Re: tarsnap website redesign

[Graham Percival <graham@percival-music.ca>]

On Sat, Aug 08, 2009 at 02:59:29AM -0700, Colin Percival wrote:
> Front page (describing what tarsnap is)

I'd call it "tarsnap" rather than "front page".

> | |
> | Paranoia
> | |
> | Flexibility
> | |
> | Efficiency
> | |
> | Utility
> | |
> | Tarsnap news

I'd abbreviate this to "News", and put it at the top of the list.
Also, give it a different background color from the four other
items.  That will help people identify the news vs. features at a
glance.

> Download
> | |
> | Download old versions

This could be simplified to "Old versions", since you're not
keeping old versions of the docs around.

Do you want a separate download page for "scrypt"?

> Documentation
> | |
> | Getting started (?)
> | |
> | Man pages
> | | |
> | | tarsnap(1)

For good documentation, I'd add a "General usage" that comes
between Getting started and the man pages.  It would basically
consist of the current "examples" section of the tarsnap man page,
possibly expanded.  Maybe also including items like:
  gperciva@nagi:~/aaa/bin$ more backup-daily.sh 
  #!/bin/sh
  tarsnap -c -f "daily-`date +%Y-%m-%d`" $HOME/.gper-home/daily/

Basically, a man page is a reference -- the commands are
alphabetically ordered.  That's great when you already know
(mostly) what you want to do, but it's not the best way to learn
something for the first time.  For the latter goal, you want to
have the most important options first.

Yes, it's true that most users of tarsnap can find the examples
section on their own... and it's equally true that most users of
tarsnap will create their own backup scripts...  but there's
nothing wrong with making it even easier to find.

> | |
> | Mailing lists

Hmm, I wouldn't consider this part of documentation.  My first
instict would be to put them under the main page, although that
would make the first submenu quite large.

It even be worth making it a new top-level item.  Or maybe promote
"News" or "Keeping connected" into a top-level item, which could
hold the mailists in addition to the obvious "News" page.

Cheers,
- Graham