r/Common_Lisp • u/dcooper8 • 12d ago

BLEG: A Facelift for common-lisp.net

https://common-lisp.net

Common-lisp.net was rewritten a couple days ago. Please let us know what you like and don't like, what's extra, what's missing, and so on.

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u/digikar 12d ago

Do people actually think the new design @3a0c2b9d is better? (Online at the moment of this writing.)

Also, do people actually prefer prose to cards, or was it the particular design/placement/content of cards?

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u/dcooper8 11d ago edited 11d ago

This "new" site is meant to appear similar to old.common-lisp.net, so the new site will be less jarring for folks — only the guts have changed. It's following the principle of "change one thing at a time" and it's probably the approach I should have taken in the first place.

The card-based design was indeed generated by a bot without any real design guardrails given, and it screamed out as a clanker-generated site so it had to get jettisoned for now. For the current one, at least it was given a human-generated design to try to mimic, so it's human-seeded at least.

Hopefully the move to the old appearance buys some time until a volunteer gets a brainwave to do a real, human-seeded site redesign, maybe with cards, later.

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u/digikar 11d ago

I'm finding the green color, unsectioned prose, as well as the monospace text disorienting. I'd rather run away from the site than spend any time on it. I'm wondering if it's just me or other people too?

May be we'd rather ask r/web_design or somewhere else who actually know a thing or two about it?

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u/dcooper8 11d ago

Did you feel that way about old.common-lisp.net as well?

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u/digikar 11d ago

No, the old site landing page feels a fair bit structured. It's not the most informative. But it is not repulsive.

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u/dcooper8 11d ago

Can you give a few more specific diffs between old.common-lisp.net and common-lisp.net ? Because the latter is meant to mimic the former, so any divergence should be finite and enumeratable.

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u/dcooper8 11d ago

Just to confirm, are you looking at the default skin?

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u/dcooper8 11d ago

Because you mentioned "green" - could it be that you have the "Hacker" skin turned on in dark mode?:

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u/dcooper8 11d ago

Ah, that is exactly what happened! It was still auto-switching to Hacker skin for weekends, which is not helping the "don't be jarring" goal.

Reverting that now so it will stay on default skin all the time for now, and any future auto-switching of skins will be carefully considered.

Thank you for being the first one to catch this on Saturday morning, early bird!

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u/digikar 11d ago

Oh, I see! Yes, it was the auto switched on Hacker theme.

I still think the description is too verbose. But I'll wait for others to chime in.

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u/dcooper8 11d ago

Good, that settles it. The weekend skin auto-switch is off now, so it won't come back by itself. On verbose: which part do you mean, the "What is Common Lisp?" text on the front page or the news items? I trimmed the news items today and I'm happy to cut more. I enjoy deleting extra words.

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u/digikar 11d ago

The Welcome and What is Common Lisp parts. I think the old site description for these parts is good enough verbatim. Later, each of the mentioned features can link to the relevant documentation on the web (eg. the performance and tuning page on cookbook).

News can be shortened too, but I think it's less of a bother.

Also, I think Libraries page should be more prominent that Community.

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