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FreeBSD Project Launches New Website
UltimaGuy writes "The FreeBSD Project has launched a new website today. The new design was created by Emily Boyd, a student at Smith College that they had the pleasure of working with through Google's Summer of Code program. The old website is also still available."
Well that's a heck of an improvement on the old one. Now if only some of the other BSD's (Open, i'm looking at you) would do something similar, would be good. And yes, i know, better they spend time hacking at the source than making their site pretty, but as was shown by the summer of code thing, finding people willing to take on the responsibility of sorting it out isn't hard.
...this is much much better than the old website. The important details are much clearer (i.e where to get it, what the current releases are) and the whole thing generally feels very fresh and modern.
Hopefully they will give the handbook a bit of a spring clean next...whilst informative it sometimes lacks in either explaining concepts sufficiently or just assumes a lot of prior knowledge in certain areas.
Kev
What! A new web page a no new logo? I couldn't see anything about the logo contest at first glance. (disclaimer: I didn't submit any logos, no personal agenda).
Come on FreeBSD, it has been 3 months since the contest ended, are you having trouble deciding which is best out of the 500 submitted or which is the least worst? At least post the submissions in a gallery.
Yeah -- if I had some free time I'd offer to help Debian fix their site. It's pretty awful.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I must admit, it makes it look more like they're providing a serious product rather than something made by a group of hippies and slackers.
One might think it's weird how much the quality of some products seems to be judged based on the looks of the box it comes in. But wait - maybe these are related?
I can't help to think that any quality product needs 1 thing at least: not suck badly in any aspect. Meaning it doesn't need to shine in every aspect, but if it really sucks in any department, overal quality is affected.
Why? Because this signals bad attention to details. And it's exactly attention to details that makes great products. Many developers working for months on useability-features, bugfixes and performance improvements for a desktop OS? And then they fail to pick some nice-looking backdrop(s) and meaningful icons to finish it off? Or fail to properly document how it works? Says more about overal project quality than developers would like to admit, IMHO.
Lesson to be learned: if you have something great, make it look good as well. Get some HTML coders and graphic designers onboard, besides C coders and beta testers.Actually, judging from the date of the forum post (10-05-2005, 05:26 PM), the new website has been up even before that.
Best regards, A.C.
There is a "BSD UNIX" and it was distributed by the University of California. I don't know if it ever had a registered trademark, but it does exist, and that is its name. Some people, particularly lawyers, might not like the name, but facts are facts.
But that's neither here nor there. FreeBSD isn't using the UNIX trademark. They're saying it's "based on" which is factually accurate and does not violate trademark. It's not that much different from a generic pain killer saying "Same active ingredient as in Fruzrin(tm)!".
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How hard would it be to write a script that checks submissions to see if any link to identical URLs? That's right, trivial. This would eliminate 90% of dupes. Throw URLs and story submission IDs as (key, value) pairs into a hash table. If you get a collision, flag both stories--the editor could check the conflict via the hash table. Keep stuff in the table for maybe a week. We'd still get dupes linking to different versions of the source story, but that doesn't really happen that often...
And I guess it wouldn't help your problem--editors would still be free to choose an inferior submission. But hell, if editor A rejects submission 1 about some topic, and editor B comes along and doesn't see submission 1 (because it's already been rejected) but sees submission 2 and likes it, he would then see that it dupes (rejected) submission 1. He is then free to compare the two submissions, and greenlight 1 instead of 2...
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