stylus site

[Hippyjake]

Should a website be thought about? I know hosting and domain names are not free... Can we get a static site (Like Jekyll) to serve and install styles? Im not a ruby/chrome api guy, can we use JS to install themes.

I think users uploading themes would not work with out some kind of a git commit system. Doing this without a DB is going to be a PITA.

Just a thought

[Alanaktion]

I definitely think a basic informational site using GitHub Pages would be a good start. A full on site with a theme gallery/installer is probably quite a bit down the road, but I'd love to see a good alternative to userstyles.org at some point. That may be outside the scope of this repo though 😉

[catcat520]

Jekyll , it's a very cool idea

[Hippyjake]

Can the calls be made in javascript (The current site is wrote in ruby)?

On a side note I've been playing with Wordpress. Mostly BB and Buddy Press, anyone want to help me poke at it? I'm trying to see how to recreate the "store" and user profiles.

[Sylk]

I'm a PHP and frontend guy and I'm open to helping on this, is there any designs that have been created for it? If not I have a friend who may want to get involved. I'm able to start as soon as we're in agreement.

[Hippyjake]

https://github.com/Hippyjake/userstyles I forked the old site. Im glad they never touch it!

Any ideas on how to move forward? Use a repo and hooks to store and update themes? I'm just grasping at straws.

[Sylk]

We need someone to take charge and host it so, It's really up in the air. I'd like to get the person spear heading this to jump in here. @schomery

[quentincaffeino]

We can develop fully functioning website on github pages. For storing data about styles (just websites and username/repo lists) we can use firebase which free plan I think is enough for our needs.

[quentincaffeino]

Ok I've created little demo using github pages & submodules. So it stands out that we even don't need a database. So the only things we need to do are:

• Create nice view
• Create (or steal ;) ) isntallation script
• Add search

That's all I think. Everything else is less important and can be added later. Styles can be added via issues which we'll review and add them if they at least work :D What do you think guys?

[mikerockett]

I'd like to help where I can with this project. I found Stylus as I was going through all the negative comments about the new userstyles.org site, and I'd honestly be happier helping out Stylus.

I might be able to get a domain (I have a great one in mind, but watching my budget right now). I'm sure there are good companies out there who'd be willing to sponsor a vps - or perhaps aws would be a good choice.

A possibility for the future would be to have a Laravel site, and it should definitely have all the features that userstyles dropped and/or messed up. Good to keep things simple for the time being, but it would be wicked-cool if Stylus could take over as the go-to destination for styles.

Lastly, I have a site concept in mind - still working on it though. And a logo.

[schomery]

At the moment, I have no extra time to spend on this. Either one of you guys get the full responsibility or give me a month or two until can revisit this topic. Sorry guys!

[mikhoul]

I'm thinking SERIOUSLY about starting a new Userstyle, I'm busy right now but I've already forked the old Userstyle when the new owner destroyed everything useful.

If nothing is done soon I think in few week I could have the time to do it.

If I do it I will pay for hosting it, buy a name etc and advertisement should be enough to pay for the fees.

But contrarily of many here I would scrap the old site for ACTIVE styles contact the devs to have let them control their styles to update them.

So I will follow this thread and if nobody take over I there is big chances I will takeover.

Regards :octocat:

[mikerockett]

For those interested, this is the concept idea I came up with a little while back:

And this is what it would look like when searching:

Didn't conceptualise any other pages though - no time, I'm afraid.

[mikhoul]

@mikerockett Could be good :) but the first thing to me will be to have the web site like it was in other words "working" ;-).

After it would be very easy to change the CSS, that was the only thing that should have been done since everything mostly was working fine.

The only things I did not like was the "small limit" in size for the screenshot and using IMGUR it could be easily changed by letting IMGUR hosting the file so the database would be even smaller and the end users would not have to recompress the screenshot to comply with the small size.

First thing for me if I go ahead will be to have a prototype of the old Userstlyle.org working locally.

After that it would be to find a way to scrap effectively the active styles, but even if I had not a big knowledge in scrapping it should relatively easy to find a way with and build a bot to do that.

I'm very confident about it if the code I've forked work it should be quick to have it back, the only thing IMO that could be hard is to have back the forum WITH the old messages. But I don't think having old messages for the forum is primordial, maybe just a summary of the most consulted topics in a FAQ for the newbies with Stylus/CSS.

Regards :octocat:

[Hippyjake]

The style DB is not part of the site, so we need as many theme writers as possible to start to fill the site. The CSS is the only thing that should have been changed (My vote would be to use some existing theme for the old site).

As for the forum, a new site without the cruft would not need a copy of all old forum posts. After some work on the site is done we should (the ones with the coding chops (I'm not one BTW)) look for a forum software to complement the site. :frog:

[mikerockett]

@mikhoul

Could be good :) but the first thing to me will be to have the web site like it was in other words "working" ;-).

I dunno hey, sometimes brand new is better - the reason I created a new design was because a style site like this should at least embody what it's all about. Can't have a crappy looking site that provides good looking styles for other websites. Another thing that I'd want to avoid is using the exact methodology userstyles used before their "upgrade" and do something completely new with the features that people want.

After that it would be to find a way to scrap effectively the active styles, but even if I had not a big knowledge in scrapping it should relatively easy to find a way with and build a bot to do that.

I'm sure they'd want to prevent that from happening as it is specifically against their ToS.

I'm very confident about it if the code I've forked work it should be quick to have it back, the only thing IMO that could be hard is to have back the forum WITH the old messages. But I don't think having old messages for the forum is primordial, maybe just a summary of the most consulted topics in a FAQ for the newbies with Stylus/CSS.

Agreed - one could prefill the forum with basic FAQs.

Regarding forum software, I'd recommend Flarum - whilst it is in Beta, many folks are already using it, and I haven't encountered major issues. I think it would be a perfect fit. Plus, it has a cool rest api. One could also easily integrate user authentication with it.

[quentincaffeino]

@mikhoul, no need to build a bot, I already have one.

I'd recommend Flarum

+1

[sizzlemctwizzle]

Hey guys, so I run (mostly pay the bills and take care of general hosting stuff now) the opensoure site https://openuserjs.org which was developed during and after the fall of userscripts.org, which is built on Node.js, MongoDB, AWS S3 for script storage, and GitHub integration to let people keep their scripts on GitHub but serve up the lasted version on the site. We even have have Markdown (with limited HTML) that is virtually identical to GitHub comments (although our client-side preview is all wrong). The front-end isn't pretty (most contributors are programmers), but we did something similar to what you seem to need. I found out about your situation on a thread on the site and threw out some ideas along with getting some feedback from the active maintainer of the site: https://openuserjs.org/discuss/OpenUserCSS

Bottom line is that the userscript community was in a similar situation awhile back and I'd like to offer a hand in some way.

[mikhoul]

Sorry for the late reply I was really busy in the last weeks 🤓

Hi, Guys,

Some news, I'm in the process to buy some webhosting space this week,

@QuentinCaffeino Thanks for your offer I will gladly accept it since it will save us some time to recover the styles 😃 I will contact you in the next weeks (see lower).

@sizzlemctwizzle Thanks also I'm in the process to setup a server (shared-space) so I could need some advices since I'm new to hosting but I'm self-taught so I learn quickly and in the last week it was a crash course for me to learn how shared-hosting work and what is important to have from the hosting companies (hardware/software). 😼

I have now a short list of web hosting companies so in the next 2-3 days max I should have buy some RELIABLE space.

There was more to learn than I though about "webhosting" (especially about shared hosting) and I like to understand fully the things involved (Server hardware/software options etc... ) and not go blindly. 😋

In the next 1-3 weeks Maximum I should begin to test locally the website to see if it work fine and to fix it too if the need arise. Once it will run fine and I will see how we can integrate the "old Userstyles" painlessly.

IF the CSS can be tweaked easily right after I will just update lightly the CSS (GUI) WITHOUT changing anything drastically since for me everything was fine before the mess on Userstyles.org.

If we need to tweak it more than I think to put new CSS I will keep it like before and I will setup another complete version for beta testing with new CSS and maybe other improvements.... but NOT on the live version. 😜 .

Regards :octocat:

[quentincaffeino]

@mikhoul, well I lied :D I meant I could easily write one using some framework (eg. like scrapy). Also not that I'm a pro but I have a few websites running on amazon in docker containers.

As an option there's 12 month free tier on amazon and the only thing we would pay for is dns router (it called Route 53) and domain.

In the next 1-3 weeks Maximum I should begin to test locally the website to see if it work fine and to fix it too if the need arise. Once it will run fine and I will see how we can integrate the "old Userstyles" painlessly.

You already have the website? Or you going to use the fork of old userstyles? I can help set up local docker so everyone will have same working environment.

[mikhoul]

@QuentinCaffeino Ahhh OK it's not a big big thing to mount a bot, it's just to take the time to be understand how it work and structure all we need to be efficient when scrapping data to organize it .

I have already small websites but this time I want to use something more powerful and permanent for the long term, I don't want to change of web hosting company after 1 years and I don't want to manage it fully since time is precious 😉.

I've already looked for Amazon but overall even if it's free for one years it is unmanaged and take lot of time to set-up properly especially since it is a dynamic website and not a static one. Since webhosing is relatively cheap that's why I've chosen shared-hosting it's managed, the fees are almost always the same and it's more easy to manage in the long term since you don't have to update packages, DB motor etc...

I will fork the old Userstyle since we don't need to reinvent the wheel 😆 , but like I said once everything will run fine it will be more easy to setup a beta.website to make the change to improve the website without breaking it.

I have some great idea to make it better and I'm very open also to suggestions. I never used docker before but it COULD be useful to make the change on a beta version if Github is not enough after the initial lauch. 😺

As soon I will begin to need help to test it I will be back here and setup a more convenient way to communicate than by Github messages 🤣

Thanks for the suggestion !

Regards :octocat:

[quentincaffeino]

@mikhoul I can see you don't know much about docker) It's not that I insist on choosing aws, just saying you're not right about this:

take lot of time to set-up properly

No, because you setup docker container once, and it will work on every machine including host. I use only EC2 (for instance, detached storage and ip) and Route 53 (dns router) When I want to deploy (whether it is host machine or local) for the first time I need to run only few commands, and I don't have any dependencies except docker itself.

[mikhoul]

@QuentinCaffeino Let me take few days and I will look at Docker integration with EC2 and will be back since I was not thinking Docker will integrate with EC2.

I was thinking they were "separate" but I think I understand the concept with docker and EC2 so I will learn more about it and be back here to let you know. 😸 It could be interesting for this project or even others projects I have related to the web.

I was seeing docker only as a way to test apps to have always the same dev environment and be stable but if it integrate seamlessly with EC2 it could be very interesting. 😃

Regards :octocat:

[quentincaffeino]

@mikhoul you almost got what I meant.

I was thinking they were "separate"

They are, there's another service on amazon if you want them to be "integrated". But there's no need in that.

but if it integrate seamlessly with EC2

What integration do you mean?

Good luck ;)

[Mottie]

Update: We were contacted by @DecentM about work done setting up a site to replace USO (https://openusercss.org/). It's still in the alpha phase, so please check it out and provide feedback, help and encouragement!

GitHub source: https://github.com/OpenUserCSS

[tophf]

Thanks to https://userstyles.world and https://uso.kkx.one we can consider this issue resolved.