New Front Page for Haiku

I would like to help with a new front page for Haiku OS.

Is anyone in charge of the site and we could discuss
how to move forward?

For example, on the separate Haiku, Inc. site, there is still
a link to Haikuware, which then redirects to an unrelated website.

Web design trends have changed in the last few years and I am
sure that everyone would like to see a refresh of the overall layout.

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I just saw that humdinger linked to the GitHub repository for the site on this post:

I am a little annoyed that you sent me an unsolicited PM not a day after making this post. I’m sorry I didn’t get around to replying to your post on the mailing list, but if you’d looked at the archives, you’ll see we have a history of not replying to people very quickly … it’s almost like we aren’t getting paid to do this. Who knew?

But anyway, insofar as anyone is “in charge” of the website, I guess I am, but in reality it’s just that my opinions are more respected. I don’t have ultimate veto power; if everyone but me is on board with some idea, I get overridden. That’s how a meritocracy works.

If you want to redesign the website, post a mockup and we’ll see what people think. Somewhere out there, there are some mockups done by GCI students that I really liked; I don’t know what has happened to these.

We are not closed off to change. We’re just very busy and focusing on other things.

Hey, you are a college student. Why do you run an entire operating system?

John emailed me as well, as I suspect he might others. Our conversation quickly went nowhere (plesant) and I ended it.

Humdinger attacked the design as “horrible” because it might scroll. But I never said it would scroll. After I told him he was bad for calling a design “horrible” he became defensive and said never to talk to him again.

That’s right. You suspected correctly: when people want to get things done, they try to e-mail people. This is apparently not what you do here at Haiku, where it takes years to release products.

No worries, I won’t paraphrase sentences out of context from your abusive emails.

Don’t make an enemy out of me. I am trying to help the website with a redesign. If you felt that my design mockup wasn’t up to standard, you can phrase it differently than “horrible,” which didn’t even make sense in the circumstance because you thought it would scroll. If you don’t want to respond to my e-mails, it’s ok. I don’t hold hard feelings towards you, in any case, even though I expressed disgust towards your reactions to what I said. My expression of disgust towards you is not long-term resentment.

I won’t post any of your insults and abuses that followed my use of the word “horrible”, but the one sentence + screenshot (resized 50% to save some space) and my reply to it that was literally all that was said about any sort of design:

On Saturday, 10 February 2018 12:12:23 GMT+1, John Pratt wrote:
I put this screenshot together as a guide for what I would do in HTML. It would lead to a modern design feel to the site and look very different, in a technological way.

To which I replied:

Not sure what I see on that screenshot…
If it’s text boxes over a background that scrolls at a different speed, I see that on some sites with advertisement and it’s horrible, IMO. :slight_smile:

I advise to make “real” mockups, with the actual contents of the current site.

I am in the middle of adjusting text, so the text overlaps, but here is part of the top of the new front page I am experimenting with:

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You know that Linus Torvald was still student when he started Linux, right?
Or Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they started PageRank engine at heart of Google?
Or Mark Zuckerberg when he wrote FaceMash, ancestor of FaceBook?

I don’t see how calling someone a college student can be an insult. It’s not like only professional people can do IT stuff correctly.

Anyway, I guess nobody involved in Haiku think that they’ll become rich or an IT celebrity doing it, nor compares Haiku history to any of these success stories. This doesn’t mean that some are still college students, others are way older, having a day job in IT for some, working on Haiku on their free time.

Haiku project is not an one guy project, but an open source collaborative project with lot of distinct contributors since start.
If you had done a bit of project’s background research before proposing to rework its face on the web, you will have knew that…

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Whether the person is of college age does not matter, like you say. It is that while in college, a student has many classes to take and this is really going to limit time. It is not the age of the person, but the circumstances of a student. If you organize an entire open source project while taking a big class load, it is going to be a lot of work and it is going to be hard to juggle it all.

You are right: open source projects often have myriad contributors from different backgrounds, both old and young. People can be capable at any age.

Sure.

But their free time amount may vary a lot.
And I often find that students are not the one with the less one.
Having kids, on the other side…

everyone in the Haiku project is either a student, or has a full-time job, and/or is raising kids in parallel. And it has pretty much always been like that. This is why we try to optimize the little free time we have and try to not waste it on endless discussions here.
We have achieved great things this way. Of course, if there was a company ready to hire some devs full time, a few of us would jump in. However this is not currently the case. The project itself will remain this way, it is an informal entity. This is indeed unusual, but it works well for the current contributors. So it’s difficult to change it. But there are many things that can be done. Show us your work, and if it is any good, you earn recognition and credit for that. Then people will listen to you in your area of knowledge.

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Here we go then.