New website announcement post

[Songtech-0912]

This should be self-explanatory, but this PR adds the news announcement for the new website (finally!) It also adds author names to the articles on the news page. Merge soon please :) THenry you all contributions for your contributions! (see Natron Discord for context)

[Songtech-0912]

@Shrinks99 Thanks for the review! Everything you suggested should be merged in now! :)

[cgvirus]

Guys, just a suggestion, please keep the tone of the blog professional.

A website building should not take this much effort on the surface (Though it does!) compare to a software like Natron.
It may expose Natron as a week community in public eye.
Right now it feels like it was really hard to do and manage and the struggle was too high.

Being concise is always advised. It shows the confidence. Thanks.

I would suggest to review it with @blackearth2014 first.

[Songtech-0912]

Being concise is always advised. It shows the confidence.

Agreed. Talking about "it was so hard to do XYZ" does backfire for us. Professionalism comes first. There is a fine line between "look at how much effort we put into this site!" and "this took 5 years when it could've taken 5 weeks". Definitely worth further reviews although I may not be able to merge them in if they come after 6/18 (due to travel) so please feel free to take over for me.

That being said, I also don't want us spending way too long polishing this article. I don't want a repeat of what happened with the website where we weren't willing to publish despite the website being essentially publishable for years because we were finessing over getting everything on an increasingly-growing checklist done. This is not meant to attack/criticize any of you, everyone's worked hard, but the plain truth is if it takes a month for the Natron community to publish a single article that is about as laughable as us taking 5 years to make a website.

[cgvirus]

but the plain truth is if it takes a month for the Natron community to publish a single article that is about as laughable as us taking 5 years to make a website.

That is the exact point. Less is more. The article IMHO should be:

"New site arrived!
Welcome to our new site. Thanks for the contribution from everyone in the community.
Contributors name....."

That's it. No toil, no soil.

[Songtech-0912]

That's it. No toil, no soil.

I fully agree with making sure it didn't seem like we were outwardly advertising our slowness at webdev. But the point of this post is that it's not just a simple announcement. If it's that, we'd have been done 2 weeks ago. The reason why it's a write-up that explains our design choices and development workflow is because this further bolsters our professionalism and showcases our capabilities.

Posting a simple announcement would be easy, yes, and we could've chosen to do that, but I think a write-up makes much more sense from both a promotional and communicative perspective. Maybe I'm wrong, but there's a reason why other successful open-source projects write in-depth articles when they release something. Having a nicely-written article that draws in someone might get them to download the software/use the library, especially when it's the top-level article (as this one would be).

Yes, we don't want to say too much (especially negative stuff), but a news page that has basically nothing other than release notes that are near-verbatim copied stuff from our GitHub releases changelogs communicates a lack of professionalism and a clearly amateur project (which Natron is not). It is essential that we at least have something on our news page that showcases the effort we put in for this project; otherwise, while the news page may be functional, it will not get us any positive reviews (so to speak). I am satisfied with it as-is, but again go ahead to look through it and suggest changes.

[cgvirus]

Hmm, I have understood the point. Probably, you guys need fillers. I needed it back then and got very few responses from the community then.
Here are some ideas if you folks need to fill up the news:

• Beta, Alpha release notes
• Explore community made tutorials
• Explore community plugins updates
• Explore artists collab

These were my plans but activity was too low then from the users. So ditched it entirely. Maybe now it is thriving. IDK.

But with all honesty, exaggeration is the worst kind of apple to bite. Natron core isn't updating itself and may be will get minor updates in 2-3 years. Just like Gimp or Inkscape. If that is the reality, then it is the truth. And that is fine. Not everything needs a hyper reality.

Anyway, signing off.
P.S: I can understand the emotion and I am empathetic towards it. It is my habit to knock the harsh reality time to time.

[Songtech-0912]

Thanks, I do understand your point also. I would also love for Natron to have fast development and a website with tutorials and artist showcases and release pages and such. But you are right in that this probably isn't going to happen; it took us 5 years to make a website for a reason. My hope was to put in the effort to make one high-quality article, knowing that doing anything more was probably not going to be possible, but at least 1 is better than zero. Again welcome to discuss this further.

[Songtech-0912]

Hey @Shrinks99 would you mind just merging? Although I know there's stuff we can change and it's not perfect, I don't think we're exaggerating anything either. I am also not in favor of deleting 95% of the article since that defeats the point of writing all of this. If you're not okay with that it's fine too.

[Shrinks99]

Images need alt text, other than that looks good to me. @Songtech-0912 Please merge once that's added.

As somebody who has written corporate blog content before this is well within my comfortable zone of professionalism and personality. Soulless isn't interesting.