Re: Unicorn is a famous and widely use software, but why official website look so outdate?

Re: Unicorn is a famous and widely use software, but why official website look so outdate?

[Eric Wong]

Zheng Cheng <guokrfans@gmail.com> wrote:

Please don't send HTML email; it is bloated, spammy and your
mail got stuck in my spam filter instead of hitting the list.

About the Subject, unicorn itself is outdated by design:

	http://unicorn.bogomips.org/PHILOSOPY.html
	http://unicorn.bogomips.org/DESIGN.html

This list rejecting HTML is another "outdated" characteristic
of the project :)

Being outdated is not bad IMHO; more of us had slower computers
and connections back then and needed to make every byte matter.
Many "modern" websites are slow and inaccessible to poor and/or
low-eyesight users.

The CSS on the old website was as big as the README page;
slowing or even breaking rendering.  Nowadays it does not depend
on CSS at all, and is designed to reduce scrolling for users
on small screens (or big screens and giant fonts :)

Enabling CSS may also be dangerous:

	http://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste

Slow connections still come from poorer areas and even the
well-off have connectivity trouble over Tor or mobile.  Some of
us have bad eyesight and need gigantic fonts and custom colors
to read.  Web designers should not set colors or fonts for us.

A "modern" website also sets unrealistic expectations for
maintainers and potential contributors.  unicorn is a daemon,
it can never require a graphical interface to run, so users
should not be expected to run one, either.

Fame and being widely used are accidents since I little effort
into marketing.  It's nice to have it solve some problems for
users, but market dominance is harmful to ecosystems.

> and why not put source code on Github,

GitHub bundles a proprietary, centralized messaging platform we
cannot opt-out of.  It also requires registration,
terms-of-service, and JavaScript to use.

Plain-text email is universal and interoperable.  unicorn and
Ruby do not require registration, terms-of-service or JavaScript
to use; so contributing should never require those things,
either; even anonymous contributions are welcome.
Plain-text email is the only additional requirement,
anybody with Internet access hopefully has that.

> Write some Github Wiki,
> A contributor guide, Thing like that.

Some old-school projects have a "HACKING" file for contributors :)
http://unicorn.bogomips.org/HACKING.html

You can email comments, patches or pull requests here to improve
the docs (which becomes the website), so it's like a wiki with
review process over email.

> I am a newbie just start learning Unicorn and can't find any good tutorial
> about Unicorn. and recommend?

There is a short Usage section in the README and Configurator
docs:
	http://unicorn.bogomips.org/#label-Usage
	http://unicorn.bogomips.org/Unicorn/Configurator.html

But unicorn is not for everyone, so I recommend starting with
rack and tutorials, since unicorn is built on rack:

	https://github.com/rack/rack/wiki/tutorial-rackup-howto

unicorn is one of many rack servers you can choose from.  I
encourage people to try other ones and evaluate based on their
needs; not whatever some other websites are using.

> Thank you very much.

No problem :>