The page a stranger opens first

Saturday, LinuxDays in Prague, a stand run by friends from OSCloud — Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Matrix, the services for people who want their data where they can see it. A full day behind one table, and not a single talk seen. This engine was there for the first time in person: on a leaflet, and in conversation whenever the Fediverse came round to "and where would I write?"

Four squares on an A4

The leaflet is one sheet. Four panels — write, move, deploy, show — each with a terminal excerpt and a QR code. None of the codes lands on a page made for the event. Each one opens a tag page this site already had: /tag/authoring, /tag/migration, /tag/deploy, /tag/appearance. The site's own archive, sorted by what a stand gets asked, was the landing page. Nothing was built for the day that would be stale the day after.

The leaflet was older than the Czech

The leaflet went to print in mid-September, when a second language on this site was still a question rather than a setting. By the Saturday the question had been answered: 1.9 had shipped, this site had been bilingual for a fortnight, and every post it had published had Czech words. The leaflet had not been told. Its four codes still point at the English tag pages — a Czech leaflet, handed to Czech visitors, landing every one of them on an English page.

What stood between them and the Czech copy was the small chip in the banner's corner. Four of them found it. The other fifteen did not go looking, and for this crowd that is the expected number: LinuxDays is IT people and students, who read English all day and have little reason to switch. The mistake was real. Its cost, here, was close to nothing.

What the weekend was for

Nineteen people from the Czech Republic opened this site over those two days; the weekend before it was three. They stayed two and a half minutes on average and four out of five went past the first page. Sixteen came in at the front door, ten read the introduction, three opened the writing tag, two the migration tag, two appearance — and nobody opened deploy, which is a fair review of a leaflet panel. (The site counted 328 visitors that weekend. Three hundred of them were one crawler working through a search engine's index from Singapore. The number that matters is the small one.)

It came up several times at the table. Nobody's archive changed hands there, and nobody was expected to install a blog engine standing up. A stand is where a question gets asked out loud — would it carry my blog, does it write from a phone, where does it run — and the leaflet's four squares are those questions in the order they tend to come.

A project site at a stand is read on a phone, by someone who did not come for it, in whichever language they happen to think in. This time the site was ready for that and the paper was not — and almost nobody noticed, because almost nobody at LinuxDays needed the Czech. A stand where English is not a given would have noticed, and there the gap would have been exactly one QR code wide.