Hello,
I think the suckless website could do with some updating. I think suckless
has potential, but people are turned off by the old website. Using a more
modern website built with a modern framework like React or VueJS could
probably solve a lot of its problems.
Some of the problems:
1. I am able to find most information by using the clearly labelled menu
items. This is very boring! A good website makes users search for the
content they want, this is more fun and drives engagement.
2. I am unable to find a mobile app for either iOS or Android? Is there a
suckless mobile app? You really can't afford to NOT have a mobile app
these days.
3. Because the website is written in plain language with relevant and
useful content the SEO score is very low. You can add some more
critical keywords as a quick fix, but personally I would recommend some
larger changes, such as renaming "software that sucks less" to "Is it
true that software can suck less? We compiled 7 reasons why it could!"
Other content that could be added are blog posts, for example "How
suckless' minimalism can help your relationship with your dog", or "Six
different ways suckless can get you laid", "Why Linus Torvalds says he
HATES suckless", "Does using suckless mean you're a beta cuck?", etc.
The most important part is a title that will either 1) confirm people's
preconceived notions, or 2) outrage people. Most people don't read the
article so that's not very important, as long as it uses many keywords.
It's also important to post this on at least 46 subreddits, Hacker
News, Lobste.rs, etc. Don't worry if it may be on-topic or not, with
some luck it will slip past the moderation because your incendiary
title will drive engagement. You can always create a new account if you
get banned.
4. Suckless.org currently has a score of 100 on Google PageSpeed. This is
far too high. The homepage loads in about 200ms for me, far too fast
too. Slower load times increases frustration of users, and more
emotional users drive greater engagement.
5. It doesn't ask to send me notifications at all. As a user, I feel
undervalued and ignored. Please, ask for notifications and send me a
notification every time something important happens, such as mailing
list posts, or other important events such as a suckless developer
breaking wind. I absolutely need to know about this without any delay.
6. The page is not standards-compliant: it only uses about 9% of my CPU
during the initial load and 0% after this. This is not in accordance
with modern web standards. It's important to be standards-compliant.
It's really stuck in the IE6 days in this regard!
7. It's not made with 💖. This breaks my 🫀. Do you not love me? I think
this is very rude.
8. I am not distracted by fun and interesting advertisements. If I do not
see an advertisement about Coca Cola, Swatch, Wix, etc. every 5 to 10
minutes then I might forget about them, and that would be terrible!!
9. There are no social media features, and I can't 👍 or 💖 anything. I
also can't post it to my Facebook. I would really like to share it with
my anti-vaccination group on Facebook but now it's very hard :-(
10. The website is only in English; I expected the page to be
automatically translated to Indonesian as I'm accessing it from
Indonesia. Respecting the user's preferences from the Accept-Language
header is also not in accordance with modern web standards.
11. The suckless website is open source and I cloned the git repo, but I
couldn't find any way to run it with systemd. Is this possible? I
wanted to try and make it better, but it's very hard for new
contributors if your website doesn't run on systemd. I also tried
adding it to my k8s cluster, but that didn't work either :-/
As you can see, these are all very real problems. I think suckless will
never be popular without a good modern website. I could add some more, but
I think we can start by working on these problems.
There are many modern frameworks but you should really use React in my
opinion. It is amazing. I do everything with React; I became a millionaire
by mining Bitcoins with React, I cook my food with React (React curry with
chickpeas is about as amazing as [12]+3 resulting in the string "123"!),
and wow, the response from the women when I say I use React!! It's the
easiest Tinder opening line ever. My cat loves React too.
I hope you find all these tips useful!
Thank You,
Martin
----
This email has been written with TDD.
Martin Tournoij
Innovator.
Visionary.
Industry Thought Leader.
Cloud-Native Web Citizen.
Webscale Blockchain Engagement Expert.
Official Certified Oracle™® Cunt™® (2020)
Decoupled Microservice Turd Flinger
