First things first, you need to have an account to control your artist profiles and submit artwork.
- Setting up your account is easy, you just need an email address and some creativity. Once you have
- your account, you can create one more artist profiles which are controlled by you.
-
-
- {{-- End .card-block-style-one --}}
-
-
-
-
Submit Your Album Artwork
-
Your artwork should be unique, high-quality, and on-topic. Our artists stive to provide the podcast
- hosts with unqiue artwork each and every episode to use as the album artwork. artwork should be
- a minimum of 512px square.
-
-
- {{-- End .card-block-style-one --}}
-
-
-
Podcasters Select Your Art
-
When publishing their podcast, podcasters select the album art they like best, and if you are selected,
- you'll get your credit here and usually in the show-notes of the podcast that used your art. If you aren't
- selected for Album Art, your artwork could be used for Podcasting 2.0 chapter art as well.
-
First things first, you need to have an account to control your artist profiles and submit artwork.
+ Setting up your account is easy, you just need an email address and some creativity. Once you have
+ your account, you can create one more artist profiles which are controlled by you.
+
+
+ {{-- End .card-block-style-one --}}
+
+
+
+
Submit Your Album Artwork
+
Your artwork should be unique, high-quality, and on-topic. Our artists stive to provide the podcast
+ hosts with unqiue artwork each and every episode to use as the album artwork. artwork should be
+ a minimum of 512px square.
+
+
+ {{-- End .card-block-style-one --}}
+
+
+
Podcasters Select Your Art
+
When publishing their podcast, podcasters select the album art they like best, and if you are selected,
+ you'll get your credit here and usually in the show-notes of the podcast that used your art. If you aren't
+ selected for Album Art, your artwork could be used for Podcasting 2.0 chapter art as well.
+
+
+
+
{{-- End .row --}}
{{-- End .container --}}
diff --git a/site/resources/views/home/leaderboard/section.blade.php b/site/resources/views/home/leaderboard/section.blade.php
index c348dc4..e358327 100644
--- a/site/resources/views/home/leaderboard/section.blade.php
+++ b/site/resources/views/home/leaderboard/section.blade.php
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
{{-- End container --}}
-{{-- End section --}}
\ No newline at end of file
+{{-- End section --}}
diff --git a/site/resources/views/home/support/page.blade.php b/site/resources/views/home/support/page.blade.php
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..41fe8b6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/site/resources/views/home/support/page.blade.php
@@ -0,0 +1,138 @@
+@extends('layouts.master')
+
+@section('page-title', 'Support and The History of the Art Generator')
+
+@section('meta_description', 'Learn the history of the No Agenda Art Generator and how to support the generator.')
+
+@section('page-top')
+
+
In June of 2010, there was no formal process to submit artwork to
+ the No Agenda Podcast for use as album artwork for each episode. At the same time,
+ I was in the process of learning the then "new to me" Drupal 6 Content Management
+ System. I realized that I could kill two birds with one stone by improving the process
+ of uploading artwork, add some community and competition to the process and learn more
+ about Drupal module development by building a simple tool that would allow anyone to
+ submit artwork live as we trolled-along in the IRC "trollroom" as the show was recorded
+ by our venerable hosts, Adam and John C.
+
The first variation of the Art Generator was built over the course of a weekend, and
+ as part of that development, I did my best to re-create the work of Sir Randy Asher and Sir Paul T.
+ who had, up until that point, submitted the bulk of the user submitted artwork in the archive.
+
+
For the next almost four years and roughly 4,500 art submissions, the generator continued
+ in it's first interation with an abandonded upgrade to Drupal 7 somewhere in the duration as the Drupal
+ community was more focused on writing "codes-of-conduct" than writing actual code.
+
Around that time, many in the PHP community and myself
+ became aware of an upcoming framework that seemed to offer a ton of promise - Laravel, and I chose to
+ use the generator to become familiar with that new framework. In October 2014, the Art Generator was
+ re-written from the ground up using the Laravel 4 platform which greatly simplified the maintenance and
+ customization of the platform.
+
+
In 2022, I started to run into minor issues due to the age of the codebase, support for older versions
+ of the database and PHP were becoming deprecated, and tackling them would require a basic rewrite of
+ the entire platform (seriously, the upgrade path from Laravel 4 to 5 suggests re-writing the application.)
+ Laravel had matured, and became the most popular PHP framework on the Internet, upgrades between versions
+ had become relatively painless and took a few minutes to a few hours. However, I procrastinated doing the re-write
+ as I was already spending my days writing Laravel code and I put a lot of focus learning other technologies
+ that would make the upgrade worthwhile.
+
+
I began the re-write for the current interation of the Art Generator, in early 2023, working on small pieces
+ on weekends as free-time allowed, the core functionality of the system is now powered by Laravel 10 and I used
+ much of the development time to learn some of the new third-party add-ons that would improve developer's experience
+ moving forward such as Laravel Live-Wire, Docker, Docker Compose, Traefik, Caddy and other technology. Development
+ in earnest began in early summer of 2023 - a new design was developed using a new logo graciously provided by
+ Nykko Syme and addressing some community requests for both dark and light mode support,
+ easier to access download links for the artwork, and a much more streamlined codebase allowing for future development
+ with less pain points. A bonus is the ability for me to run the entire stack in Docker making migrating to other hosting
+ and development environments smoother.
+
+
Toward the end of September, the host that had powered the Art Generator since 2010 emailed its customers and
+ notified us they would be shutting down without warning. I took the time to migrate the database away from that host,
+ and moved as much of the site off of them as possible while working as quickly as possible to finish the upgrade. Communicating
+ with them, I was told to expect to continue to have hosting until my paid-in-advance hosting ran out, which would have
+ been through May of 2024 - but on the morning of November 30, 2023, they disappeared without a trace, stopped answering
+ the phone, and emails bounced. This lit a fire under my rear to complete the newest build as I was very close to complete.
+
+
+ The latest version of the generator launched on Sunday, December 17th, 2024 to a rocky launch with "good-enough"
+ functionality, it took a few days to stabilize the cacheing and hardware, but you are now viewing the "new hotness" or whatever
+ the kids these days call it, powered by Laravel 10 in a docker powered container that can be migrated in minutes to other locations.
+ It facilitates point-in-time backups, and as you will see below, makes it fairly simple for anyone to grab and entire archive of the
+ artwork submitted to the site in an sane, organized manner. Here's some of the new features that really made the upgrade worth it:
+
+
+
All artwork is optimized, sized, and scaled to the absolute smallest filesize while having the resolutions required by Apple (3,000px x 3,000px) and by the sane people in the world (512px x 512px) with none of the extraneous temporary files and unnecessary thumbnails of the old system.
+
The artwork is organized by year, month, and date, with the artist's name and artwork title in the filename so offline use is easier.
+
Even with the larger resolutions available for download, the size of the artwork archive was cut nearly in half from 30Gb+ to approx 15Gb.
+
Artists get a lot more credit on the new version, it's easier to find their additional work, and get high quality downloads of that work.
+
While not yet implemented in the production site, the new version was built from the ground up with support for more than one podcast. In the coming weeks, I hope to expand and turn that feature on for additional podcasts in the No Agenda Community.
+
+
Want to download your own copy of the archive? Know wget and/or curl? There are lists in the sidebar you can download that are updated each time a piece
+ of artwork is approved. I plan to make this easier for non-dudes/dudettes named Ben soon. In the meantime, enjoy your stay, note the v4v section, and be
+ decent to one another.
+
+
-- "Sir" Paul Couture Keeper of the Artwork
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+@endsection
diff --git a/site/resources/views/layouts/master.blade.php b/site/resources/views/layouts/master.blade.php
index 1b78688..c8bbb26 100644
--- a/site/resources/views/layouts/master.blade.php
+++ b/site/resources/views/layouts/master.blade.php
@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@
@else
.: No Agenda Art Generator :.
@endif
+ @include('partials.metabranding')
@include('partials/favicon')
@vite(['resources/scss/app.scss'])
@livewireStyles
diff --git a/site/resources/views/leaderboards/leaderboards.blade.php b/site/resources/views/leaderboards/leaderboards.blade.php
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5a20f4a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/site/resources/views/leaderboards/leaderboards.blade.php
@@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
+@extends('layouts.master')
+
+@section('page-title', 'Leaderboards')
+
+@section('meta_description', 'Check the standings of the competition at the No Agenda Art Generator.')
+
+@section('page-top')
+
+