New home page

The Pleiades home page of the past year, while full of useful information, has baffled some visitors. It didn't provide immediate answers to questions such as "Who is using this data?" or "How do I use this data?" It didn't suggest useful search terms. It didn't exactly celebrate any particular place. In an effort to make the home page more clear and more engaging, we stepped back and rewrote it from scratch. Voilà, the new incarnation: http://pleiades.stoa.org. Two paragraphs of text attempt to better explain what and who (on the left) and how and why (on the right). Above that is a prominent search form that suggests terms like "Internum Mare." We've never before described Pleiades so plainly as "a community-built gazetteer and graph of ancient places", but that's what we're doing and now we say so in bold letters. The centerpiece is a slideshow of random places from Pleiades, highlighting the geographic nature of the project and giving otherwise obscure places a chance to shine.

The page is a single HTML document based on the fine work of the HTML5 Boilerplate project. The base CSS is from the same source, with additional rules from the main Pleiades content management systems. A few dozen lines of Javascript – jQuery and Google Maps API, mainly – run the slideshow. Like everything else in Pleiades, it's open source. See https://github.com/sgillies/pleiades-frontpage. The page is lightweight and fast: only about 10-20% of the latency of the old home page. Each step of the slideshow fetches random JSON data from a cache which proxies a view on the Pleiades site. If you open a few browsers, you will notice that each plays the same sequence of places.

Speaking of the old home page: it continues at http://pleiades.stoa.org/home and users of the site will encounter it often. It is linked from the first of the portal tabs, the one labeled "Home", and is the root of the links in every content item's breadcrumb trail.