Quoting myself


Just gone over this again.

Paypal charged me, for a £5.00 donation, a cross-border fixed fee of £1.99. Plus a fee of 3.4% + 20p as I used a debit card. Total fee £2.36. If it had been a £50.00 donation the fee would have been £3.89.

If I'd made a transfer from my bank, in the UK, the fixed fee would have been £9.50 irrespective of the amount.

I assume that the cross-border transfers would also apply to sales.

Therefore from my point of view Paypal is the cheaper option and a larger amount is the most cost effective.

Level of fees, convenience, ease of use and service are all considerations that need to be weighed up. Also as long as there isn't a steep joining fee Pat could provide several ways of transferring money and we make the choice.

1 members found this post helpful.

PayPal's service fees seem to vary significantly and I have no idea what rules it's based on. I don't remember exactly what I was charged, but it seemed pretty reasonable to me. I think it added up to the equivalent of no more than 5-10% (but it was for a larger sum -- I'm a bit iffy about mentioning this in a donation thread but maybe it helps others).

Does anyone know how this works? Maybe it's possible to ask a friend who's temporarily relocated in another country, or who has some other sort of PayPal benefits, to donate in your place, and give him the money later via some other means.

The slackware.com site should be just as accessible in a text based web browser, such as links, as it is in Firefox. I don't see the point of shipping web browsers in a full installation of Slackware that cannot even open up slackware.com.

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Agreed! Slackware doesn't need a pointy-clicky-site with rainbows and unicorns. I like the simplicity of our site.
Slackware! Accept no substitute.

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Yes!!! There is a trend in Debian to "modernize" it, and I suspect its the invasion of *buntu users, lets not allow Slackware to suffer this illness, as it is often fatal, as in: whoopsie.

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Ahem, I didn't like 'that font' either.

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LMAO....

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From the ChangeLog at "Fri Jul 27 21:01:22 UTC 2018":
"I've never been much of a website designer, and the slackware.com site is basically left over from work done by former Walnut Creek / BSDi employees. I've never seen able to make much sense of the SQL backend. The interface to edit and post articles is clunky (and I'm not sure the PHP for that even works any more). When I've posted articles in recent years, I've done so by editing the main page already processed from PHP into HTML, which is pretty darn messy as I'm sure you can imagine."
http://www.slackware.com/changelog/c...php?cpu=x86_64

Based on that I think a functional KISS solution is needed with a quality of life "interface to edit and post articles."

Edit: I'm at a loss why there needs to be mysql & php. You could create the website straight up from CSS and HTML if you omit the quality of life features.

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I like the site aesthetically too. As an end-user, I appreciate distro sites that haven't gone 'rainbows and unicorns' with icons and animations and gobs of code from the marketing department...

Stumped me, too. Seems like the urgent need is to make a donation link. No matter how much of a rat's nest the backend has become, surely something can be jury-rigged with the current site.

3 members found this post helpful.

Wow! You are a prophet of sorts

It's not clear to me what PV would like in terms of "interface to edit and post articles", but what I did for my blog works pretty well for me.

On my laptop I have a short script called "mkblog" which invokes $EDITOR on a temporary file or on an existing file (to edit a post) and then scp's it to a "~/tblog/incoming" directory on my website. Sweet and simple.

The blog software (itself a scant 354-line perl script) then looks in "incoming" for any new content and converts it to html before spitting content at the user, wrapped in a template I adapted from Bruce Schneier's blog.

All files-based, totally transparent, no database involved. It took two afternoons to whack together, and I'm not even a web developer. Actually -writing- things to post has proven ten times harder.

If he wants something fancier, like an in-browser editor, there's doubtless talent for doing that in Slackware's diverse userbase. I seem to remember AlienBob mentioning that he and some co-conspirators put together a prospective CMS-based replacement for the website, but that it wasn't used for unspecified reasons.

*shrug* The only person who knows what Patrick wants is Patrick, and when he's ready to move on it, he has plenty of people around him willing to pitch in and make it happen.

4 members found this post helpful.

I hope Pat keeps the same theme used on the current web site. I don't know why SQL and PHP are needed for a static site. I'll guess in the early days some dynamic content was on the site.

If Pat decides to post an occasional blog, I hope the blog is just another link in the web site. I hope he does not use Wordpress, which ties deeply into Google sh-t, which is a devious way to track people.

We all have our opinions and rosebuds. Pat should (and I'm sure he will) do as he pleases.

2 members found this post helpful.

An even more simple way of doing this, would be by using a flat file CMS.
Once installed, just type away, hit publish. Done. No database, PHP, CSS use/knowledge needed.

A list of a few such CMS systems can be found here
https://www.cmscritic.com/flat-file-cms/

Even if I didn't go through 'em all, I'm sure there is at least one, that is open source and "free" for use.
And of course, easy to use

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My two cents on the web site, I likes it. Simple, pleasing to the eyes, nothing fancy, a perfect fit for Slackware.

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Adding a link to the donation page on the web site on the front page would also be useful.

4 members found this post helpful.