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Richard Stallman's Personal Site

stallman.org

31–40 of 52 posts

Re: Richard Stallman's Personal Site

#34
This website a good example what's wrong with a lot of open source software (and don't get me wrong, I love FOSS, in fact, I make a living out of it). Complete ignorance of form. There's plenty of awesome function and amazing minds behind it, but humans are visual beings and sites like this (completely unscannable) make it really difficult to separate what's important and what's not. The only reason to visit a site like this is if you're given a good blog post with a direct link.

Yes, I know it renders on everything properly, but that doesn't make it right, UX, after all is where most of the technological products fail - because users do not know how to use them properly - or at all. Apple and Tesla understand that.

Re: Richard Stallman's Personal Site

#35
post #34

This website a good example what's wrong with a lot of open source software (and don't get me wrong, I love FOSS, in fact, I make a living out of it). Complete ignorance of form. There's plenty of awesome function and amazing minds behind it, but humans are visual beings and sites like this (completely unscannable) make it really difficult to separate what's important and what's not. The only reason to visit a site l…

> humans are visual beings

Yep, it's important for a site to be easy to skim, but beyond that, you'd be surprised at how little people care about or note good design. I mean, you're posting this on Hacker News, which can't even be bothered to set a reasonable text column width.

Re: Richard Stallman's Personal Site

#36
post #34

This website a good example what's wrong with a lot of open source software (and don't get me wrong, I love FOSS, in fact, I make a living out of it). Complete ignorance of form. There's plenty of awesome function and amazing minds behind it, but humans are visual beings and sites like this (completely unscannable) make it really difficult to separate what's important and what's not. The only reason to visit a site l…

Your feedback is fair, but does if anything particular to do with FOSS vs software websites in general ? Beyond perhaps that bad UX can kill a business faster than a volunteer project, so bad commercial websites tend to disappear

Re: Richard Stallman's Personal Site

#37
post #34

This website a good example what's wrong with a lot of open source software (and don't get me wrong, I love FOSS, in fact, I make a living out of it). Complete ignorance of form. There's plenty of awesome function and amazing minds behind it, but humans are visual beings and sites like this (completely unscannable) make it really difficult to separate what's important and what's not. The only reason to visit a site l…

Are you seriously comparing someone's personal wep page to Apple and Tesla? If that's supposed to be a satire on Silicon Valley's startup culture, I think it's hilarious.

I think his page is really great because it has lots of high-quality content and nothing in the "UI" made it difficult to access it.

Re: Richard Stallman's Personal Site

#38

The source code is very straightforward too. Commented out sections of the website with dated reminders to uncomment them. I guess he must look at his source code frequently enough that these reminders work? Very simple but effective mechanical turk I guess? e.g. It's the Grav-Mass season! Grav-Mass is the celebration of physical laws. December 25 Isaac Newton's birthday. ¡Feliz Gravidad! -->

If he doesn't have a script that can update the website using those date notes, he is dishonoring his Unix heritage

Re: Richard Stallman's Personal Site

#39
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stallman's big on puns so that wouldn't surprise me. He calls Uber "Goober"

My personal favorite is the Amazon "Swindle"

I saw him speak in person and averted my gaze from him in guilt when he said that, since I had my "Swindle" in my bookbag at the time.

Re: Richard Stallman's Personal Site

#40
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In conversations about webdesign, I usually always mention HackerNews and Stallman's political blog: http://stallman.org/archives/polnotes.html Minimalist, all the content is linkable, and they both work even on Links or Opera Mini. I'd prefer this over some fancy layout that don't degrade gracefully, e.g. requiring JS to display static content. It's not everyone who have fast internet and fast laptops.

Some other classics: DJBs site: http://cr.yp.to/djb.html Fabrice Bellards site: http://www.bellard.org/ Donald Knuths site: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/

http://www.landley.net/ is also quite austere.
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