[Nix-dev] New website

[Vladimír Čunát]

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


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 3251 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Url : http://lists.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/attachments/20140531/b8e9d449/attachment.bin