Re: [Chicken-users] Homepage design proposal
I support moving the download and documentation sections to the top of the page. I always have trouble finding the link to the manual. --Alex On 2015-01-23 08:01, Bahman Movaqar wrote: On 01/23/2015 07:25 PM, Peter Bex wrote: On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 07:17:17PM +0330, Bahman Movaqar wrote: I strongly disagree with using CHICKEN for the website. Let's keep things simple by using the right tool for the job. I think you're mixing up two things. One is the tool to generate the website and the other is the online try CHICKEN here evaluator. Ah...my mistake then. Yes..as you said, I was under the impression that the topic is the website content. The earlier discussion was about how to make the try CHICKEN online REPL work, while it looks like you're talking about the tool to generate the website (if it isn't just static HTML). These days there are some good static website generators out there, like JBake and Jekyll, with which one can use HTML or asciidoc or Markdown to generate a static website. Hosting these kind of websites is extremely cheap: they only need HTML (no PHP or .NET or anything). And they are very fast. The website content can be version'ed on a git repository and regenerated and copied to the web-server upon a git push. We have a perfectly fine static website generator called Hyde, which most of us use for their personal blogs and websites (including my own more-magic.net and pebble-software.nl). See http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/hyde If we have this, why work with lesser languages? Makes sense...as long they are able to get the job done. PS: I never dared to suggest anyone to use PHP or .NET. NEVER. I was actually bringing their names up as bad decisions for website backend :-) ___ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users ___ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users
Re: [Chicken-users] Homepage design proposal
Hi, Bahman-- On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 8:47 AM, Bahman Movaqar bah...@bahmanm.com wrote: I strongly disagree with using CHICKEN for the website. Let's keep things simple by using the right tool for the job. I'd like to challenge that statement. As a (trying-to-be-professional) web developer who has developed a template processor and a blogging engine in Chicken Scheme, I view the question like this: * There are a lot of good tools for web development in Chicken. * They are mostly not very user-friendly - if you define user as a web developer who does not know Scheme, or knows only a little Scheme - My Civet project (and its IMHO rather good documentation) is in part an attempt to address that issue * The various tools available don't appear to represent a *coherent approach* to web development In view of the above, I would argue that Chicken is indeed not a great tool for web development in general (which is why I don't offer Chicken solutions to clients at present). But the ingredients are there, and may be good enough for the Chicken community to use for its own website. And doing that might help the community to understand better what is needed to make Chicken competitive in the webdev sphere. These days there are some good static website generators out there, like JBake and Jekyll, with which one can use HTML or asciidoc or Markdown to generate a static website. There is not a specific package for this, but I've done it using civet and the markdown egg. Not difficult. Hosting these kind of websites is extremely cheap: they only need HTML (no PHP or .NET or anything). And they are very fast. The website content can be version'ed on a git repository and regenerated and copied to the web-server upon a git push. +1 for version control. And I agree that static pages are a good idea whenever there is not heavy interactivity or very frequent updates. However, there is the egg repo to consider. And regarding the expenses - I don't know what you consider extremely cheap, but cloud VPSs are quite affordable these days, and permit you to build your site any way you want. Digital Ocean starts at $5/month, the very-well-regarded Linode, I think, starts at $10; I'm using GreenQloud, which starts at about $7.80/month. The most basic VPS might or might not be adequate for call-cc.org; I can say that I've had a Chicken-based dynamic website (albeit a small and unpopular one) running for around 2 years, and it is very light on resources (and never goes down). It doesn't matter that much to me - just saying that eating our own dog food should be considered. -- Matt Gushee ___ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users
Re: [Chicken-users] Homepage design proposal
On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 1:00 PM, Matt Gushee m...@gushee.net wrote: These days there are some good static website generators out there, like JBake and Jekyll, with which one can use HTML or asciidoc or Markdown to generate a static website. Sorry. Peter mentioned a static site generator, and he usually knows what he's talking about. I meant that my particular approach was not packaged in an easily reusable form. -- Matt Gushee ___ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users
Re: [Chicken-users] Homepage design proposal
Hi, Tim and everyone-- I've been meaning to comment on this topic for some time, but I am somewhat afraid to express my opinions on this list (I hasten to add that that has nothing to do with anyone's behavior here - just my own feeling of being hopelessly outclassed in this community. Plus the fact that I tend to ignite controversy without meaning to). But my hand has been forced! And I have to make this really quick, so this is going to be more of a braindump than a coherent statement First of all, Tim, I think your mockup is a giant step forward. Thanks for doing it! I agree that the homepage needs work, the sooner the better, and I mostly agree with your approach to the task. I also took a recent tour of programming language websites and gleaned more or less the same insights as you. Funnily, the site I thought was best (more from an information architecture standpoint than a visual one) was opendylan.org - Dylan being possibly the coolest implemented language that nobody uses. However, I'm also a strong proponent of designing web sites around their content, and I think the site as a whole lacks coherence and needs an overhaul. But that should not be based on one person's, or a small group's idea of what makes sense. I think there is a broader topic that should be discussed before any major work is done on the site. That is the question of how Chicken Scheme should position itself in the software development world. And actually, I have to cut this off right now. I'll try to finish my thoughts later this afternoon. Let me just complete the above thought by saying that I think it's a great idea to reorganize the homepage content and layout right now along Tim's lines. And I'm not saying the bold new look is necessarily wrong, just that any new visual design should apply to the whole site, and so perhaps should wait until the deeper problems are addressed. On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 12:24 AM, Tim van der Linden t...@shisaa.jp wrote: Hi all! In the recent light of visual changes to the wiki, I have picked up an old(er) idea to have my go at a redesign of the homepage (landing page, front page, the-first-page, etc...). I, for one, find our CHICKEN site charming. Yet many new folks see the homepage more as the scrolling end credits to CHICKEN The Movie then an actual eye-catching, easy to pick-up page. Too much text, no pleasing, eye stroking candy. Do not understanding me wrong, I do not wish to push a Candy Crush, plastic, all bells whistles design, yet I hope most of you agree that something needs to be done to attract new users (rather then to scare them away) and to try to get to information faster. The first thing I did on this journey was to take a peek at our fellow language pages, and see what they do to reel them in. A quick glance at other languages (like Python, Racket (!), Ruby, Erlang, ...) show the following common features: - See common, easy-to-understand code samples depicting typical language features - Clear changelog timeline - Visual weight (visual importance, not one blob of text) - Big Download/Get Started now call-to-action Things less commonly see, but just plain beautiful: - The ability to run code in an interactive shell - A map of CHICKEN across the world - A list of real-life CHICKEN projects - An awesome photo of chickens For the design I thought it would be smart to give it a minimalistic approach...CHICKEN is a tiny language after all, and we want to tout it's simplicity, right? Before putting in to much design work, I thought I would throw it out early in the process. So I have gone ahead and create a (very rough) design for the homepage only, using flat elements and hopefully a better approach then currently is the case. Mind that this is only a mock-up (nothing works!) and not all information is accurate. But it should give you a fairly good idea of the direction I wish to take... Also...if there are any *real* designers in the house...any help is welcomed ;) Find it here: http://shisaa.jp/chicken/ All input is greatly appreciated and I hope this will spark a few ideas here and there... Cheers, Tim ___ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users ___ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users
Re: [Chicken-users] Homepage design proposal
Hi Tim, On Fri, 23 Jan 2015 16:24:18 +0900 Tim van der Linden t...@shisaa.jp wrote: In the recent light of visual changes to the wiki, I have picked up an old(er) idea to have my go at a redesign of the homepage (landing page, front page, the-first-page, etc...). I, for one, find our CHICKEN site charming. Yet many new folks see the homepage more as the scrolling end credits to CHICKEN The Movie then an actual eye-catching, easy to pick-up page. Too much text, no pleasing, eye stroking candy. Do not understanding me wrong, I do not wish to push a Candy Crush, plastic, all bells whistles design, yet I hope most of you agree that something needs to be done to attract new users (rather then to scare them away) and to try to get to information faster. The first thing I did on this journey was to take a peek at our fellow language pages, and see what they do to reel them in. A quick glance at other languages (like Python, Racket (!), Ruby, Erlang, ...) show the following common features: - See common, easy-to-understand code samples depicting typical language features - Clear changelog timeline - Visual weight (visual importance, not one blob of text) - Big Download/Get Started now call-to-action Things less commonly see, but just plain beautiful: - The ability to run code in an interactive shell - A map of CHICKEN across the world - A list of real-life CHICKEN projects - An awesome photo of chickens For the design I thought it would be smart to give it a minimalistic approach...CHICKEN is a tiny language after all, and we want to tout it's simplicity, right? Before putting in to much design work, I thought I would throw it out early in the process. So I have gone ahead and create a (very rough) design for the homepage only, using flat elements and hopefully a better approach then currently is the case. Mind that this is only a mock-up (nothing works!) and not all information is accurate. But it should give you a fairly good idea of the direction I wish to take... Also...if there are any *real* designers in the house...any help is welcomed ;) Find it here: http://shisaa.jp/chicken/ All input is greatly appreciated and I hope this will spark a few ideas here and there... Many thanks for your efforts to improve the CHICKEN landing page situation. Our sites (specially the wiki!) really need to be improved. I think we need something to start, and you've provided a very nice start point. I should note that I actually like the information provided by the current landing page, although, admittedly, the features section does sound a bit Schemer-oriented (is it bad?). :-) I don't like the center-aligned text, though. Some comments on your proposal: On WHY CHICKEN?: * I'd remove An excellent maintenance environment; bugs can be corrected live, without restarting a single process.. That's pretty much dependent on how applications are designed. * Programmers are capable of only so many correct statements per unit time. Scheme provides a vehicle to generate more correct statements in any given time period. Fewer bugs = Faster code. is more about Scheme than CHICKEN. I'd move this one to the bottom. * Generally speaking, I'd highlight in that list the following aspects, that I think are the big advantages of CHICKEN (and what I'd look for as a developer): - Focus on practical applications. - Simple, lightweight on dependencies and easy to install: you just need a C toolchain and GNU Make to build and install it on the supported platforms. - Active and supportive community of developers and users. - Portable. - Many extensions. - Good documentation. - Good cross-compilation support. - this one maybe is not that important for most users, but since CHICKEN is a compiler and cross-compilation is hairy, maybe it's worth mentioning. * I'd be cautious with Works with third-party libraries written in C, C++, Java, Python, and Lua. Support for major databases. C and C++ are ok. Although we have eggs to interact with Java, Python and Lua, those applications are not largely explored, as far as I can tell. * Supports Windows, BSD, Linux, MacOS X, and embedded platforms. You mention a list of operating systems then embedded platforms, which seem to be more related to hardware. Since no hardware is mentioned on that item, I'd suggest either mentioning some hardware platforms or dropping embedded platforms. On ALL FEATURES: * I'd change the title to MAIN FEATURES * s/Modulair/Modularity/ * I'd add a Simple section and kinda repeat the Simple and lightweight on dependencies thing. * Somehow mention the scrutinizer and the benefits it offers. Maybe too technical for a landing page? * Add a section about the documentation and mention the API browser (api.call-cc.org). * Not sure if it is a good idea or not, but most items have a corresponding chapter/section in the manual. Maybe add a
[Chicken-users] Homepage design proposal - part 2
Hi All Forgive me for skipping out of the running Homepage design proposal thread with top posting a new message. I simply want to distill the great comments I got so far (thanks everyone!) on the first rough draft of the homepage, so we can keep all the information together. Let me run over the major points. Design -- 1. Images of real life chickens The image I used on the homepage is a random image of chickens (not from Alaric) but carries a creative commons license which allows free commercial use. The only thing we need to do is to add some sort of credit to the photographer on the site. Yet, Alaric, if you are listening and able to shoot some pics of your chicks...? Yaroslav pointed out that the picture is currently a bit attention demanding, so I will see to tone it down a bit. Maybe a different (brighter?) picture might seek less attention. 2. Still much text As some have correctly pointed out, there is still a load of text (amount did not change that much over the original), yet I intentionally did not touch the actual content. I am in no (technical knowledgeable) position to edit the text. I am fully aware that the text, especially the bullet points and feature listings, is much too long. They are not punchy enough, not (dare I say it) commercial enough. A powerful bullet I like (short, to the point) is: Very supportive community, with a wide intellectual background.. I think this should be an example for the other points. So I reach out to you guys to help reshape these texts into a more to-the-point and accurate form. Mario already provided some good alternative texts. 3. Colors Almost everyone pointed out that some texts are not very readable with the current color scheme. I agree (sorry for that ;) ). Also, Mario, yes I tried to incorporate the colors of the logo into the site, simply because I like both the logo and its colors. It just feels right. It's playful and yet professional. I feel a bit uncomfortable with picking a different color scheme as I think this would fight the logo very quickly. On the other hand...my main focus is not design...so I could just be talking gibberish here. Or...do you also mean we could change the actual colors of the logo, Mario? If there are any color-aware folks in the room to comment on thisplease do! Features 1. Interactive shell As I understand it this would be not as feasible as I first thought, and, in hindsight, for good reason (Thanks for pointing out why everyone). So, let us assume we do not get an interactive shell...yet I do find it important that we show some code examples right on the front page. Maybe three or four (or more!) samples depicting typical features of CHICKEN. These samples could be easily flipped through with a few navigation buttons, they would carry a clear title per sample and a few comments inline of what this code is about. Programmers love to see beautiful code...right? 2. Map of CHICKEN around the world Hmmm...Peter made a good remark about privacy...and apparently this has been attempted before and has already seen its exit. No map then. 3. Latest changes Mario was not very favorable about the Latest changes section on the homepage...yet this is something I see with a lot of languages and end-user tools. To me, it shows that there is progress going on. If I see no version numbers/release dates I tend to get suspicious. If there is a clear timeline that shows that the project is alive, however, it boosts my confidence in giving it a try. Or does that sound too naive? 4. Eggs list Peter mentioned a link to the eggs list...actually I did not think about that at all, but it is indeed very important to show some major eggs right on the front page. Eggs are what can make the language more interesting to more higher level users and to show that a lot of tooling is already available. CHICKEN is not only a compiler for/dialect of Scheme, but an impressive tool belt as well. General --- 1. Structure Matt wrote a very insightful reply towards how we should approach this beast. First, Matt, don't feel hopelessly outclassed...I wrote but two eggs which I consider to be the basics of the basics. I shamefully haven't touched CHICKEN and wasn't present in the community for the whole 2014... Next, the reference to the Open Dylan is very nice. They have the exact features I was looking for. Yet their design is, regretfully, a simple Bootstrap theme. Finally, I also agree that only reforming the homepage, only to fall back to the current design for the remainder of the site, only adds insult to injury. I too think it is therefor important to try and get a picture of how the site is currently structured (sitemap?) and see how we can (and if we need to) restructure the information to be better accessible and digestible. Moving the Download button more in sight and presenting more apparent top links to relevant parts of the site was my feeble
Re: [Chicken-users] Homepage design proposal
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess we're stuck with a server-side solution unless we can get Chicken running on this little emulator http://bellard.org/jslinux/. repl.it may be of inspiration! Thanks, K. On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 1:08 PM, Yaroslav Tsarko eriktsa...@googlemail.com wrote: Kristian, On 23.01.2015 14:34, Kristian Lein-Mathisen wrote: Has anybody played with the idea of compiling CHICKEN with emscripten http://emscripten.org/? That way, we could have a client-side REPL to experiment with on the homepage. As far as I could understand it, one does not simply compile CHICKEN using emscripten because of setjmp/longjmp (according to this page: http://kripken.github.io/emscripten-site/docs/porting/guidelines/portability_guidelines.html) without special porting. Thanks, Yaroslav ___ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users ___ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users
Re: [Chicken-users] Homepage design proposal
On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 07:17:17PM +0330, Bahman Movaqar wrote: I strongly disagree with using CHICKEN for the website. Let's keep things simple by using the right tool for the job. I think you're mixing up two things. One is the tool to generate the website and the other is the online try CHICKEN here evaluator. The earlier discussion was about how to make the try CHICKEN online REPL work, while it looks like you're talking about the tool to generate the website (if it isn't just static HTML). These days there are some good static website generators out there, like JBake and Jekyll, with which one can use HTML or asciidoc or Markdown to generate a static website. Hosting these kind of websites is extremely cheap: they only need HTML (no PHP or .NET or anything). And they are very fast. The website content can be version'ed on a git repository and regenerated and copied to the web-server upon a git push. We have a perfectly fine static website generator called Hyde, which most of us use for their personal blogs and websites (including my own more-magic.net and pebble-software.nl). See http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/hyde If we have this, why work with lesser languages? Cheers, Peter signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users
Re: [Chicken-users] Homepage design proposal
On 01/23/2015 07:25 PM, Peter Bex wrote: On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 07:17:17PM +0330, Bahman Movaqar wrote: I strongly disagree with using CHICKEN for the website. Let's keep things simple by using the right tool for the job. I think you're mixing up two things. One is the tool to generate the website and the other is the online try CHICKEN here evaluator. Ah...my mistake then. Yes..as you said, I was under the impression that the topic is the website content. The earlier discussion was about how to make the try CHICKEN online REPL work, while it looks like you're talking about the tool to generate the website (if it isn't just static HTML). These days there are some good static website generators out there, like JBake and Jekyll, with which one can use HTML or asciidoc or Markdown to generate a static website. Hosting these kind of websites is extremely cheap: they only need HTML (no PHP or .NET or anything). And they are very fast. The website content can be version'ed on a git repository and regenerated and copied to the web-server upon a git push. We have a perfectly fine static website generator called Hyde, which most of us use for their personal blogs and websites (including my own more-magic.net and pebble-software.nl). See http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/hyde If we have this, why work with lesser languages? Makes sense...as long they are able to get the job done. PS: I never dared to suggest anyone to use PHP or .NET. NEVER. I was actually bringing their names up as bad decisions for website backend :-) -- Bahman Movaqar http://BahmanM.com - https://twitter.com/bahman__m https://github.com/bahmanm - https://gist.github.com/bahmanm PGP Key ID: 0x6AB5BD68 (keyserver2.pgp.com) signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users
Re: [Chicken-users] Homepage design proposal
I strongly disagree with using CHICKEN for the website. Let's keep things simple by using the right tool for the job. These days there are some good static website generators out there, like JBake and Jekyll, with which one can use HTML or asciidoc or Markdown to generate a static website. Hosting these kind of websites is extremely cheap: they only need HTML (no PHP or .NET or anything). And they are very fast. The website content can be version'ed on a git repository and regenerated and copied to the web-server upon a git push. Just my 2 cents. On 01/23/2015 06:03 PM, Kristian Lein-Mathisen wrote: Yeah, that makes sense. I guess we're stuck with a server-side solution unless we can get Chicken running on this little emulator http://bellard.org/jslinux/. repl.it http://repl.it may be of inspiration! Thanks, K. On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 1:08 PM, Yaroslav Tsarko eriktsa...@googlemail.com mailto:eriktsa...@googlemail.com wrote: Kristian, On 23.01.2015 tel:23.01.2015 14:34, Kristian Lein-Mathisen wrote: Has anybody played with the idea of compiling CHICKEN with emscripten http://emscripten.org/? That way, we could have a client-side REPL to experiment with on the homepage. As far as I could understand it, one does not simply compile CHICKEN using emscripten because of setjmp/longjmp (according to this page: http://kripken.github.io/emscripten-site/docs/porting/guidelines/portability_guidelines.html) without special porting. Thanks, Yaroslav ___ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org mailto:Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users ___ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users -- Bahman Movaqar http://BahmanM.com - https://twitter.com/bahman__m https://github.com/bahmanm - https://gist.github.com/bahmanm PGP Key ID: 0x6AB5BD68 (keyserver2.pgp.com) signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users
