I'm going to represent the critical opinion and say: this is cute and I like the idea in theory, but if I encountered this in the wild, I would just leave the page. I explore most informational websites with a mouse or a touchscreen - I don't want to type to navigate your website!
A middleground might be to make the commands clickable, so that clicking on "help" automatically inserts and runs it, and clicking on any of the commands in "help" does the same. You would still frustrate users who would have to keep scrolling up to reach the navigation, but it would make it usable without a keyboard.
It's a cool looking site, but these terminal style sites (seen a few of them from web developers and software types) look terrible on phones and tablets (keyboard constantly present), which is well over 60% of web traffic now.
You have to keep in mind your audience. If you presume everybody visiting this site is software-inclined, it's fine. I know a lot of less tech-literate users who would leave something like this straight away thinking they're being hacked or something daft.
I know a lot of less tech-literate users who would leave something like this straight away thinking they're being hacked or something daft.
That reminds me of the time my friend and I put together a silly shell script called pentagonhack.sh that went through an 80s-movie-style nonsense hacking sequence while you mashed the keys. Most of the content was inside jokes, but there were a number of all caps references to a Pentagon server with warnings about unauthorized access being forbidden, and overall it looked pretty plausible to someone with no technical background or even cursory knowledge of SSH and Bash.
Anyway, my friend got bored one day and fired up the script in a TTY on his laptop during lunch in our high school cafeteria. Apparently his friend who'd been sitting nearby noticed and started paying attention to what was on his screen, and then understandably found it alarming when by all appearances he was in the middle of typing out a command to run a malware executable on a Pentagon server. So she stands up and yells, "JOSH IS HACKING THE PENTAGON!". Of course he immediately switches back to X11/GNOME, probably with some homework assignment open in OpenOffice or an active Blackboard tab in Firefox, and everyone looks at his screen before looking back at her like she's crazy. The way he tells it, she was practically ready to go call the cops until he explained the joke and calmed her down.
When I returned to college ~15 years ago, my main laptop was a ThinkPad T60 running some flavor of Debian. I spent a lot of time with a full-screen terminal open in some sort of green-on-black color scheme.
On several occasions some complete stranger would interrupt me - usually with a shoulder tap - and demand to know what I was doing hacking in the library/student union/etc. Never happened in the engineering buildings, though.
The front page of our early phreaking zine was an interactive cellphone- a certain famous model of Motorola- that you had to navigate to enter.
It was a great filter against people who wouldn't have understood the content. If you knew how this model worked, there were a lot of easter eggs, and we received a lot of great feedback to make it more fun and rewarding.
Being told that it would "frustrate users" would have elicited a friendly "Not ours :)".
Absolutely! I very much respect that; some things are meant for a specific audience, and that's OK.
That being said, it looks like this website is meant to serve as a portfolio and a self-introduction - and for that, you generally don't want to alienate the entirety of your mobile audience :sweat_smile:
Agree. While I acknowledge the work that must have gone into this, and the playful quality of the result, with respect this is a frustrating way to present information.
Personally I'd have gone for a 90s TUI-style hypertext presentation. But, like I said, nice work!
Exactly. I can appreciate the effort behind it, but if you want me to consume your content, you need to make it obvious and easy and not make me work for it.
Agreed, a better option would be SSH / Telnet server in addition to a web page, perhaps with auth instructions given on the web page to keep the majority of bots out.
A middleground might be to make the commands clickable, so that clicking on "help" automatically inserts and runs it, and clicking on any of the commands in "help" does the same. You would still frustrate users who would have to keep scrolling up to reach the navigation, but it would make it usable without a keyboard.