Re^2: Open sourcing perlmonks

Personally, I like the perlmonks community, but I think the website just plain sucks from a design point of view.

Ah so. What is it that sucks? IMO its a lot easier saying that than actually offering a detailed review and critique that pmdev can use to improve things.

I'd like to know what you consider to be good design. You mentioned a link in one of your other sites that I followed, but the page doesnt seem to load properly. Is that what you consider good design? Frankly a lot of sites that ive been pointed at by web designers as example of good stuff have themselve been really pretty, and basically useless. PM otoh, is not entirely pretty, (although given how customizable the user experience is this is only an issue for the anony monk), it is quite functional. Super Search works well unlike most sites search features. We provide XML feeds of just about everything we can think of, and seem to be able to provide an enviornment where programmers beginner and experienced can find a place to contribute or learn from. What exactly is it that we doing so wrong?

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$world=~s/war/peace/g

Comment on Re^2: Open sourcing perlmonks

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Re^3: Open sourcing perlmonks (super search) by tye (Sage) on May 29, 2005 at 06:22 UTC
Super Search does some things quite well but there are quite a few things that many people reasonably expect from a web search that Super Search mostly sucks at. Several things could be improved with some fairly simple features (like being able to build up the list of matches). But the problem space is rather strangely and somewhat severely constrained and so many things will never be done well by Super Search. But making PerlMonks robot-friendly will address many of those areas (because google is quite good at one common type of web search, especially if we define a few key "words"...) And Super Search is good at searching for punctuation, which is a rare treat for me; most searches suck at that, but then I wrote it so there should be something about it I like. This is all rather vague but most of it is covered in other nodes and I'm not going to spend more than a couple of minutes on this so you'll have to use it if you're curious. So there is much I like about it, it usually works quite well for me, I'm glad it works well for you, it treats the servers nicely, and I realize many of its significant faults and have plans for improvements for some and alternatives for others. But right now, there are several ways in which it sucks, and not just a little. (: - tye	[reply]

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Re^3: Open sourcing perlmonks (super search)
by tye (Sage) on May 29, 2005 at 06:22 UTC

Super Search does some things quite well but there are quite a few things that many people reasonably expect from a web search that Super Search mostly sucks at.

Several things could be improved with some fairly simple features (like being able to build up the list of matches). But the problem space is rather strangely and somewhat severely constrained and so many things will never be done well by Super Search.

But making PerlMonks robot-friendly will address many of those areas (because google is quite good at one common type of web search, especially if we define a few key "words"...)

And Super Search is good at searching for punctuation, which is a rare treat for me; most searches suck at that, but then I wrote it so there should be something about it I like.

This is all rather vague but most of it is covered in other nodes and I'm not going to spend more than a couple of minutes on this so you'll have to use it if you're curious.

So there is much I like about it, it usually works quite well for me, I'm glad it works well for you, it treats the servers nicely, and I realize many of its significant faults and have plans for improvements for some and alternatives for others. But right now, there are several ways in which it sucks, and not just a little. (:

- tye

[reply]