also, this is my wishlist; we don't have to do all of these

• a dictionary based on linku's or nimi.li's, probably which also provides separately and/or merges lipu kemeka
• built-in flashcards like anki
• a sitelen pona name generator like vitphire's
• a sitelen pona generator like linku's /sp
• an UCSUR converter like the one in linku (but it should go both ways)
• a general word transliterator
• jan nikola's grammar checker
• links out to other tools that exist and/or the tools that inspired each of these

other disorganized thoughts

• could we offer a freelancers list like tokipona.org does?
• could we have a page luka pona?

[slender carbon]

you know what would be a really fun long term goal

no idea how viable it would be but like

forums.tokipona.net

[silk cosmos]

is this idea in any way different from the now-closed kulupu.pona.la

[slender carbon]

nope, other than being in a more visible specific location
i am thinking of it as a fun thing as opposed to like, any sort of necessity
though it is nice in theory to have publicly visible community like that

[dark bloom]

i think having a lot of normal casual conversation visible would be nice yea
cause rn from an outsiders perspective, the community is just a bunch of scattered art projects here and there
having normal casual speech visible like that would be sick

🤔 i've never seen a discord channel embedded but if possible that'd be neat
embedding the one from ma mun or smth?
but ye, a lot of this is just daydreaming, actually making and managing this stuff in practice takes a lot of time and energy

[vernal seal]

is there a link yet? where is it

[dark bloom]

i like the pastel color scheme, but the magenta is a bit harsh
maybe pastel yellow and pastel blue would be the best, like the logo

[vernal seal]

interesting

can we get gradients

on the buttons

[vernal seal]

i meant like a vertical gradient and not that overt

more subtle

like yellow on the top and a little bit pinker on the bottom

[dark bloom]

this gradient gives such a mid 00s vibe

(which is a good thing)

[modern forge]

true

[marsh stone]

the black on blue contrast is also too low

[slender carbon]

i haven't styled it any but i added a widget DiscordWidget and some corresponding scripts within itself and in utils/discord.ts; it does what mika described before, loading what it can build time, and updating on the client at runtime, with a 30 min ttl on the data which it puts in the cache

[silk cosmos]

pona

[slender carbon]

that's on the mockup branch

[proper harbor]

ooo cool this looks like a nice idea

[versed pasture]

-# saving for later

[frosty heath]

Just heard about this! I'd love to contribute some content (English and/or toki pona), especially about the benefits of learning, and how long it might take. (But I understand literally nothing about the coding/design side)

I think it would be good to have some carefully worked examples that go from a common beginner question like (to give examples from today's discussion) "how do I say sandwich" or "how do I say syncopation," to the process of explaining these concepts using simpler concepts, to expressing them in toki pona.

[lavish shard]

i like how reddit is a tiny little bullet below all the discord servers

[silk cosmos]

the mockup is in such a rough state