[Digital-Citizen]

Structurally, the service is hosted online as a website, this means one must upload a copy of their data to be converted. Naturally that raises questions because there's a lot we don't know about this site: who runs it, what are the terms of service (I saw none on the site), what are users granting the site owners to do with uploaded data? Answers to these are almost certainly guesses as this information is not readily available. The site source code is minified Javascript; designed to be terse and at the cost of legibility (variable names are often shortened, useful or long comments eliminated), certainly not the source code a developer would work with when writing the software.

How could this have been implemented in a way that obviates all of these show-stopper failings? Respect users' software freedom by offering users one or more programs to do the conversion jobs with reasonable default settings. Distribute complete corresponding source code alongside the rest of the site so as to let the user host an instance of the site on their own. Users so inclined can set this up for themselves and others, or use their software freedom to end up with a conversion service they don't need to guess about.

[mtusman]

Hey, thanks for your feedback. I'm the guy that created the site. I agree that more information needs to be listed on the site about how the process works and also agree that the code needs some work. I'm a self-taught programmer and created this to put on my cv and thought it would just be cool to share what I created. I plan to add much more features and pages but just wanted to test what I've already created.

To those that are interested in understand out how the website works, the process goes as follows: the files are uploaded to the server and then uploaded to a private s3 bucket where the user will have an hour to download the converted content via a presigned url after which it will be permanently deleted. Furthermore, as soon as the file is converted, the original file is deleted from the server. In hindsight, I should have shipped an "about" page explaining this process.

[bo1024]

- I appreciate these posts that promote software freedom.

- The tools `convert` and `ffmpeg` should cover your criteria and the functionality of the site.

[knight17]

Thank you for suggesting this. I never knew about this. I learnt that it is from/ part of Imagemagick [1].

Unoconv tool [2], recommended in another comment here, is also great to convert documents to and from formats that are supported by OpenOffice (LibreOffice?).

Pandoc [3] is also a worthy option to convert between document formats.

[1] : https://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php, https://www.lifewire.com/convert-linux-command-unix-command-...

[2] : http://dag.wiee.rs/home-made/unoconv/

[3] : http://pandoc.org/

[systoll]

unoconv too, for the office formats.

[bo1024]

Thanks