Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On 4 Jun 2014, at 7:27 am, Wout Mertens wout.mert...@gmail.com wrote: I really don't like that Nixpkgs is being buried in favor of NixOS. More people using Nixpkgs = more bugs found+fixed, more packages, newer versions, more switches to NixOS. Nixpkgs is a stepping stone. Why point Homebrew users to Nix? They only want to have an nginx install, or a more recent rsync etc. They don't want to reinvent Nixpkgs... +1 I am an OS X user and I love nix and nixpkgs – I would love to see a website describing the benefits of both for users of non-NixOS operating systems. ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
Maybe nixpkgs deserves its own website. I for one am not interested in NixOS at this point, but I can see it have a much larger impact and user base than nixpkgs (think mobile platform). Nixpkg consumers are probably less sensitive to the lookfeel of a website, so that site could be pretty simple and even hosted on github, for example. Pj. On Mon, Jun 02, 2014 at 06:39:56PM +0200, Wout Mertens wrote: Hi Eelco! On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 3:58 PM, Eelco Dolstra eelco.dols...@logicblox.com wrote: On 01/06/14 09:58, Wout Mertens wrote: Â * Nixpkgs should be more visible Actually, a major goal in the redesign was to *get rid* of all the non-NixOS stuff. It's the NixOS homepage, after all, not the Nixpkgs homepage. Confronting visitors with a lot of other projects is just confusing. Ok, I get that... but on the other hand Nixpkgs is a *major* thing. I can see it supplanting Homebrew on the Mac once it has more packages, and it allows deploying newer versions of services on older distributions, safely. I agree that Nix is not that interesting to end-users. Likewise, NixOps is very interesting but probably only to a small subset of potential NixOS users. So how about making the discover/download section of the homepage more visually separate from the news section, and splitting it vertically: ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On 06/03/2014 01:16 PM, Pjotr Prins wrote: Maybe nixpkgs deserves its own website. I'm quite against separating nixpkgs from nixos, on the contrary. My intuition is that nixpkgs makes more than half of what nixos is; even when putting aside the fact that nixos expressions also reside in nixpkgs repo nowadays. There are nixos-specific expressions like for services and the system config, but mostly they even rely heavily on the common packaged stuff. Also, much of the nixpkgs stuff doesn't really work well out of nixos, because packagers often assume our specific /run/* paths, or just because IMO relatively very few use it elsewhere on Linux (Darwin is a bit separate platform). Vlada smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
Hi, On 03/06/14 13:16, Pjotr Prins wrote: Maybe nixpkgs deserves its own website. It already has: http://nixos.org/nixpkgs/ It's not much though, and I'm not sure if it makes sense to make it very prominent. For instance, if you'd want to lure people away from Homebrew, it would make more sense to point to them http://nixos.org/nix/. -- Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/ ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
I really don't like that Nixpkgs is being buried in favor of NixOS. More people using Nixpkgs = more bugs found+fixed, more packages, newer versions, more switches to NixOS. Nixpkgs is a stepping stone. Why point Homebrew users to Nix? They only want to have an nginx install, or a more recent rsync etc. They don't want to reinvent Nixpkgs... On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 2:40 PM, Eelco Dolstra eelco.dols...@logicblox.com wrote: Hi, On 03/06/14 13:16, Pjotr Prins wrote: Maybe nixpkgs deserves its own website. It already has: http://nixos.org/nixpkgs/ It's not much though, and I'm not sure if it makes sense to make it very prominent. For instance, if you'd want to lure people away from Homebrew, it would make more sense to point to them http://nixos.org/nix/. -- Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/ ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
Hi Wout, On 01/06/14 09:58, Wout Mertens wrote: * Nixpkgs should be more visible Actually, a major goal in the redesign was to *get rid* of all the non-NixOS stuff. It's the NixOS homepage, after all, not the Nixpkgs homepage. Confronting visitors with a lot of other projects is just confusing. I actually considered removing the Projects menu in the navbar, since it's not really useful. (E.g. if you want the patchelf page, you can just google for it.) It would be nice to have a Packages link in the navbar though, like on archlinux.org, linking to a easily browseable list of available packages. Also, the front page could have a blurb about the number of packages available in NixOS, which could link to Nixpkgs. * The front page is serving new visitors and active users, it should pick one. I considered removing all the news from the homepage, but 1) it seems useful to show activity on the homepage, just to convey that the project is alive; 2) visitors don't have to read it, it's easy to mentally filter it, so I felt it doesn't hurt much to have it there. o Front page mostly for active users: https://www.archlinux.org/ http://www.gentoo.org/ o Front page mostly for discovery/downloads: http://videolan.org Videolan.org actually has a pretty similar layout to nixos.org: a description + big download button, followed by news/blogs. -- Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/ ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
Eelco Dolstra eelco.dols...@logicblox.com wrote: Actually, a major goal in the redesign was to *get rid* of all the non-NixOS stuff. It's the NixOS homepage, after all, not the Nixpkgs homepage. Confronting visitors with a lot of other projects is just confusing. While non-NixOS stuff belongs into the wiki, nixpkgs itself is not quite non-NixOS. I very much like the structure of the Arch Linux homepage with its small introduction (no large fonts), news as the primary content and recent activity in the package database. On the right hand side you find links to documentation and other stuff. NixOS differs from other distributions in that it is actually a collection of projects that work together. As such a projects menu should appear somewhere on the page and you should not have to unroll it first. It should include at least (here in alphabetical order): * Hydra, * Nixops, * NixOS, * nixpkgs. I agree that helper packages like PatchELF do not belong there. It would be nice to have a Packages link in the navbar though, like on archlinux.org, linking to a easily browseable list of available packages. Also, the front page could have a blurb about the number of packages available in NixOS, which could link to Nixpkgs. This should be easy enough by using nix-env's XML output together with a suitable XSLT stylesheet. Hydra could take care of maintaining it. * The front page is serving new visitors and active users, it should pick one. I considered removing all the news from the homepage, but 1) it seems useful to show activity on the homepage, just to convey that the project is alive; 2) visitors don't have to read it, it's easy to mentally filter it, so I felt it doesn't hurt much to have it there. News are fine. They are useful both to newcomers and to active users. Videolan.org actually has a pretty similar layout to nixos.org: a description + big download button, followed by news/blogs. I would compare VideoLAN less to a distribution and more to a monolithic software package similar to Firefox or LibreOffice. Also I wouldn't like people to mistake NixOS as just another distro. It is, among other things, a development and (continuous) deployment platform. The homepage should make this clear. Greets, Ertugrul -- Ertugrul Söylemez ert...@gmx.de Key-ID: F9B5212A Fingerprint: 8D89 7AC9 21CF F868 F074 9058 30CB D56F F9B5 212A pgpU5_7dQ32YB.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
Hi Eelco! On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 3:58 PM, Eelco Dolstra eelco.dols...@logicblox.com wrote: On 01/06/14 09:58, Wout Mertens wrote: * Nixpkgs should be more visible Actually, a major goal in the redesign was to *get rid* of all the non-NixOS stuff. It's the NixOS homepage, after all, not the Nixpkgs homepage. Confronting visitors with a lot of other projects is just confusing. Ok, I get that... but on the other hand Nixpkgs is a *major* thing. I can see it supplanting Homebrew on the Mac once it has more packages, and it allows deploying newer versions of services on older distributions, safely. I agree that Nix is not that interesting to end-users. Likewise, NixOps is very interesting but probably only to a small subset of potential NixOS users. So how about making the discover/download section of the homepage more visually separate from the news section, and splitting it vertically: |NixOS is Awesome! | NixPkgs installs anywhere! | | * declarative * instant rollback * ... | * Debian * RedHat * Suse * OS X * ... | | [Download] [Learn More]|(6500 pkgs) [Download] [Learn More]| News Blogs News - News Twitter News - News Commits It would be nice to have a Packages link in the navbar though, like on archlinux.org, linking to a easily browseable list of available packages. Also, the front page could have a blurb about the number of packages available in NixOS, which could link to Nixpkgs. Yes a package list would be great. How do you count the packages btw? nix-env lists 24k :) * The front page is serving new visitors and active users, it should pick one. I considered removing all the news from the homepage, but 1) it seems useful to show activity on the homepage, just to convey that the project is alive; 2) visitors don't have to read it, it's easy to mentally filter it, so I felt it doesn't hurt much to have it there. Yeah... although right now I think it is visually too much like the learn about nixos part, and a layout with more spacing and clear sectioning would help. Wout. ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On Sun, Jun 1, 2014 at 2:19 AM, Eelco Dolstra eelco.dols...@logicblox.com wrote: Obligatory link: http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ To be fair, this carousel doesn't stop on mouseover, and it complains that users don't interact with them. I see carousels more as a highlighter for lazy visitors. They should be visual, contain few words, and repeat what's on the page elsewhere. They're like the ad space in a subway station - peripheral information infusion. Anyway :) To recap the conversation so far: Only agreements: - Help should be Documentation = Pull request sent - Nixpkgs should be more visible - I propose splitting the NixOS blurb between Nixpkgs and NixOS equally, with [Learn More] buttons on each Under discussion: - The front page is serving new visitors and active users, it should pick one. - Front page mostly for active users: https://www.archlinux.org/ http://www.gentoo.org/ - Front page mostly for discovery/downloads: http://videolan.org http://mozilla.org http://foundation.zurb.com/ - Mix: http://www.gnome.org/ http://kde.org/ http://www.libreoffice.org/ - I prefer the Gnome setup: A blurb for gnome+more info/download, a small section of news, and links to parts of the site specialized in each. Contention: - *For project discovery, a 2-minute video is excellent. I've spent many a 2-5 minute with colleagues watching a video about some project we were discovering. * - Several people dislike videos, and the conversation centered about 20+minute videos. - I really mean TWO minutes. You click, you get a whirlwind tour of nixpkgs and nixos, done. - Highlights could be: - install another version of something side-by-side with the one in your aging distribution, in a few keystrokes - ls -l /bin /sbin /usr on NixOS - nothing! - Upgrade from 14.04 to unstable - and go back! - Environments: Python 2/3, Ruby, Haskell? (don't know much about these) Wout. ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On 05/31/2014 12:22 PM, Moritz Ulrich wrote: And another thing: Is it really a good idea to have april fools jokes on the front page? When NiJS was announced, I actually fell for it at first. I don't think showing this to newcomers helps. ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev It seems to be gone now which means I had to search in horror to find out whether it was what I thought it was. Funnily it was posted to the Guix ML which to me seems to be doing the same thing as what the joke was about except in Guile. -- Mateusz K. ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On Sat, 31 May 2014 17:29:12 -0700 M. P. Ashton d...@imap.cc wrote: I don't mind the new website at all. I think it looks nice, and it does seem more professional than the old one. If you need to look like some Enter Prise Service (typos intended) to deserve the professional label, I'm happy to look unprofessional. [...] I'm afraid I must not have written very clearly. I certainly didn't intend to imply that you were wrong about anything. I just thought I'd tell Dr Dolstra and the list about my own experience, since it was obviously very different to yours and the other fellow's. (And was also not wrong.) I'm sorry for the confusion. As I'm sure you and the other knowledgeable participants will have no trouble working out these weighty matters amongst yourselves, and I actually don't care that much about this anyway, I'll just step aside and let you all do that. No worries, I didn't mean to be offensive. This is not about my experience, but about my opinion, and I'm just stating that we do not have to follow the lead of large websites, particularly since the goal of our website is to convey useful information. It does not provide a web service in the traditional sense. The new website does have a few new features, but most of them look like stopgaps to me, like the commit history, which isn't really useful on the home page. I would prefer the subprojects themselves to take most of the space with a very short introduction at the top. Greets, Ertugrul -- Ertugrul Söylemez ert...@gmx.de ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On 06/01/2014 06:52 PM, Mateusz Kowalczyk wrote: Funnily it was posted to the Guix ML which to me seems to be doing the same thing as what the joke was about except in Guile. The resemblance to Guix was actually the main reason why I thought it wasn't a joke. :-) Vlada smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On Fri, 30 May 2014 13:27:00 -0700 M. P. Ashton d...@imap.cc wrote: I don't mind the new website at all. I think it looks nice, and it does seem more professional than the old one. If you need to look like some Enter Prise Service (typos intended) to deserve the professional label, I'm happy to look unprofessional. It also has a more promotional bent, which may or may not fit the project's goals -- I don't know if world domination is an aim for the project right now, but the new website seems to satisfy that goal much better than the old one. I can't speak for the whole community, but I would say the project's aim is to provide a decent deployment system. A growing community is certainly helpful, yet we have managed to get this far with a comparatively small one. In either case there is no need for an Enter Prise Web Site (typos intended) to be successful. I don't care for websites sending me to external servers, mostly because the load time tends to become much longer, and occasionally the external servers don't cooperate. But for me it's not such a big deal. I'm pretty sure Google and NSA and Facebook know more about me than I do, even if I studiously use DuckDuckGo (which is probably a trigger word). As Jay explained we shouldn't actively contribute to their power. Anyway, this problem has been fixed. Someone said that they couldn't find the manual -- I found it very quickly under HELP. I usually look for Documentation first, but Help seemed a reasonable second guess. At least two of us overlooked the top bar the first time, including myself, and neither of us is a novice in web-browsing. This is very strong evidence that there must be something wrong with the design. This bar is more important than everything else on the page, so it should be very visible. In fact I'd go as far as to say that a single-line bar isn't even sufficient. For example the NixOS projects should be visible all the time. They are our bread and butter. So, thanks for working on this -- I appreciate it, FWIW. Don't get me wrong. I do appreciate the work, but the process behind it was completely wrong. The website was switched before the community even had a chance to review it. I'd ask all committers to pay more attention to what the community says before applying patches. Greets, Ertugrul -- Ertugrul Söylemez ert...@gmx.de ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
So concretely: - Help should be Documentation or Docs, I tripped over the same thing - I miss the very visible introduction to each of the components - Nix begets Nixpkgs begets NixOS begets NixOps (so is DisNix dead?). - The Projects pulldown could be converted into vertical tabs on the index page - A carousel could be used to highlight each: Logo, blurb, link to the project page - I see no mention of Nixpkgs at all, while I think that's an excellent foot in the door. - Just install this thing without any dependencies, on any distribution, and all your installation woes are solved!. - I know you guys live in a NixOS world, but I'm still trying to convince management of even using Nixpkgs on Ubuntu 12.04 - For project discovery, a 2-minute video is excellent. I've spent many a 2-5 minute with colleagues watching a video about some project we were discovering. - I suppose I could make one but I feel unqualified :) - The Twitter stream should be in a shorter box but below the blogs, then commits, ordering news in order of most likely use to homepage visitors. - I'm reasoning that visitors want to learn about NixOS, and those who know go to github or use the mailing list - Shouldn't monitor.nixos.org and status.nixos.org also be linked? How about together with Hydra in a Status dropdown? (Dis|A)greements? Wout. On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 10:53 PM, Jay Sulzberger j...@panix.com wrote: On Fri, 30 May 2014, M. P. Ashton d...@imap.cc wrote: I don't mind the new website at all. I think it looks nice, and it does seem more professional than the old one. It also has a more promotional bent, which may or may not fit the project's goals -- I don't know if world domination is an aim for the project right now, but the new website seems to satisfy that goal much better than the old one. I don't care for websites sending me to external servers, mostly because the load time tends to become much longer, and occasionally the external servers don't cooperate. But for me it's not such a big deal. I'm pretty sure Google and NSA and Facebook know more about me than I do, even if I studiously use DuckDuckGo (which is probably a trigger word). I think the website should not, by design, send tracking information to any third party. We may be being tracked with exquisite care and by means of delightfully subtle statistics, but formal collaboration is different from acquiescence. We may not actively fight, on this front, the battle against the Panopticon Machine of the Englobulators, but neither need we give them for free what is ours, and not theirs, by right. oo--JS. Someone said that they couldn't find the manual -- I found it very quickly under HELP. I usually look for Documentation first, but Help seemed a reasonable second guess. So, thanks for working on this -- I appreciate it, FWIW. --mpa ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
- Help should be Documentation or Docs, I tripped over the same thing Actually, the design i too like GitHub where we have learned that the top bar is about _site platform_, not about the project in question. I don't know whether this is a problem for many others but it may be that people don't pay much attention to the top bar. - I miss the very visible introduction to each of the components - Nix begets Nixpkgs begets NixOS begets NixOps (so is DisNix dead?). Yes, the granularity of getting some use from each step without the rest was better visible before. - The Projects pulldown could be converted into vertical tabs on the index page - A carousel could be used to highlight each: Logo, blurb, link to the project page Carousels with blurbs are often annoying. You start to read and it switches. - I see no mention of Nixpkgs at all, while I think that's an excellent foot in the door. - Just install this thing without any dependencies, on any distribution, and all your installation woes are solved!. - I know you guys live in a NixOS world, but I'm still trying to convince management of even using Nixpkgs on Ubuntu 12.04 Agreed. I would actually give many novices advice to install Nixpkgs first, so they don't have to know how NixOS specifies partition layouts etc., then install NixOS when they are comfortable using Nix. - For project discovery, a 2-minute video is excellent. I've spent many a 2-5 minute with colleagues watching a video about some project we were discovering. - I suppose I could make one but I feel unqualified :) Given that for Nix* even the screenshots can be plain text most of the time, I'd say that transcript is better than video almost always… - The Twitter stream should be in a shorter box but below the blogs, then commits, ordering news in order of most likely use to homepage visitors. - I'm reasoning that visitors want to learn about NixOS, and those who know go to github or use the mailing list I agree that blog posts usually assume less context than Twitter messages and obviously most commit messages assume understanding the general structure of code. So for the newcomers it is reasonable to give them something they can understand immediately. - Shouldn't monitor.nixos.org and status.nixos.org also be linked? How about together with Hydra in a Status dropdown? Ho, there is status.nixos.org… Not sure if either of this should be on the front page. Although putting them under the Hydra link in a dropdown is probably a good idea. ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
This is very hard, and it's certainly impossible to satisfy everyone, but still, if we try hard to be objective... On 05/31/2014 09:10 AM, Wout Mertens wrote: So concretely: * Help should be Documentation or Docs, I tripped over the same thing Yes, the word Help is IMO rarely used in this sense. To me it associates to Contribute / Help us easily as well. * I miss the very visible introduction to each of the components [...] * I see no mention of Nixpkgs at all [...] * For project discovery, a 2-minute video is excellent. [...] o I suppose I could make one but I feel unqualified :) I might be in minority, but the current layout does seem weird: - The first half of what you see is focused on newcomers (those who know nothing about the project). - The second half contains various types of news. So we have two halves with nontrivial content that are useful to *different* sets of people. Newcomers will hardly get good idea from recent news (as it contains mostly differential information), and the introductory half will mostly be useless to anyone but newcomers :-) Personally, I would probably convert the homepage to a simply structured collection of most useful links, naturally starting with a big fat one like Introduction to NixOS.org, so we would separate this specific group and could provide them *more* information (the half-page is only an advertisement, and can't give a basic idea about the project). Direct link to each of those projects would be nice, as IMO they're used a lot. News: currently it's more than one screenful of information (for me), so I would again separate it into nixos.org/news page. BTW, RSS/Atom are very useful for such things, and I see none on the homepage or planet. Some build status summary might also be on that page, like the timestamps+revisions of the latest channel bumps. Videos: I really prefer well-structured linked text (with images) to videos. IMO a text of comparable value is much easier to produce. I understand that videos are better at keeping attention of some people... BTW we *do* have recordings of several introductory Nix(OS) talks, notably the FOSDEM one. https://nixos.org/wiki/Nix(OS)_in_the_media_and_presentations DisNix: I *heard* it's largely orthogonal to NixOps and that it makes sense to use them together. Vlada smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 12:19 PM, Michael Raskin 7c6f4...@mail.ru wrote: Carousels with blurbs are often annoying. You start to read and it switches. Just hover it with your mouse and [if it is implemented properly] it won't switch. I've seen carousels that keep switching if you hover them two or three times in my life. That's braindead. ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
Carousels with blurbs are often annoying. You start to read and it switches. Just hover it with your mouse and [if it is implemented properly] it won't switch. I've seen carousels that keep switching if you hover them two or three times in my life. That's braindead. Don't know, I open a site (purely keyboard action) and start reading it while finding out where my mouse pointer is; so if reading already needs mouse pointer it's a loss. ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
Kirill Elagin kirela...@gmail.com writes: On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 12:19 PM, Michael Raskin 7c6f4...@mail.ru wrote: Carousels with blurbs are often annoying. You start to read and it switches. Just hover it with your mouse and [if it is implemented properly] it won't switch. I've seen carousels that keep switching if you hover them two or three times in my life. That's braindead. And without a mouse? Do I need to tap it every few seconds and hope that does not follow some link? ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
Vladimír Čunát writes: I might be in minority, but the current layout does seem weird: - The first half of what you see is focused on newcomers (those who know nothing about the project). - The second half contains various types of news. So we have two halves with nontrivial content that are useful to *different* sets of people. Newcomers will hardly get good idea from recent news (as it contains mostly differential information), and the introductory half will mostly be useless to anyone but newcomers :-) That's something I noticed too. When I open nixos.org on my screen, the 'What's NixOS' part of the page actually drowns in news. I'd prefer a much shorter news section pinned to the bottom of the page, which a noticeable whitespace to keep them separated. Right now, the news/introduction ratio is ~3/1, which is never good for a page which primary goal is to inform people about *what* NixOS is. Another thing is the giant header introducing NixOS: My brain automatically skips such big fonts, as I actually find them harder to read than normal sized text. It looks like it has to be this gigantic or else it would drown as well. Personally, I would probably convert the homepage to a simply structured collection of most useful links, naturally starting with a big fat one like Introduction to NixOS.org, so we would separate this specific group and could provide them *more* information (the half-page is only an advertisement, and can't give a basic idea about the project). Direct link to each of those projects would be nice, as IMO they're used a lot. That's pretty much how it was on the old site. Imo, that was really useful and a super nice way to get an overview of each of the projects. And in a decent font size, too. News: currently it's more than one screenful of information (for me), so I would again separate it into nixos.org/news page. BTW, RSS/Atom are very useful for such things, and I see none on the homepage or planet. Some build status summary might also be on that page, like the timestamps+revisions of the latest channel bumps. Videos: I really prefer well-structured linked text (with images) to videos. IMO a text of comparable value is much easier to produce. I understand that videos are better at keeping attention of some people... BTW we *do* have recordings of several introductory Nix(OS) talks, notably the FOSDEM one. https://nixos.org/wiki/Nix(OS)_in_the_media_and_presentations I don't think any video can ever replace an useful description. It can extend, or better explain some topics, but imo it's *much* easier to read a short pitch about something instead of watching a 20 minute video. *Especially* when it's about something as technical as NixOS. -- Moritz Ulrich pgpv9z9hLwU6h.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
And another thing: Is it really a good idea to have april fools jokes on the front page? When NiJS was announced, I actually fell for it at first. I don't think showing this to newcomers helps. -- Moritz Ulrich pgpckfwwrziLs.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On 05/31/2014 12:22 PM, Moritz Ulrich wrote: And another thing: Is it really a good idea to have april fools jokes on the front page? When NiJS was announced, I actually fell for it at first. I don't think showing this to newcomers helps. Yes, people will typically fail to notice the publication date :-) smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
I think people should write more stuff. Then it will disappear from the frontpage really quickly. From: nix-dev-boun...@lists.science.uu.nl [nix-dev-boun...@lists.science.uu.nl] on behalf of Vladimír Čunát [vcu...@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2014 12:45 PM To: nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl Subject: Re: [Nix-dev] New website On 05/31/2014 12:22 PM, Moritz Ulrich wrote: And another thing: Is it really a good idea to have april fools jokes on the front page? When NiJS was announced, I actually fell for it at first. I don't think showing this to newcomers helps. Yes, people will typically fail to notice the publication date :-) ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
Hi, interesting to see so many opinions on the new website. In stead of mentioning issues here in the mailing list, which is imho fine for general discussion, but hard to track specific issues, I would suggest people, who have (specific) issues/problems with the site, start making issues for specific problems/improvements at: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/issues . Even better, make a PR with some enhancements. Cheers, Rob On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Sander van der Burg - EWI s.vanderb...@tudelft.nl wrote: I think people should write more stuff. Then it will disappear from the frontpage really quickly. From: nix-dev-boun...@lists.science.uu.nl [ nix-dev-boun...@lists.science.uu.nl] on behalf of Vladimír Čunát [ vcu...@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2014 12:45 PM To: nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl Subject: Re: [Nix-dev] New website On 05/31/2014 12:22 PM, Moritz Ulrich wrote: And another thing: Is it really a good idea to have april fools jokes on the front page? When NiJS was announced, I actually fell for it at first. I don't think showing this to newcomers helps. Yes, people will typically fail to notice the publication date :-) ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev -- Rob Vermaas [email] rob.verm...@gmail.com ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
Hi, On 31/05/14 10:19, Michael Raskin wrote: Carousels with blurbs are often annoying. You start to read and it switches. Obligatory link: http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ - Shouldn't monitor.nixos.org and status.nixos.org also be linked? Yes, monitor should absolutely be linked from somewhere, such as in the Nixpkgs docs and from the Nixpkgs page. Status is really an internal thing. -- Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/ ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On Fri, May 30, 2014, at 11:49 PM, Ertugrul Söylemez wrote: On Fri, 30 May 2014 13:27:00 -0700 M. P. Ashton d...@imap.cc wrote: I don't mind the new website at all. I think it looks nice, and it does seem more professional than the old one. If you need to look like some Enter Prise Service (typos intended) to deserve the professional label, I'm happy to look unprofessional. [...] I'm afraid I must not have written very clearly. I certainly didn't intend to imply that you were wrong about anything. I just thought I'd tell Dr Dolstra and the list about my own experience, since it was obviously very different to yours and the other fellow's. (And was also not wrong.) I'm sorry for the confusion. As I'm sure you and the other knowledgeable participants will have no trouble working out these weighty matters amongst yourselves, and I actually don't care that much about this anyway, I'll just step aside and let you all do that. regards --mpa ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
So I just had a look at the new NixOS website, and I have a major problem with it... I can't find the documentation. And that's as someone who already knows what NixOS is and why I'd want to use it. Worse, anything about NixOps/etc is hidden away in a menu in the top right corner! I didn't even notice the top bar until I'd gone to look a few more times. Why can't we have a Debian-style places to go menu on the front page, front and centre? https://www.debian.org/ Even FreeBSD's is better in terms of being able to figure out where to go. http://www.freebsd.org/ The current front page has a huge amount of fluff, but the call to action (get it) is all wrong; nobody downloads new operating systems on a whim, they want to see examples of what it would do for them. The getting started section on the Debian front page goes a long way to fixing this. So basically, what the front page needs is (a) a fairly comprehensive and obvious menu of things a user would want from the site, and (b) links off to places where a new user can find out more. Probably a hook (NixOS is a Linux distribution which uses a fully declarative package manager and integrated configuration management system, making system configuration and upgrades painless), maybe a snippet of a configuration.nix showing off how easy it is to set up, say, a simple web server or a desktop environment, and maybe a little widget saying what the current version is + a couple of titles of the latest news articles. I'm not sure the declarative, reliable, devops-friendly fluff helps anybody. Just my two cents, Shell On 30 May 2014 14:26, Ertugrul Söylemez ert...@gmx.de wrote: Hello there, I'm looking at the new website with mixed feelings. Being less static is a good idea, so I appreciate the news, blog posts and commits sections. On the other hand it's way uglier and less lucid compared to the old website. These are minor design issues that we can talk about and fix. However, one issue with the new site I would rate as critical: As a good web developer NEVER EVER download anything from external servers unless it is necessary, especially not from entities like Google, Facebook or Twitter. If at all, do it server-side. The new website unnecessarily downloads jQuery from the Google servers, not only compromising our privacy, but also every NoScript or Ghostery user will be told: This website compromises your privacy!. And for what? For a dropdown menu? Come on! You don't even need JavaScript for that. CSS alone can handle it much nicer. I have managed to keep my browser from sending my browsing habits to Google for a long time now. Indeed, I don't even use Google as a search engine (there's DuckDuckGo). And today my very Linux distribution forces me to allow access to Google servers. That's not going to happen, so currently I'm unable to navigate the website at all. This is the top issue, so as kindly as my current anger allows, I'm asking you to fix this as soon as possible. I hope I'm not the only privacy-minded NixOS user. As SPJ once said, avoid success at all costs, because this is what happens when you don't. I'm not sure the old website really needed to be replaced, but since it was, please remove the badies and bring back the goodies. Also in this case please don't tell me to send a pull request. This is web development! What would take the original developer five minutes would take me hours. By the way, the Hydra frontend has the same issue. Greets, Ertugrul -- Ertugrul Söylemez ert...@gmx.de ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
Shell: why don't you make a mockup or create a pull request: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage Ertugrul: Looks like your wish was granted: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/commit/6803987bce4ff4bca1a5482ef25bfa99f4023538 On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 3:53 PM, Shell Turner cam.t...@gmail.com wrote: So I just had a look at the new NixOS website, and I have a major problem with it... I can't find the documentation. And that's as someone who already knows what NixOS is and why I'd want to use it. Worse, anything about NixOps/etc is hidden away in a menu in the top right corner! I didn't even notice the top bar until I'd gone to look a few more times. Why can't we have a Debian-style places to go menu on the front page, front and centre? https://www.debian.org/ Even FreeBSD's is better in terms of being able to figure out where to go. http://www.freebsd.org/ The current front page has a huge amount of fluff, but the call to action (get it) is all wrong; nobody downloads new operating systems on a whim, they want to see examples of what it would do for them. The getting started section on the Debian front page goes a long way to fixing this. So basically, what the front page needs is (a) a fairly comprehensive and obvious menu of things a user would want from the site, and (b) links off to places where a new user can find out more. Probably a hook (NixOS is a Linux distribution which uses a fully declarative package manager and integrated configuration management system, making system configuration and upgrades painless), maybe a snippet of a configuration.nix showing off how easy it is to set up, say, a simple web server or a desktop environment, and maybe a little widget saying what the current version is + a couple of titles of the latest news articles. I'm not sure the declarative, reliable, devops-friendly fluff helps anybody. Just my two cents, Shell On 30 May 2014 14:26, Ertugrul Söylemez ert...@gmx.de wrote: Hello there, I'm looking at the new website with mixed feelings. Being less static is a good idea, so I appreciate the news, blog posts and commits sections. On the other hand it's way uglier and less lucid compared to the old website. These are minor design issues that we can talk about and fix. However, one issue with the new site I would rate as critical: As a good web developer NEVER EVER download anything from external servers unless it is necessary, especially not from entities like Google, Facebook or Twitter. If at all, do it server-side. The new website unnecessarily downloads jQuery from the Google servers, not only compromising our privacy, but also every NoScript or Ghostery user will be told: This website compromises your privacy!. And for what? For a dropdown menu? Come on! You don't even need JavaScript for that. CSS alone can handle it much nicer. I have managed to keep my browser from sending my browsing habits to Google for a long time now. Indeed, I don't even use Google as a search engine (there's DuckDuckGo). And today my very Linux distribution forces me to allow access to Google servers. That's not going to happen, so currently I'm unable to navigate the website at all. This is the top issue, so as kindly as my current anger allows, I'm asking you to fix this as soon as possible. I hope I'm not the only privacy-minded NixOS user. As SPJ once said, avoid success at all costs, because this is what happens when you don't. I'm not sure the old website really needed to be replaced, but since it was, please remove the badies and bring back the goodies. Also in this case please don't tell me to send a pull request. This is web development! What would take the original developer five minutes would take me hours. By the way, the Hydra frontend has the same issue. Greets, Ertugrul -- Ertugrul Söylemez ert...@gmx.de ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On Fri, 30 May 2014 17:28:28 +0200 Wout Mertens wout.mert...@gmail.com wrote: Shell: why don't you make a mockup or create a pull request: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage Ertugrul: Looks like your wish was granted: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/commit/6803987bce4ff4bca1a5482ef25bfa99f4023538 Yeah, gladly my issue was easy to resolve. Shell's point is more fundamental and I could probably help in my spare time to approach a solution. I wonder what you think of using Hakyll to generate the website instead of the current XML-based toolkit. It would allow us to use lightweight markup languages like Markdown and generate CSS from something more modular like Clay. It does require some basic Haskell knowledge though. -- Ertugrul Söylemez ert...@gmx.de ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On 05/30/2014 06:23 PM, Ertugrul Söylemez wrote: I wonder what you think of using Hakyll to generate the website instead of the current XML-based toolkit. I guess that's connected to our documentation being written in docbook. We've had quite some discussions about that, e.g. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/1960 Vlada smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
Hi, On 30/05/14 15:26, Ertugrul Söylemez wrote: I'm looking at the new website with mixed feelings. Being less static is a good idea, so I appreciate the news, blog posts and commits sections. On the other hand it's way uglier and less lucid compared to the old website. I'm flattered you consider my shitty, amateur design from 5 years ago superior to the work of the Twitter professionals... Anyway, Rob removed the external jQuery references, so now only AWS and the NSA can monitor your nixos.org visits. -- Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/ ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
I'm looking at the new website with mixed feelings. Being less static is a good idea, so I appreciate the news, blog posts and commits sections. On the other hand it's way uglier and less lucid compared to the old website. I'm flattered you consider my shitty, amateur design from 5 years ago superior to the work of the Twitter professionals... amateur aka: lightweight unique content-centric … I guess what is the most important benefit is the last: Twitter Bootstrap comes with expectations about what goes where and for no project these expectations fit the project needs precisely… http://web.archive.org/web/20140517201632/http://nixos.org/ follows your idea of importance of content, not some predefined categories, so it looks better (I hope no one will doubt that you know what content on NixOS.org is important better than the theme knows) ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On Fri, 30 May 2014 20:26:08 +0200 Eelco Dolstra eelco.dols...@logicblox.com wrote: I'm flattered you consider my shitty, amateur design from 5 years ago superior to the work of the Twitter professionals... It was delightfully easy to navigate. Twitter never felt like that. I'd go as far as to say that Twitter's web design sucks. Michael summarized it even better: content-centric. The web designs of all those large websites is not content-centric, but rather service-centric. Never forget that YOU ARE USING FACEBOOK, AND WE RULE YOUR WORLD!. Neither do we need to nor should we follow these examples. Greets, Ertugrul -- Ertugrul Söylemez ert...@gmx.de ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
I don't mind the new website at all. I think it looks nice, and it does seem more professional than the old one. It also has a more promotional bent, which may or may not fit the project's goals -- I don't know if world domination is an aim for the project right now, but the new website seems to satisfy that goal much better than the old one. I don't care for websites sending me to external servers, mostly because the load time tends to become much longer, and occasionally the external servers don't cooperate. But for me it's not such a big deal. I'm pretty sure Google and NSA and Facebook know more about me than I do, even if I studiously use DuckDuckGo (which is probably a trigger word). Someone said that they couldn't find the manual -- I found it very quickly under HELP. I usually look for Documentation first, but Help seemed a reasonable second guess. So, thanks for working on this -- I appreciate it, FWIW. --mpa ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
Re: [Nix-dev] New website
On Fri, 30 May 2014, M. P. Ashton d...@imap.cc wrote: I don't mind the new website at all. I think it looks nice, and it does seem more professional than the old one. It also has a more promotional bent, which may or may not fit the project's goals -- I don't know if world domination is an aim for the project right now, but the new website seems to satisfy that goal much better than the old one. I don't care for websites sending me to external servers, mostly because the load time tends to become much longer, and occasionally the external servers don't cooperate. But for me it's not such a big deal. I'm pretty sure Google and NSA and Facebook know more about me than I do, even if I studiously use DuckDuckGo (which is probably a trigger word). I think the website should not, by design, send tracking information to any third party. We may be being tracked with exquisite care and by means of delightfully subtle statistics, but formal collaboration is different from acquiescence. We may not actively fight, on this front, the battle against the Panopticon Machine of the Englobulators, but neither need we give them for free what is ours, and not theirs, by right. oo--JS. Someone said that they couldn't find the manual -- I found it very quickly under HELP. I usually look for Documentation first, but Help seemed a reasonable second guess. So, thanks for working on this -- I appreciate it, FWIW. --mpa ___ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
