Realistic example for home page

I just pointed someone on reddit to http://pydoit.org/ , and I realised that the landing page is a bit… abstract. It has an example task definition, but it’s just the structure, not a task that you could actually run, and it doesn’t say how to use it.

The intro at http://pydoit.org/tasks.html is better - it’s a working example, and it tells you about dodo.py and the doit command. But it’s too simple to show why you’d use doit.

I think doit is a pretty cool tool, and it’s a pity that it’s not more obvious how and why to use it. With your permission, I’d like to try to come up with a meaningful example to put on the homepage, showcasing some of the main features (such as combining Python tasks with shell commands) and explaining how to use it.

[schettino72]

Done http://pydoit.org/ Also updated the sphinx template to something that works better on mobile devices.

Thanks for feedback. very much appreciated 😃 And special thanks to @vlcinsky from who i got significant parts of the added text.

[takluyver]

Nice! I think it’s a pretty good example - it shows how doit can mix Python functionality and system commands. And I like the side-by-side code block and shell section showing how you’d use it.

I’d still make the example more prominent. At present, I have to scroll down about two full screens in a maximised window on my laptop to see the example - and until I see that, all I’ve really picked up is that it’s something like make but using Python. Maybe this is just my perspective, but I’m not interested in a list of advantages until I’ve got a better idea what the tool is and how I’d use it in practice.

I really like this about the example docs @vlcinsky showed: as soon as I open the tab, I can see an example straight away.