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Comment on SiteOne Crawler – big tool with no users

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For some odd reason, the tool didn't get any replies on Reddit, HN, AlternativeTo.net or GitHub, despite looking fairly sophisticated. The dev is also non-professional.

Maybe I am bad at digging, but I couldn't find anything about siteone.io. The entire situation is strange.

Older discussion with one reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292651

Post mortem:

janreges is according to the website (siteone.cz) one of the top 3 people at his company, and the tool and website look well made. By "non-professional" I meant that there is some kind of mismatch between my expectations and the style he replies to people here.

I was trying to establish the oddity of the situation to encourage more digging, and didn't express my point clearly enough.

My apologies to janreges. I know my own expertise and social sense are bad, so please don't take any of this to heart.

There's no reason to apologize, man! :) On the contrary, I am very grateful for this post and your proactivity :-*

My cynical 2 cents: First impression is that the above-the-fold webpage looks like a page out of a kindergartner's book. 2 sentences with different bright colors. The red heart (the cynic in me cringes when it sees all those "Made with (heart)" lines). The cartoon character logo...

I scrolled down, and the video with the cartoon font? Oh god, that reminds me of an exchange student at uni who used a Teddy Bear PowerPoint template for a presentation.

Thanks for the feedback! That's my job :-| I'll ask my fellow designers to improve it in the near future - as a backend developer I obviously fail a lot in graphical sensibility, or I'm just a kid with a need for child fonts ;)

Maybe people ignore it because there are already many tools like this. I was tempted to not look, but checked it out anyway

The parent, SiteOne, seems to be a well-established IT company in The Czech Republic. Hopefully, they will gain more traction in the near future.

Very small amount of sourcecode: Under 20k by my count. Are they outsourcing the actual crawl to a different tool?

SiteOne Crawler offers 2 open-source tools: 1) command-line version (which is the core of the crawler itself): https://github.com/janreges/siteone-crawler 2) a graphical application for Win/macOS/Linux, which is just a wrapper over the command-line version and displays the output from it through Xterm: https://github.com/janreges/siteone-crawler-gui

yeah and it looks really full-featured and well-done, while many other crawlers/scrapers with way less get way more stars

Yes, the tool has a lot of features, settings and usage options. I believe that many people will like the tool and help promote it themselves.

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