Re: Site facelift?

[roboticus]

locust:

As far as how the site looks: There's plenty of flexibility available to you if you want to tune up your stylesheets. I wouldn't want any serious changes in looks, though. I'm pretty happy with it as-is.

Speeding things up would certainly be nice, though. I don't have enough time left in the day to learn the inner mechanics of the site to try to speed things up, though, so I won't complain about it. I've seen several suggestions for speeding things up a bit (such as turning off the nodelets on preview) so I expect that some tune-ups here and there will probably percolate through as time permits.

Since I've seen several requests like this, I'm just curious: Just what is it you want to see? If you leave the structure alone so that the site basically works as-is, then I'd expect you to propose:

1. Color schemes: I wouldn't mind this at all, but it's already available to you.
2. Fancy graphics: A waste of bandwidth, in my mind. (Yes, even though the browser can cache the images and keep the bandwidth low.)
3. JavaScript widgets: This could be a complete pain in the butt. I really don't want to have to enable JavaScript to use the site. I wouldn't mind it if it didn't get in the way such as for minor visual effects, but would balk at more than that.

Without concrete suggestions for actual improvement, it just sounds like change for changes' sake. (In other words, a lot of work for no benefits.)

...roboticus

UPDATE: One minor note: One reason I don't care for more "modern" designs is they tend to stuff plenty of whitespace on the screen to make things pretty. I have a couple large monitors on my home machines, and I still wish they were larger. If I'm digging for information, I just want as much as I can get on the screen. The bells and whistles are nice for things like watching videos and such, but I'm not here for that. As hominid mentioned, I'm here for the content.

That doesn't mean that I think PM is a pretty site, it's just that I think making it more attractive will make me scroll more, and that's a big turnoff. Having said that, if you post a style sheet to make stuff purty, I'll give it a try and offer suggestions on it, if you like.

--roboticus

Update: Struck out the bandwidth complaint: Now that I'm monkeying about with a style sheet on my box, I've started looking at the text of the pages PM is sending me, and there's a huge amount of stuff to support style sheets. Thus, I don't think a few K here and there will impact the bandwidth as much as I initially expected.

[Gavin]

Color schemes: I wouldn't mind this at all, but it's already available to you.

I think the point that locust was trying to make was that its all about first impressions on visiting a site.

PerlMonks is a very traditional site and I think that having a more modern interface may very well attract more new programmers to PerlMonks and then hopefully they will stay with PM and perl, because without New Blood, well we all know what will happen then!

[planetscape]

without New Blood, well we all know what will happen then!

Yes, the vampires will starve!

[locust]

Roboticus,

I just wanted to get a "friendly" discourse going and see what others might come up with.

I figure there are plenty of people who come to this site and love perl who have different talents. I'm sure there must be someone who is really good at design that may feel the same. I'm not trying to dump the responsibility on anyone else. I'm just trying to get a discussion going. I'm not suggesting that you do something tonight or within the next month. But, perhaps, we could map it out.

I'm willing to contribute my time and money to helping, because I'd like for Perl to get the recognition it deserves. As a community, we could pull our resources together...or maybe not.

Wouldn't it be nice to spread it around more and have people come to the site? What if this is their first look at Perl after hearing something negative about it? It may just confirm that.

And that guys is correct in that I just signed up for an account a few days ago. That's because I just got a job where I get to use Perl again.

But, I used this site about 10 years ago when I was working as a Perl programmer professionally. Then the bubble burst and I moved to Austin. I can't find crap around here for Perl jobs. There all PHP on Craig's List. I've learned some Php. Hey, it's pretty cool. But, it just not the same as Perl.

So yeah, I came back to the site after not really using it for years and it still looks the same. Everyone now a days has social media built into their sites. That is where the sites are going today. Not only that, but even the more technical sites still have nice graphics and gradients, like perl.com. They make it look like an O'Reilly book or something like that.

So, I'm not trying to be a know it all or anything like that. It just pisses me off how Perl has been pushed to the side in favor of php. And, after using mod_perl and setting it up, I can say that perl can do the same stuff. I don't have the benchmarks, but I do like the language better. And, Perl has so many more uses. Anyhow, do I really need to make this argument on perlmonks.com? Shouldn't this be the place where we are biased in favor of perl?

Much respect