Having your home page be just a login button is a bit disappointing.
There's no screenshots and no information about how it works (or information at all for that matter), which doesn't really convince me to create an account (in my mind, the process of picking a deck and printing it is not one where requiring a login would be obvious, so some more "convincing" might help).
I don't want to sound mean-spirited, but I'd guess many people would similarly refrain from creating an account for the reasons mentioned above.
Edit: Turns out there's a cool scrolling cards animation as background! It's just that it doesn't seem to work on Firefox so there it just has a blank background.
I agree. Without this post, if I visited the page without any prior knowledge, I'd have no idea what this is about, and would have no incentive to sign up.
Maybe some sort of "guest mode" where you could use the site, pick a deck and preview the printing (maybe a very small image), but then required an account to not lose the deck or actually getting the printable would be pretty reasonable.
That said, maybe there's some other advantage to having an account that I just didn't think of.
If you want to play around with it, try account hn@example.com with password hackernews!
I didn't add any restrictions on email registration because I hear you that actually creating an account can be a chore. Exposing web services to the public internet without auth seems scary, which is why I rarely do it.
but also the chat function doesn't do anything unless you supply an email. Seriously without your post text here it's literally impossible to figure out what your site does exactly pre-account creation
> I didn't add any restrictions on email registration […] Exposing web services to the public internet without auth seems scary
Aren’t you still effectively doing that, though?
This seems like the combination of two downsides: Bots will be able to perform email verification if they want to; honest users will still be deterred.
The animated background works in Chrome, but not Firefox. There is one CSS rule that Firefox doesn't like. If you open the Firefox devtools/console and type this, it'll fix it:
I get that they probably (I'm assuming) represent moving the titlebar to the top (maximizing) or to the bottom (minimizing) of the screen, but I can see someone who doesn't already know what they do assuming they're for changing between windows.
To be fair, the modern maximize/minimize icons that Windows uses are not that much better. The minimize button doesn't even represent what a taskbar entry looks like (by default) anymore.
> In my country we’ve spent a literal metric fuck ton of money trying to replace some of the COBOL systems powering a lot of our most critical financial systems. From the core or our tax agency to banking. So far no one have been capable of doing it, despite various major contractors applying all sorts of “modern” strategies and tools.
To be fair, it's possible that the current systems are just poorly documented. All the best strategies in the world are hopeless against poor documentation/spec work.
This is probably the case for some, but not for all of them. There have also been attempts at completely replacing something like our digital registration for elections system. Basically every adult is issued a voter card when we have elections, in the “olden days” you’d register at tables with people with big voter books, where they’d need time to find you which can generate some rather large queues in rush hour. With the digital system every voting card has a barcode as well as the other info and they can just scan your barcode which is much faster.
Anyway the old thing was build when the public owned their own IT. It’s been something like 25 years since that was privatised and nobody has been capable of replacing that old system, meaning that the old organisation which is now a private company has a monopoly. Which is against our law.
There is really not a lot to it technically. But apparently it’s proving impossible to replace the mainframe way of dealing with it through the CISC input terminal thing. I have no idea why, we’ve had some of our biggest IT suppliers taking turns at cracking it and nobody has been able to so far. I think the ultimate “must not break” deadline was 10 years ago.
This was the “easiest” example. A lot of the others have decades of stuff build on top of them. There is the COBOL core and what has been hard for people to replace here is the bi-temporal data. But on top of the maintain there is a myriad of different Java services (only Java if you’re lucky) which turn the data into something which can be worked with and consumed by well, http.
I think there's a build of an older version of it on the YoYoGames archive. The archive didn't save the screenshots that the original website had, sadly.
I also spent a long time working on a very large update which I might have archived somewhere locally but never shared it online.
There's no screenshots and no information about how it works (or information at all for that matter), which doesn't really convince me to create an account (in my mind, the process of picking a deck and printing it is not one where requiring a login would be obvious, so some more "convincing" might help).
I don't want to sound mean-spirited, but I'd guess many people would similarly refrain from creating an account for the reasons mentioned above.
Edit: Turns out there's a cool scrolling cards animation as background! It's just that it doesn't seem to work on Firefox so there it just has a blank background.