FreeBSD’s Murray Stokely says that the FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce the launch of the new website today. The new design was created by Emily Boyd, a student at Smith College that they had the pleasure of working with through Google’s Summer of Code program. The old website is available here.
I like it a lot. Much more professional and uncluttered. IMO the should get rid of the Beastie as well, but the most passionate users just love it.
WHAT?! Get rid of beastie? are you fscking mad?
Looking good. Can’t wait for a http://www.debian.org/ redesign.
Hope they chose a nice logo. The logo contest page says it’s going to be available before the end of October which is soon now.
Oh, and gotta love the beastie on the front page! It’s absolutely gorgeous.
Hey, now you can easily see where to download the OS. I like it, very nice, clean and fast, just like FreeBSD!!!
Ya, I think the old design is a bit hard to use, now this is better!
And I just love Beastie on the front page. Without him the website would look too much like a commercial one.
with a website that beautiful, I’ll have no choice but to try out FreeBSD!
OMG the title FreeBSD font is horrible and jagged. Other than that, the actual layout is nice…but the font flaw is so bad that IMO the previous page would still be better.
I didn’t notice a font problem when I first looked at the page. So after reading your comment I went back and looked at it again with Firefox, Netscape 7.2, Opera 8.x, Knoqueror and Epiphany. The font looked very nice in all of them.
Sounds like you just need to add a font to your system that doesn’t look awful when your browser tries to render the page and substitutes a font that you have for the one that is specified by the page.
HTH
Actually the parent is right and it’s not his problem, because its a PNG image that displays the logo (http://www.freebsd.org/layout/images/logo.png). Anyone that knows anything about fonts will tell you that it is absolutely horrible.
I’m open for some education then. If it’s not a font being displayed but is actually a .png graphic then why is it still a horrible font and not a bad rendering of the .png graphic by his browser?
I’m not trying to backflash at you. I really don’t understand what you (two) are saying and can’t reproduce the issue here with any browser so far. I haven’t tried Galeon yet, but I will now.
Yup. Looks fine in Galeon too. What am I missing?
To follow up: I realize that adding a font to the system won’t fix a .png file on the FBSD site.
I have now looked at it under Netscape 8 in Windows (Server 2k3) and Mozilla 1.7 in Solaris (10 ver. 3_05) and still don’t see any horribly blocky ugly text/font/rendering. It still looks very nice. Do I need to go to a resolution greater than 1024×768?
I suspect you need a resolution less than that actually. It looks fine for me as well, and it wasn’t until the poor antialiasing was pointed out that I noticed it. It’s a pretty minor issue, although I agree that it should be fixed.
Try setting your display to a lower resolution, and you should see that the font of the title looks a bit jaggy. The grandparent did, however, totally exaggerate how bad it is; to the point of trolling.
Thank you for your reply.
I went back to the site and changed resolutions down to 800×600 and 640×480 and could see some rendering of lines that was razor less than sharp but nothing even close to blocky fonts.
Anti-aliasing is a function of the operating system or display driver/manager if the monitor is capable of performing it, is it not? I don’t see how that could be repaired by FBSD site design except by creating a script to attempts to detect it, presuming that is possible, and I’m not sure that would be a reasonable way to design a web site. If you have poor anti-aliasing it seems like it should be addressed at your end of the connection, not at the web site.
There may be more to this than what I have understood so far, but I’m still wondering how it can be a png graphic and still be a font issue. Maybe I’m just overfocused on that point and it’s not the actual issue, just my failure to “get it”.
Get rid of Beastie? Are you kidding me. Beastie is the best OS Logotype out there!
Very nice!
Okay…what am I missing? A side by side comparison shows both the old and supposedly new page the same. I have cleared all cache, etc. There is no new page as far as I can see.
something is wrong because there is a HUGE difference. total redesign
I like the website. But this section at the very top that say “Text Size: Small/Large/Donate/Contact is a litle stupin. I would put the Donate and Contact in the main bar (with Home About etc) and abolish Text Size. Who cannot use a zoom function in his browser to get the fonts in the size of his liking anyway? Also the letters of the languages I would put in the very top. There are some other little details but I don’t think they are so important…
I use Opera, and when I zoom, Opera doesn’t only increase font size, but zooms everything including graphics. Therefore a “Text size” option is pretty handy actually. I set it to large as I don’t like small text.
More professional with the exception of the BSD Daemon. I like it but if FreeBSD is going to be taken as a serious OS then he needs to be tucked away somewhere. You don’t see a big fat penguin on the Novell/Suse website.
Before I go so far as to admit that the chameleon on the SuSE site is much more professional looking than Beastie it would probably be worth pointing out that there is no big fat penguin on the kernel.org site. Novell/SuSE doesn’t have the same relationship to Linux that FreeBSD has to FreeBSD.
the netbsd website needs a similar change. clean, slick, modern, economical and professional.
on the Gentoo website redesign project? That’s been going on for like a year now?
It’s still compil…
oh, never mind.
It would be a neat idea to use the error page to feed the search results. So if I want to learn more about the FreeBSD scheduler, I could plug in freebsd.org/scheduler and get some relevant search results.
Some other ideas would be to produce pages on Information Security and Benefits for Developing for the FreeBSD Platform with prominent links on the main page.
The reason why you don’t see a big fat penguin on the Novell/Suse website is because those products are Linux Distro’s. The penguin is the logo for the Linux Kernel, because the kernel itself is not an OS and has nothing to do with Novell/Suse. They just pacakge an OS with Linux at the core.
The FreeBSD logo is the OS’s logo, it is one in the same, everything developed together. One complete product.
(I’m not nocking GNU/Linux btw).
Most people won’t notice this so let me point out at the very bottom of of the page
$FreeBSD: www/en/index.xsl,v 1.129 2005/10/05 21:46:34 delphij Exp $
I’m a big fan of XSLT (it’s pretty safe to assume “.xsl” refers to XSLT and not XSLFO). Having spent the summer doing web development I can attest that it really smoothed out development. Previously I would find that others would make changes to a page but not propagate the change to other pages causing “glitches” of things not aligning the same way on different pages.
With XSLT jsut change the XSLT and run it on all the XML files and got’ve got guaranteed* consistency at least in your XHTML.
Also, if you cache the generated pages then the speed is not an issue (hint: use a Makefile). With XSLT coming in Firefox 1.5 all that is needed is for Apple and you can then leave the XSLT to the client side (The raw XML files should be readable in Lynx and even then I guess it could do XSLT transformations too).
The only thing I’m curious about is why she went with XHTML Transitional and not strict? I’m guessing it has something to do with issues surrounding MIME type or something… but I’m not really sure about that since I’ve never really configured a server.
All in all a beautiful site under -and over- the hood. Congrats.
Nice tidy website and easy to overview.
What’s wrong with the Osnews website btw?
Man osnews.com is slow lately,the mysql is mostly not accessible.Maybe they should hire a hot babe as janitor 🙂
I dug out a vector beastie I did a year ago or so.. I wonder if they’re interested in it for this new website.
http://dose.se/~elvis/beastie.svg
I really like this new look, except for two things: 1) I don’t like that tiny Verdana font that so many sites use. I like big text. 2) Wasn’t there a direct link to the Handbook at the front page before? Can’t remember.. Now I have to press Documentation -> Handbook.
Anyway, I can increase my font size, so it’s not a big problem.
If you like big text go to http://maddox.xmission.com
Don’t expect it to be adopted by serious professional websites though.
now all they need is a shweet gui installer
I seem to recall another Summer of Code project that had someone attemping to merge the new bsdinstaller[0] (built from some of the DragonFly BSD guys) with FreeBSD.
So, you might get what you’re hoping for 😉
LabThug
[0] http://www.bsdinstaller.org
First of all , FreeBSD problem is its License , the license is not Free Software and is not open Source , when your not politically PAID to lie about it you know why. Correct that to be on equal footing with the GPL and then you have a chance at longer survival. The GPL whas created from the mistake learned from the BSD license. It might also give a disctinctive advantage for FreeBSD over the other BSD’s if they looked into that. ( They whont but nonetheless its good to remind those looser about the almost only thing that there doing wrong , because there software usually is on par or sometime I dare say in very specific minimal case superior to what GNU/Linux and GPL one have to offer ).
Second for a 30 year Project covering only 6 langugae its really really weak. Or they do and just insulted a majority of there users group.
* de * en * es * fr * it * ja * ru
3 Language they might whant to have convert in are African , Hindou and Chinese.
Instead of Hidding there real supporter ( commercial vendor) like the plague they might whant to put them into the light and work out some kind of financing deal between them and FreeBSD ( publicity / hardware exchange / etc … ). I know some Idiot think that FreeBSD are monkey who work on/for Banana , but with Darpa pulling out it would be nice to have another mean to replace that income. Having money is not a bad thing. ( You do know that Ubunutu as set aside 10 milion for shipping Free CD to anyone who ask ? right ? )
BTW you DONT whant to put your security problem on your main page , the long list will scare away some potential users.
BTW FreeBSD is a free replacement for Microsoft Windows product is simplier to understand then lying about :
“FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium® and Athlon â„¢), amd64 compatible (including Opteron â„¢, Athlon 64, and EM64T), Alpha/AXP, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC® architectures.”
The advanced part is laughable and a lie.
– Have a nice day 😉
HAHAHAHA
My morning was going slow and you have provided my amusement.
Cheers
HAHAHA
Don’t be a Moulinneuf
Hey wait a moment… you ARE Moulinneuf.
I second ‘Anonymous’ (on IP: 202.50.187.—) you have made my day.
Thanks.
🙂
You should stop smoking crack – it’s not good for you!
And it’s even valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Doubleplus good.
I really like this new desing, and the download page is very easy to use. But the beastie must be on the first page, is our soul.
Thanks Emily Boyd.
Moulinneuf’s existence makes as good a case as any I’ve seen to be pro abortion. Just enough of a brain to string words together in a browser, but not enough to be able to put forth a cohesive (and constructive) argument.
Back on topic, I’m not a huge fan of FreeBSD.org’s new look. Maybe it’ll grow on me. I always thought the logo was cool enough, but it’s size and placement don’t seem to work. IMO.
> FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86
> compatible…
The first time you will goto to he website you will ready it, maybe, the next times it will start to annoy you and it will capture your eyes attention for something you already know and also it gives less space to the news that you have to scroll to read them.
When going to documentation and then clicking on pubblications the link to pubblication on the link left bar remains a link, while it should be not be a link and it may change color because it shows you where you are actually.
So when you go to documentation you have no idea where you are (@ a first glance, at least).