Freshening up and curating the gallery?

[dannguyen]

Wanted to propose a cleanup (removal of any dead links) and new format for data/sites.yaml to make it more gallery and visual-like. Some possible steps:

1. Create a curated "Featured" set of sites that include the highest-profile sites. The set should just be a few (3 to 9) and if need be, something that could be rotated.

The data format could look like:

featured:
   - title: Proteus by thoughtbot
     url: https://thoughtbot.github.io/proteus/
     source: https://github.com/thoughtbot/proteus
     image_url: http://thoughtbot.github.io/proteus/assets/images/logo.svg
      ## image url is used for the og:image/meta tags and in the "Featured" gallery. Should be a screenshot of the site's frontpage.
     description: |
      A collection of useful starter kits to help you prototype and launch static sites. They follow the thoughtbot styleguide and include thoughtbot's favorite front-end tools.

This Featured section would let users at a glance see some of the great projects built with Middleman, rather than having to peruse through the current long list and hoping to land on something interesting.

2. Prune the site list, add meta data where possible - I have a script I use for other situations in which I need to mass-check URLs and generate metadata from URLs. For all the non-featured sites, we can at least provide human-readable titles and descriptions when possible. This would also check for 404s that can be removed. If the list of URLs is still very long, it might be worth taking out some of the sites that have no metadata after manually checking them (no metadata might indicate that they're not well-maintained yet)

3. Include a section of writeups/blogposts (i.e. case studies) -- this could be its own separate page, perhaps...but this is a listing of articles/posts in which users describe how they used Middleman. Stumbling across such a post was how I found about Middleman a few years ago and it was a hugely serendipitous and fortunate find for me, as I use it for virtually every site I build today.

examples:

• http://juliepagano.com/blog/2013/11/10/site-redesign-using-middleman/
• https://benfrain.com/understanding-middleman-the-static-site-generator-for-faster-prototyping/
• https://robots.thoughtbot.com/middleman-bourbon-walkthrough
• http://product.voxmedia.com/2014/7/29/5863004/take-a-peek-at-the-code-that-powered-the-verge-50
• http://darrennewton.com/2012/09/16/hacking-up-sites-with-middleman/
• https://blog.engineyard.com/2015/middleman-static-sites-arent-just-for-blogs
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/static-website-generators-jekyll-middleman-roots-hugo-review/

Well, that's about the gist of my suggestions, which would also require a quick redesign and rearrangement of the current elements. I can volunteer to do the data work and front-production, just wanted to check to see if this was not-already-being-done and/or worthwhile to the project. I know it would be worthwhile for me because I frequently recommend Middleman and it's nice to have a convenient link showing what it's capable of.

And just for convenience's sake and until I fork the repo and start hacking at it, I'll include a list of Middleman sites that are worth listing (featured or not):

http://paperswelove.org/
http://api.data.gov/

[tdreyno]

All these ideas are fabulous. I'm basically maxed out on what I can contribute to middleman right now, but I approve these ideas and will happily merge any changes you want to contribute.

[tysongach]

+1, this would be fantastic. I’ve been wanted to spend some time doing a bit of cleanup on middlemanapp.com, and hope to soon. Would love to help on this, specifically.