Over the past couple months, myself and the rest of the gentlemen at work have been plugging away at our online presence. Something long overdue. Even before starting work with TinyFactory this past March, we'd mentioned that the site needed a new look. A fresh take & an updated goal.
We gave it a new look before a node.js meetup we hosted in our office; we completely half assed the website so we had something online in time for the event. Down to the point where we left lipsum copy while it was live. We didn't even pick any of the cool ones.
Content[less]
We don't take on client work, so how are we to showcase all this work that hasn't come in? We hack together a lot of cool stuff in house, some of which never see the light of day. We didn't want to focus on a bunch of smaller, seemingly insignificant little hacking projects, so we started putting together things like the documentation, @michaelsacca's semi-secret-almost-public project, and we're messing around with an Arduino to power the lights in front of the office via your smartphone.
All of these things are incredible, but they don't put work in a portfolio.
Activity, not complexity
This got me thinking. Since we are trying to open source a lot of the work we've been doing lately, why not showcase these projects front and center to show the amount of momentum they have. It sucks when you run across an awesome project online that hasn't been updated in 3 months. So, the new TinyFactory site does just that. Showcases all our activity.
The new site pulls latest activity from all of the team's social accounts, and aggregates them onto one page using, yet another, soon to be open source js platform. GitHub commits, Tumblr blog entries (for our iPad game), Twitter, any new docs are added to the doc site, and selected TF shots from dribbble. It's essentially a lifestream setup on Facebook's timeline model.
The tiny mechanics behind the new site is probably for another post, but on Monday the 20th, you'll all be able to see what we've been working on for the past month.