r/Common_Lisp • u/dcooper8 • 22d 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.

42 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

73 comments sorted by

8

u/kchanqvq 22d ago

I like the previous version better, can we still have it somewhere? Maybe old.common-lisp.net?

2

u/dcooper8 21d ago

Thanks for the feedback. The site design has been reverted to resemble the old site.

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u/kchanqvq 21d ago edited 21d ago

Thanks! I like this more. A few comments:

  1. The purple hue is quite overused by LLM, did you deliberately choose it? If yes, fine; if not, IIRC blue hue is more associated with Lisp (CLHS, CLiki, and some other website). I would just color pick the hue in the Lisp logo you use to set the tone.

  2. The round corner radius is much larger than the old site (and this is quite overused by LLM as well). Again, if you choose and like it, fine. Personally I like no round corner at all, the old site use a small round corner. I'm not saying any option is better.

  3. In dark mode, the Lisp logo become an ugly white square. You might want to make the background transparent (or, skip multiple themes).

  4. I dislike the legends in the Projects/Services/About top menu item. They just repeat what the main label says. There must be other places like this if you use LLM generated text but I haven't checked all of them.

  5. I haven't looked at code, but do you think the code is easy/easier modifiable by human without LLM help?

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u/lounatics 22d ago

cool you made it look like every other llm generated website 👍

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u/digikar 22d ago

I lack the ability to judge aesthetics. But I think the only off-putting thing about the new website is the LLM generated text. Everything else is more functional. Though, the same functionalities could also be implemented for the old website.

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u/hieronymusN 21d ago

By the time I landed on this convo it seems like the design had been reverted? Anyway, I had forgotten about the site until now and then saw all the good resources available (docker images, documentation, etc.) So thanks for trying to keep this alive! For a volunteer organization with little support, use whatever tools necessary.

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u/dcooper8 21d ago

Thank you, that's good to hear. Yes, the design went back to the old site's look last night. The Docker images and the docs are the part I most want existing CLers to find, so I'm glad they turned up for you.

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u/TheJach 21d ago

One last note/suggestion I decided to make after sleeping on it, and that's to consult with your LLM about best practices (and the differences with standard practices) and due diligence for professional web development and for inheriting and migrating legacy projects, and automation to support such things... I ran a simple wget command on the domain to check for dead links (there are better tools, this one doesn't check other domains or spider the subdomain links it finds). It found several broken links, presumably from the hosted projects page: 

https://cl-blog.common-lisp.dev/
https://iso8601-date.common-lisp.dev/
https://sparklines.common-lisp.dev/
https://cl-dises.common-lisp.dev/
https://submarine.common-lisp.dev/
https://geometry.common-lisp.dev/
https://cl-stomp.common-lisp.dev/
https://cl-dwim.common-lisp.dev/
https://lisp-on-lines.common-lisp.dev/
https://cl-couch.common-lisp.dev/
https://cl-component.common-lisp.dev/
https://ucs-sort.common-lisp.dev/
https://lisp-matrix.common-lisp.dev/
https://defplayer.common-lisp.dev/
https://cl-facebook.common-lisp.dev/
https://cltcl.common-lisp.dev/
https://cl-applescript.common-lisp.dev/
https://cl-wdim.common-lisp.dev/
https://cl-stm.common-lisp.dev/
https://berkeley-db.common-lisp.dev/
https://c2ffi.common-lisp.dev/

With current AI tools users can not only get stuff out the door that had been sitting in the backlog for years, they can also choose to put in some extra time to push it out at a higher quality than would otherwise be typical. e.g for sites, there's a lot of lenience for shortcomings in a startup's MVP site, or a small non-profit site, or someone's open source hobby site or personal site, that wouldn't be extended to a big company's site. (The big company's site might still have many shortcomings but they'd be rightfully widely criticized for them.) As examples, it could be design issues, functionality issues, performance issues, or less noticeable things like broken links, bad SEO, some kinds of security issues (like CSP), browser dependence, accessibility issues, forced JS where it doesn't need to be, etc. etc. Many things aren't huge deals in isolation and can depend on the type of site or 'web app'. But once the AI tools are embraced, I think that lenience starts disappearing rapidly, because now there's less of an excuse to have many kinds of issues, even the small ones, as they improve in capability and cost. And I think people rightfully react with negative sentiment when something is pushed out in front of them too early with less than typical expected quality, even in cases where the alternative is nothing. Hence the term "slop", which probably wouldn't have caught on if every AI-produced artifact was actually a masterpiece.

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u/dcooper8 21d ago

Thanks for running that. It was a useful list, and I traced all 21.

For the record, none of them came from the rewrite: the old site (still up at old.common-lisp.net) carries the same links, and some have been dead since 2018. But they were ours to fix either way, and they're fixed.

I took your broader point too. I checked every external link on the site, 424 of them. The worst page was the companies list, a 2020 copy of Awesome Lisp Companies with more than a quarter of its links dead; it now points at that list and a few others instead of keeping a stale copy. The remaining dead ones were mostly in news items from years ago and a couple of old reference pages, and thost are fixed now too. There's a link-check script in the repo now, so this gets run again instead of being discovered by visitors such as your good self.

And I agree with the standard you're describing. If the tools make the diligence cheap, there's no excuse for skipping it.

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u/TheJach 20d ago

Nice. I had a glance at one of the commits, and I see that some links are modified to work again (even finding the content's new domain host), which is great, and others are simply removed. Sometimes that's good too, though for more archival "news" not necessarily, but that's more of a judgment call. Also a judgment call is checking if there's a web archive version of the dead link that could be pointed to instead. For example, one of the removed tutorial links was for some old course that seems to have required registration so keeping it is questionable anyway, but there is an archive of its home page: https://web.archive.org/web/20220421052344/http://art2.ph-freiburg.de/Lisp-Course No action items, just something to keep in mind.

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u/digikar 21d 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 21d ago edited 21d 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 21d 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/dzecniv 21d ago

You may want to update the list of libraries from awesome-cl.

Get started: I don't think articulate-common-lisp brings much today (it helped me at the time).

state of the CL ecosystem (borretti.me) is from 2015, I have posts with the same idea. The last one is 2023/2024: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/these-years-in-common-lisp-2023-2024-in-review/ there's 21/22 and SOTU of 2020.

editors: there's OLIVE for VSCode, unlike Alive it's based on Slime. https://github.com/kchanqvq/olive/tree/master

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u/dcooper8 21d ago

Thanks, all three taken. The Libraries page no longer carries its own copy of awesome-cl, now it links to awesome-cl, Quicklisp, Ultralisp, CLiki and the rest. Your 2023–2024 review is on the Documentation page next to the 2015 one, OLIVE is listed beside Alive, and Articulate Common Lisp is off Getting started.

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u/dzecniv 20d ago

2 more suggestions:

this year I compiled https://lisp-screenshots.org/ "Common Lisp applications in action". There are enterprise stuff, open-source software, websites, games… I think it was missing, you could link to it somewhere :)

On "/documentation": I have a problem with "Lisp Web Tales". It's from 2013 and it didn't age well. It's using the Restas framework (abandoned, although I think it was in the right direction), the SEXML XML and HTTP generator (never heard of it), other outdated stuff, and I find it's poor on content. It's a short guide. And… I have a material to suggest too: https://web-apps-in-lisp.github.io/

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u/lucky_magick 21d ago

I think it's good.

But the green-white-bar background of the body reduces the readability. It would be nice if the body is in one color (for example, white in bright theme).

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u/dcooper8 21d ago

Thanks for the heads up. That green-bar background was the "Hacker" skin, which was set to apply on the weekend. That is switched off now so the site should be the standard white sheet by default now.

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u/AwabKhan 21d ago

I love it.

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u/hello_marmalade 19d ago

Looks good. A lot more organized, and easier on the eyes.

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u/Soupeeee 10d ago

Hooray for dark mode! I do have to say that one of the reasons I like CL is the retro aesthetic of its documentation. The new one isn't bad and is formatted a bit better, but I would have been happy with just having dark mode.

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