Hello everyone,
We are now into the second month of our BountySource Salt campaign. I'm happy to say that we've raised $600 last month and are already 58% of the way towards our $1250 goal (having raised $727). This amount is absolutely outstanding and I thank everyone that contributed!
Just wanted to give you guys an update on how things are going. I also recently posted an update on the BountySource page which you can read here.
These donations will help us dedicate more time to Nim development, and allow us to encourage others to contribute to Nim by posting bounties on various issues. With @Araq's permission I will be posting bounties on various issues soon. If there are any issues that you feel deserve a bounty then do please let us know.
I hope that this makes you as excited as I am about Nim's future. Thanks again to everyone that donated!
Happy to have help out. Nim is now the Nr. 4 in the months Salt ranking Earnings.
For people still on the fence, a well financed project looks like it have a future beyond a hobby project. So that is always a bonus.
It may be also interesting to apply to be a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy. sfconservancy.org It has a bunch of advantages that can be very useful for the project.
Might be also interesting to:
In other words, move most of that big bulky texts what is Nim to a secondary page and show the code to people.
Something like this:
Banner: Code, Code, Code, Code ... Lots of examples
News: Title, Date, Short description * ...
The reason why i think its better to move the big text away is people make a website impression in a few seconds. Its much better if they see news events more clearly but at the same time the code examples tweak there interest as its more clear. Like: "Ooooo ... you can do all that with just a few lines". People get interested and voila. If you write how Nim can integrate with C or whatever, i can tell you for a fact that most PHP / Web Script programmers will not see the advantage. But show them some code & result... :)
Hope this helps.
Thank you for your feedback @wulfklaue.
It may be also interesting to apply to be a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy. sfconservancy.org
Will look into that.
1. On the home page to have a more clear news & more regulare updates.
I would like to make this happen. Currently the biggest obstacle to updates on the front page is the process of getting them there, which requires: finding the appropriate rst file, changing it, pushing it to GitHub, rebuilding the site, making sure nothing too new is on the newly generated site, uploading the new site files... etc. Perhaps we need to move to some blogging platform.
More clear communication channels. I think there are like 2 or 3 twitter & reddit accounts ( nim, nimrod & nimlang ). There needs to be focus on one channel ( with again regulare updates ). And preferably clearly on the home page.
I guess we need to be more clear about which communication channels are official and which are not. For reference, the Twitter is official and is updated regularly: https://twitter.com/nim_lang.
3. Somebody posted a nim code runner here a while ago. Like "GoRun" on the website. May be interesting to put a link to that also on the front page.
Before we do that I would prefer to have a version of it that we host ourselves.
4. Make the nim in action like a side banner / image. Nim its greatest asset is the code and its slightly distracting with that ( ugle ) cover in the home page rotation.
Ugly? :(
What do you think we can do to make it non-ugly?
I'm biased but I personally think that it's valuable enough to be shown on the front page. Although I will likely change the order so that the code is shown first.
In other words, move most of that big bulky texts what is Nim to a secondary page and show the code to people.
I think you're right. But it's difficult to decide what should be shown on the front page, what is the best way to quickly describe Nim? Suggestions welcome :)
@andrea
In my (very limited) experience showing Nim to other people, the first reaction was almost always a complaint about the site looking dated. I guess a very basic, mostly white, styling (even plain bootstrap) would go a very long way to improve acceptance.
We could just copy Rust's website. It's clean, simple and nice. But I'm not sure that's a good idea. Maybe this is good use case for A/B testing :)
I really don't think @Araq would approve though.
I am not a friend of criticism without contributing a solution but I always thought we all agree that it looks dated. There is for sure an impact on "new people" visiting the site.
To me the Nim lang site looks a lot like a hobby project from around 2005. The content is not dated, but the presentation is.
I think thats caused mostly by the color scheme and the "non flat" design, gradients and esp. "glow" on the logo and other site elements. Especially the "boxes" everywhere would already be in 2005 be dated but expected from "computer people pages" in comparison to "designer pages".
It is definitely dated from the view of current responsive web-design principles (aka mobile usage) and "modern features".
For an example of what I would consider more "fresh" and still "doable" for a small comunity I may point to http://vuejs.org/ which has a very simple and clean but also very powerful presentation. The Guide is with try it out examples, the API documentation is versioned and searchable and very nice to use. They use https://www.algolia.com/ for that. As chat they use http://gitter.im/ instead of the "dated" IRC. Gitter is complemented by Github very well and can be easily used by newcomers. The "news" are just a modern and simple Blog. The forum is powered by https://nodebb.org and has impressive features.
Maybe one day somebody from the community takes the lead for something similar. Till then the current site "works" even if it is dated :)
Please don't make Nim's site like every modern website. Nim targets developers, i.e. people who tend to have a basic understanding of information structure and presentation. This so-called „modern“ website layout is bullshit, it hides information behind 10 kilometers of scrolling, throws empty marketing phrases at the user and is therefore not desirable for the website of an open-source project like Nim.
This whole website design stuff is like people chasing behind the newest fashion trends every summer. I cannot take an argument like „ooh, gradients are soo 2005“ seriously. What the fuck? Are we developers or fashion victims? Do we want to transport information on a website or use it as an expression of modern-age design collectivism?
What could be improved is the mobile-friendliness of the docs and the forum. But that isn't much of a case of design change; much more a case of a bit of clever CSS.
IRC is not „dated“, it is accepted by everyone. Almost every open source project which has a handful of contributors has a channel on freenode. It works, there are a myriad of clients for everyone's taste, and the infrastructure is not backed by some startup company which may or may not survive the next ten years. All other efforts, regardless of their technical superiority, were not accepted by any part of the open source community (remember chat rooms on Jabber? Nobody liked it).
A better news blog might be a good thing, especially for news like this here. But please don't put it on the front page. For me, that is one of the most incomprehensible decisions of web design ever. I open the website of some project, and the first thing I get are blog posts with details about something I don't know jack about. Then I have to click the „about“ link to learn what's going on here. It really should be the other way round.
Now I don't want to say that the current layout is ideal (which is not the case), but I don't want it to be changed just because of how other websites look. This is about information technology. Design decisions should be taken on the base of rational arguments, not fashion trends.
Just to add more ideas, if you wanted to change the structure just a little bit you could move the Nim in Action to a smaller link on the side, lose the slider, copy what Rust and Go pages do with a little built-in editor/compiler. Of course before that could happen then someone would need to make a "Nim playground" server/page/section that could be embedded, probably using the nimscript module.
I guess I am just adding a bunch more stuff to do heh. But I might play around with the Nim playground idea if that hasn't already been done.
Actually someone made a Nim playground https://github.com/theduke/nim-playground. Since you can't make that 'hack proof' it would probably need to go in an iframe on its own VM like a $5 a month Digital Ocean VPS or something. Then maybe have a script or something that recreates it periodically with the DO API would be nice.
Obviously this idea and theme switcher are adding somewhat to the effort of changing the design, which may not be practical.
ORM for Nim
I propose DAL for Nim. ORM is for OO-Focused langauges.
DAL is much in tune with Nim : https://github.com/web2py/pydal/
It could pay out to make "Nim" possible target for https://github.com/Codewars/codewars-runner-cli which "could" (will probably never happen) make Nim a language supported by codewars.com :) ... still probably interesting to use their runner system.
Slate seems also interesting as more modern documentation system (http://tripit.github.io/slate/#introduction .. Woho! Kittn API!)
@dom96,
Although everyone is entitled to their opinions, I do believe that 'ugly' is a bit harsh in describing the Nim webpage. That said, I do think that there is serious cause for a revamp, particularly pre-1.0. Once the 1.0 release is announced, there will be a lot of traffic on the Nim site and this will be the best possible opportunity for the language to gain traction. That said, you will want the site to be as inclusive as it can be. The dark colour scheme may be cool for young men in their 20s but for a man in his 40s or older it seems like the kind of site that you might have to hide in your browser tabs when your wife walks by (if you get what I mean). First impressions are very important. Furthermore, the colour scheme really wouldn't pass the accessibility regulations (think contrast of text and background) that I would be bound to in my workplace. This would only serve to restrict the potential audience. And last, but far from least, I believe that the Nim website is very male-oriented in that it would appeal far more to males than it would to females. It's somewhat like a digital 'bro-cave'. You may disagree with me on this point but it would be worth getting the opinions of women to see if my hunch is correct. A good website for a programming language should be inclusive, accessible, neutral, and in-offensive. There are plenty of good examples out there but the Rust website undoubtedly sets the new standard for this type of thing. I realize that you've probably put a lot of effort into creating what you clearly felt was a professional and appealing site but it's important to step back from it and ask whether the current design is welcoming (from first-impressions point of view) to new people from outside the current community. I hope that you don't interpret this criticism as too harsh because I know that you are putting a lot into building this language and the community that has built up around it.
jlindsay
I guess that in order to experiment with other designs, a quick way to deploy the main site locally would be needed (just altering the CSS would be a start, but almost certainly not enough).
What are the steps to deploy the Nim site locally?