[HN Gopher] How to build a personal webpage from scratch
___________________________________________________________________
How to build a personal webpage from scratch
Author : bosky101
Score : 652 points
Date : 2022-09-29 06:09 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rutar.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (rutar.org)
| Funes- wrote:
| My personal approach might be too simplistic for some, but this
| is what I did for my webpage, though I already had some HTML &
| CSS experience:
|
| >No website generators, no frameworks, no nothing (not even
| JavaScript)
|
| >Just design the site on the go through some trial and error
| using vim, CSS and HTML documentation always at hand
|
| >A single .css file to style the entire website--I even threw in
| some cool animations, which took a while to get right, admittedly
|
| >Publish it through GitHub Pages in under five minutes
|
| >If I want to upload a new blog post, for instance, I just make a
| copy of an existing one and manually edit the content, then push
| it through git after I've edited the blog index accordingly
|
| Reading terms like "static site generator", "content management
| system", "templates", "analytics" or "deployment" gives me an
| instant headache, especially since it's so easy to open your
| favorite text editor and design your own website by hand, so to
| speak. I've self-hosted eepsites, gemini capsules and many other
| sites this way and the process wasn't remotely as contrived as
| some approaches I've seen out there for publishing a personal
| blog
| jlg23 wrote:
| > Reading terms like "static site generator", "content
| management system", "templates", "analytics" or "deployment"
| gives me an instant headache,
|
| Only until you want to automate some of the tasks you do
| manually and, after a night of hacking, end up with a "static
| site generator", or, if you want something more dynamic, a
| "content management system". But at that point, you'll probably
| still not want to look into existing solutions because learning
| all the necessary details of product $x is often more time
| consuming than a straightforward implementation that solves
| exactly your and not someone else's problems.
| pineconebutt wrote:
| carlineng wrote:
| I really like the John Doe template. Everything is in one HTML
| file and one CSS file: https://github.com/cadars/john-doe/
|
| From the readme: "This setup is databaseless, javascriptless,
| and buildshit-free, so you can edit your website with a text
| editor and upload it somewhere like a normal person."
| Funes- wrote:
| I had a feeling that this could be made, and even thought
| about attempting it myself, but wouldn't this make every
| visitor load everything on the site at once, even if they
| don't want to? Or is it only loaded if it is actually
| displayed? Perhaps browsers have become more efficient at
| this and do it right off the bat now, but I think it wasn't
| the case a bunch of years back.
| carlineng wrote:
| <img> tags use the loading="lazy" property which doesn't
| actually load the image until it's displayed. Everything
| else is just text, which is super tiny.
|
| https://github.com/cadars/john-
| doe/blob/4f5a3eafecbdffa9d34f...
| Funes- wrote:
| I didn't know about that attribute, thanks. I wonder if
| there's a way to make "lazy" its default value, instead
| of "eager"... I guess not without JS.
|
| P. S. It seems that Safari isn't compatible with the
| attribute by default, but it can be enabled through its
| settings.
| threatofrain wrote:
| This post mentions various templating frameworks; I really
| recommend taking a peek at Astro, which is perfect for blogs or
| personal sites.
|
| https://astro.build/
|
| It offers a JSX templating language and "adapters" for deployment
| on various hosts like Cloudflare.
| dpwm wrote:
| Having just recently played with astro, I can confirm it's got
| some really nice qualities.
|
| Things I liked about Astro:
|
| - It can use front-end js frameworks like Svelte and Vue as
| components (and it can load the JavaScript only once these
| components appear).
|
| - familiar JSX, scoped CSS and single-file components for astro
| components.
|
| - Some nice plugins for responsive image optimizations.
|
| - nice touches like hot module reloading. It's nothing new, but
| it does just seem to work.
|
| I also believe there are optional SSR elements to astro now,
| but I have not played with these.
| pahn wrote:
| I just went through this and am very happy with using 11ty.
| It's simple and produces clean html/css without any framework
| whatsoever.
| o_m wrote:
| 11ty is just as much a framework as Astro
| Tuckerism wrote:
| Throwing out a resource that helped me build my own website to
| host my resume (and led me to get an Azure Fundamentals cert)--
| the Cloud Resume Challenge, which has been seen on HN in the
| past. (https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/)
|
| Has been a huge help to me since I don't directly work with cloud
| resources like AWS or Azure in my current IT role.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Great start, but the idea of reliance on Github/Cloudflare is
| both sad and likely unnecessary. Let's make the web the web
| again.
| jibbers wrote:
| What do you recommend instead?
| masswerk wrote:
| Less than 5 USD/EUR per month should buy you traditional web
| hosting ("webspace"), a domain, personal e-mail addresses and
| probably even database access. There are plenty of providers
| to choose from.
| exodust wrote:
| Yes agreed, and then you can go with a local web host -
| local to your country or city. And let's face it, cpanel or
| equivalent is fun to mess around with. Much more fun than
| github, zola and cloudfare pages!
|
| If the aim is to satisfy non-technical website builders,
| then the HTML files can be simply SFTP'd up to the web
| host. Badabing badaboom.
| masswerk wrote:
| Also, if you're planning to boast to HN, consider a
| provider without any bandwidth or data caps. :-)
|
| (With a bit of luck, this comes at no extra cost.)
| jrm4 wrote:
| See above comments on "paying a small company for hosting."
|
| I've been using hostdime for the last 15+ years for this. Of
| equal, if not greater, benefit has been "being able to pay
| someone for email." Everything works smoothly. And more
| importantly, you can call and talk to someone if they, or
| you, or in my case my father screws up something
| drastically.*
|
| *Somehow, and I don't know how, one day he deleted ALL,
| including business sensitive, of his email. ALL OF IT. I was
| certain we were screwed, until the company said -- well, this
| is drastic and you'll have to pay for it, but we could roll
| your entire server back a day before it happened.
|
| Uh oh, how much?
|
| Fifteen bucks.
|
| (That plus the then $5 a month, now about 20 or so, is some
| of the best money I've ever spent. Have no clue what gmail
| people would do if this happened.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Data centers actually online in Mexico and Brazil only ...
| ?
|
| https://www.hostdime.com/cloud/
| ryandrake wrote:
| I agree with this. It seemed so strange: The first half focused
| on doing everything from scratch and owning every line. The
| crash course on HTML and css was great, and the focus on it
| being a static site, hand-built in a text editor. Then, when it
| came to deployment, it was a 180 degree turn: Let's forget the
| details and rely on modern, magical black boxes like GitHub and
| Cloudflare! The opposite of owning your own destiny. Kind of
| jarring.
|
| To be more in line with the first half of the article, I would
| have expected the author walk through registering a domain
| name, pointing it at your computer's IP address (or your VPS),
| getting an SSL certificate, configuring web server software on
| that computer, and so on.
| beardyw wrote:
| Good article but confused by:
|
| "Unless you pay, GitHub Pages requires your repository to be
| public."
|
| How is that a problem with a static website?
| notRobot wrote:
| One example:
|
| All files/pages will be publicly discoverable. I regularly
| chuck stuff on a webserver to share files (like
| /files/dat-283992.txt) that's only meant to be accessed by
| people I share the URL with, but that's not possible when the
| repo is public.
|
| Additionally, your Jekyll config files will also be public,
| which I guess some people might not want, for whatever reason.
| Moru wrote:
| Just make sure your server does not give a list of files in
| the directory /files/ if you do that :-)
| notRobot wrote:
| Haha yep, made that mistake in the past!
| hnbad wrote:
| If the repo is public, people can just go to the repo and
| GitHub will happily give them the list of files.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| How do you do that?
| Moru wrote:
| It's a very common mistake so there is lots of help for
| it: You search "disable directory listing" for whatever
| webserver you use. I mostly use apache:
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apache+disable+directory+listin
| g+h...
| xigoi wrote:
| > I regularly chuck stuff on a webserver to share files (like
| /files/dat-283992.txt) that's only meant to be accessed by
| people I share the URL with, but that's not possible when the
| repo is public.
|
| Have you heard about encryption?
| notRobot wrote:
| Sure. I use HTTPS.
| xigoi wrote:
| That's not the point. If you want only certain people to
| be able to access a publicly available file, just encrypt
| it.
| notRobot wrote:
| I could password protect it. Or I could give it a unique
| undiscoverable URL. It's virtually the same.
|
| It's no different than sharing a link to a file in your
| Google Drive accessible only to people with the URL.
|
| Encryption doesn't play the role you seem to think it
| plays here.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| It's just something to be aware of. In progress drafts
| committed could be seen and typos/fixes are publicly logged.
| That is unusual to be so openly accessible.
| dorkrawk wrote:
| Also, it's not quite true. GitHub offers free private repos for
| individuals now: https://github.com/pricing
| exodust wrote:
| But you can't have hosted web pages and private repos at same
| time on free plan.
| c7b wrote:
| It means that not only the current state of the website is
| available (which it of course always is), but also your full
| edit history and the file tree.
| snorlaxmorlax wrote:
| A great place to start, a really good resource.
| habibur wrote:
| Adding that in HTML5, closing <p> <td> <th> <li> <dt> <dd> and
| other tags like these are optional. You can choose to not close
| those, and your HTML is just as valid.
|
| If you practice not closing, you can do without any markdown
| language. As the HTML itself gets almost as simple as markdown.
| Plus, gives you advanced control not found in markdown.
| enriquto wrote:
| I was going to say this! Moreover, besides self-closing tags,
| in HTML5 there are many _optional_ tags. For example, you
| almost never need to write explicit html, head, body, tags. The
| given minimal example thus can be simplified to something like
| this: <!DOCTYPE html> <title>Example
| Webpage</title> <h1>Welcome to my webpage</h1>
| <p>This is some content!
|
| ...and still be correct, 100% conformant html. See google's
| html style guide for more cool hints towards a minimal markup:
| https://google.github.io/styleguide/htmlcssguide.html
|
| I agree with your remark regarding the redundancy of markdown.
| It makes almost no difference to write markdown or html5 by
| hand. If people knew this, it would seem they would replace
| their "markdown engines" with cat (to put the header to each
| page), or simply with nothing at all.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _Moreover, besides self-closing tags, in HTML5 there are
| many optional tags._
|
| Those are (rooted in) SGML elements having start-element tag
| omission allowed, whereas HTML's "self-closing tags" (in
| HTML5 parlance) correspond to elements having end-element tag
| omission allowed. In your example, SGML infers the missing
| tags for html, head, body, and p to arrive at the canonical
| form: <html> <head>
| <title>Example Webpage</title> </head>
| <body> <h1>Welcome to my webpage</h1>
| <p>This is some content!</p> </body>
| </html>
|
| Cf. http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html (the TALK slides)
| explaining the inferences SGML does on the example input in
| detail
| skyfaller wrote:
| Another source explaining optional HTML in depth:
| https://meiert.com/en/blog/optional-html/
| philip1209 wrote:
| Making a personal website is surprisingly hard. This article
| doesn't even go into meta tags, next-gen image formats, GDPR-
| compliant analytics, or how to add a newsletter.
|
| I want to see more personal websites in the world. So, I've been
| building Postcard [1] to make it easy to set up a personal
| website. Caching, opengraph meta tags, page-speed optimization -
| it's all built in. I'm working right now on making domain
| connection the smoothest experience possible.
|
| [1] https://postcard.page
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Can I self-host after building with this tool?
| philip1209 wrote:
| No, it's a hosted product. It has dynamic components, like a
| mailing list, blog posts, RSS feed, dynamic OG images per-
| site and per-post, and more.
|
| If you want to self-host, check out this Next.js project from
| Tailwind Labs: https://tailwindui.com/templates/spotlight
| remram wrote:
| What's the benefit of using Cloudflare over GitHub Pages, if
| you're still using GitHub to host the repo?
| threatofrain wrote:
| Cloudflare has a lot of other services in case your website is
| slightly fancy.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| A good (and IMO essential) deployment addition would be to host
| it on a bare metal machine and run a quick apache/nginx server.
| It important that people still know how to host their own site,
| _properly from scratch_ and without big tech.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Unfortunately this also requires a dynamic dns client and
| server if you have a residential IP address that can change.
| wallmountedtv wrote:
| There are free "forever" VPS options from Google, Azure, and
| Oracle that you can use to deploy non-commercial servers. And
| together with either a free subdomain provider, or something
| like freenom to find a free domain registrar, you can have a
| fully free setup without using "no code" providers.
|
| Perfect to learn on without needing to use money.
| noirscape wrote:
| I'd rather recommend something like noip's free tier over
| Freenom btw.
|
| They're an incredibly skeezy company and if memory serves
| me right actually are one of the _extremely_ few ccTLD
| registrars to get fined for mistreating customers (which is
| extremely uncommon, ccTLD registrars have kinda free range
| to do whatever they want generally speaking).
|
| In a more direct sense, they stole several domains from me
| about a decade ago by marking my account as abusive and
| then tried to resell those domains for ~6.24 euros to
| anyone else as a "premium" domain name (which I figured out
| when I made an alternate account) once they got some slight
| amounts of traffic. Very scummy.
|
| It's a free provider so these aren't unexpected
| shenanigans, but I'd still advise anyone looking for a
| registrar to not use Freenom. Go for a dynamic DNS provider
| instead if you're starting out, there's quite a few with
| free plans. If you're willing to throw a few bones for a
| proper domain name, I'd recommend Porkbun myself but
| there's other options too.
| bell-cot wrote:
| _No_. The article is (per the author) for non-tech folks to
| build themselves a personal web page. If they don 't have easy
| access to ~free hosting at university_name.edu/~my_name to do
| that, then there are _lots_ of cheap domain name registrars and
| good-enough-for-this hosting plans out there.
|
| Vs. the technical aptitude, knowledge, and ongoing time
| commitment of running their own bare-metal servers, for a
| minimal-traffic personal web page? That's more like insisting
| that everyone must learn to sew, and make their own clothing.
| skyfaller wrote:
| I think it's still worth knowing how to host the website
| locally, even if it is only available on your local machine /
| LAN. Having to go through the deploy step and wait a couple
| minutes every time to view the tiniest changes is not very
| good, especially in the early stages of writing a website
| from scratch when you may be making a lot of mistakes.
|
| Since I use Hugo to build personal sites, running `hugo
| server` locally produces a local version of my website that I
| can view in my browser at localhost:1313/ and which auto-
| reloads with every change. Hugo builds incremental changes
| almost instantly.
| boyter wrote:
| I'd go with caddy. With a domain you get Cerys renewed for you
| without having to think. It's what I do for my blog, and the
| config is very simple too.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Has building a webpage never been easier or never been harder for
| a newcomer? I honestly can't tell. On the one hand there is an
| abundance of tools to ease the process, on the other hand even
| the entry level tooling for a webpage in 2022 is staggering.
| magpi3 wrote:
| Building a website on Google Sites is trivial. I can introduce
| it to someone modestly tech-savvy and after one session they
| are good to go.
| diceduckmonk wrote:
| We just checked out Neocities, the revival of Geocities, this
| week for our blogging purposes.
|
| I was taken aback and delighted that they had a drag and drop
| directory enumerating your CSS and HTML files.
| viridian wrote:
| Easier if you go the SaaS heavy, all in one route.
|
| It's a hellscape if you want to DIY it end to end though, which
| OP's article covers very well. What he doesn't spend any time
| on is how long it takes to get a proper "Hello, World!" at
| yourdomain.com without you being warned about using an insecure
| website.
|
| At a minimum in most cases you need: * a server, configured to
| serve your hello world and present your identity * domain name
| * DNS records pointed to your domain * SSL cert of some kind,
| probably issued by lets encrypt for something like this
| (creating a certificate authority is a project in itself) *
| reverse proxy if you are interested in serving over http+https
|
| Each of these can be done rather quickly once you are familiar
| or blindly following a guide, but reasoning about what each
| part is doing is very time consuming.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| It used to be really easy back when Netscape Navigator (and
| Communicator) still included a WYSIWYG HTML editor and ISPs
| provided users with some megabytes of hosting accessible with
| simple FTP.
| moooo99 wrote:
| > ISPs provided users with some megabytes of hosting
| accessible with simple FTP.
|
| I learned a few weeks ago that my ISP still does this. It's a
| bit hidden in the depths of the customer portal, but it is
| there!
| notRobot wrote:
| That's so cool! What ISP, if you don't mind me asking, and
| have you discovered any long-forgotten sites that still
| live on their servers?
| moooo99 wrote:
| I am with Telekom in Germany. I just moved out and got my
| first ever ,,own" internet connection/contract, so no
| hidden treasures there. What I did learn is that the
| e-Mail Account that you also used to get from your ISP
| still works and that my parents have been using that
| email address for the past ~18 years.
| paintballboi07 wrote:
| > my parents have been using that email address for the
| past ~18 years.
|
| I feel this. My mom has been complaining to me lately
| that her email makes her reset her password every time
| she logs in. She's still using an ISP email account from
| a company that got merged into AT&T years ago, but she
| doesn't want to change it because it's the email everyone
| has. I looked into forwarding it to another email, but of
| course they charge a monthly subscription for that
| feature.
| tgvaughan wrote:
| I think losing ISP-provided hosting (by default) really
| marked the transition of netizens from active participants to
| pure consumers.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| It's easier than ever if you ignore all the 'professional'
| tooling. Just Chrome or Firefox dev tools and an HTML file and
| you have an environment with instant feedback, auto-complete
| everything but none of the nonsense that most front-end
| developers deal with (since, as an amateur, you only need to
| make 1 page).
| csa wrote:
| > Has building a webpage never been easier or never been harder
| for a newcomer?
|
| Interestingly, both.
|
| It's very easy to make a basic website that more or less works.
|
| It's very hard to make a website that does anything well.
|
| Mistakes that people make on very basic, static websites:
|
| - Images not optimized, so page speeds are very slow. Bad for
| Google rankings (incl. Google Business Profile / Google My
| Business). Sometimes these images break the design, and this
| can look very unprofessional.
|
| - Responsive design is either non-existent or super janky.
|
| - Content is not presented with a focus on how the users will
| most likely want to interact with the available information.
| This includes simple things like phone number, address, and/or
| hours near the top of the page for B&M businesses. It also
| includes more complex things like clear page/site organization
| and navigation.
|
| Many people who make these sites know that they are bad, but
| they aren't willing to pay the thousands it would take (at
| least in the US) to get someone to do a simple 5-page brochure
| site right (assuming that they don't get scammed).
|
| The gap between easy-to-make junk and tougher-to-make jewels is
| currently quite large both in terms of skill required as well
| as potential cost.
| Vrondi wrote:
| It depends what you need to build. You can still completely
| build a website with only a text editor and a basic web server
| host. Cheap and simple, if you're willing to learn html and/or
| css.
|
| If you want to build Facebook, that's another kettle of fish.
| CM30 wrote:
| Depends on what you want to do. At its most basic level, you
| can still build and host a site exactly like you could in the
| olden days, there are still plenty of traditional hosting
| companies you can upload your work too, and getting a domain
| for such a site is easier and cheaper than ever. Plus SSL
| certificates are cheaper and easier than before, since Let's
| Encrypt has driven down prices in that market by offering a
| free solution.
|
| It's also easier from a CSS perspective too, since flexbox and
| grid have taken all the stress away from designing traditional
| 3 column layouts, and making them work on multiple device
| sizes. No more floating divs for you this time!
|
| But there's a difference between what's possible and what's
| expected, and I think that's where the confusion lies. If you
| want to make a 'web app' in the style of Google Maps or Gmail
| or Airbnb or Netflix or whatever else, then yeah you're gonna
| need to go down the long, somewhat confusing road of JavaScript
| frameworks and NPM and what not. And there are user
| expectations that a popular site will probably have many of the
| complex features that such frameworks enable, as well as a
| 'fancier' visual design than the sites of the 90s and early
| 00s.
|
| So the skill floor has stayed the same, but the ceiling has
| risen tenfold, and that's where the complexity can come in.
| swayvil wrote:
| I didn't read the article because it's too long, but here's how I
| do my dirt-simple page.
|
| A css. A markdown to html converter. An index file (1 in each
| directory). A dozen lines of code in that index file. The rest is
| markdown and images for content. Use the directory tree to
| organize your stuff. Voila! Works great.
|
| http://fleen.org
| 3zra wrote:
| This is really great!
|
| I wonder if one needs a framework like Hugo, Jekyll, etc. if one
| only wants to host a personal site without a blog? Is there any
| advantage compared to starting with one of those bare CSS
| templates and building a static website that way?
| jrm4 wrote:
| Wonder no more, you 100% do not.
|
| I use http://zim-wiki.org + a customized template.
|
| http://jrm4.com is it.
| redkoala wrote:
| side topic - instead of teaching PHP in your Advanced Web
| Development course, consider teaching React instead?
| fergie wrote:
| The big thing missing from vanilla HTML is templating.
|
| I dont fully understand why it has never been included in the
| HTML standard.
| ktpsns wrote:
| To be fair, when XML was cool, XSL did a good job in carrying
| out templating-language-like-features. Use case was like:
| Write semantic XML document, use XSL to generate XHTML,
| render XHTML in browser. Modern browsers still run XML with
| XSL.
| fergie wrote:
| Right, but you cant run an XSL processor without an
| application server? Or could you?
| genmon wrote:
| It works in the browser.
|
| For example, my RSS feed is processed with XSL to provide
| a friendly landing page:
|
| https://interconnected.org/home/feed
|
| (view source, second line)
| notRobot wrote:
| That's so cool!!
| intrasight wrote:
| I still use browser-side XSLT in my apps. Google had
| threatened to remove support but there was much pushback
| from the enterprise community that has many business apps
| using that approach so Google backed down. Still no
| guarantee that they'll pull the plug in the future.
| romeoblade wrote:
| Server Side Includes was probably the only thing that came
| close. While not actual templating, it did serve me well for
| code reusability and being able to make updates in one place.
| I made heavy use of them, even after discovering php3. It
| wasn't until I discovered smarty that I stopped using them. I
| miss those simpler days.
| fergie wrote:
| SSIs are actually still a thing, but they are webserver
| dependent- so if you are hosting your static pages on say
| S3 then they wont work.
| Devasta wrote:
| There is one, XSLT. However, outputting valid XML was
| considered too arduous for the average webdev so we need to
| reimplement everything we want in JS instead.
| intrasight wrote:
| XML and XSLT has been a mainstay of my career for over 20
| years. They are web standards with multiple
| implementations. It'll keep plugging along for another 20
| years while all these other proprietary "frameworks" come
| and go.
| superkuh wrote:
| Almost all webservers have support for server side includes.
| SSI are very limited and basically all you do is include one
| html file in another html file like <!--# include
| file="/footer.html" -->. It is the perfect combination of
| templating power and static html. It allows you to avoid all
| of the complexities of "static site generators" and
| "deploying" and all that cargo cult jazz.
| masswerk wrote:
| And, if you need more, there's still PHP, as kind of server
| side includes on steroids.
| jen729w wrote:
| Yes x 1,000,000. This is the _only_ thing that drives me to
| something like React (other than the fact that I'm not
| actually a programmer and it's the only thing I know) to
| build a site.
|
| I know HTML! I know CSS! But how do I make a template
| sidebar, say, without a framework. It's possible, sure. But a
| PITA. React just makes it easy, which is like using a
| baseball bat to kill a fly.
| Nathanael_M wrote:
| Check out Eleventy[0]. It's my static site generator of
| choice. It's pretty simple to pick up, high HIGH use case
| ceiling, and delightfully quick. Works with a bunch of
| different templating languages, too.
|
| [0] https://www.11ty.dev/
| Moru wrote:
| You used FRAMES ofcourse :-)
|
| (Now obsolete though)
| fergie wrote:
| You are undeservedly downvoted. I think that there is a
| strong case for using frames as a templating strategy for
| static sites that are hosted on say S3 or Github.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| If you're able to run react, you should be able to run any
| templating engine as well.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Because templating is yet another language to be interpreted.
| HTML was simple and very effective for its purpose:
| documents.
| ohbtvz wrote:
| But it has...? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/Web_Components/...
| intrasight wrote:
| HTML Imports is (was) an awesome solution to client-side
| declarative composition. Sadly, it never gained traction in
| browsers - mainly because Mozilla said they won't implement
| it. The only option now is imperative code.
| BeetleB wrote:
| You can always just write plain HTML/CSS and upload it to a
| (paid) webserver like you did 20+ years ago.
| jcynix wrote:
| If you want to have a simple web presence, you might want to
| look at some "elder self-hosting sites" (i.e pre f*book) like
| https://www.dreamwidth.org where you could easily set up your
| personal site, as I already mentioned in another comment.
|
| Disclaimer: just a self hoster, who experimented with
| dreamwidth.org some years ago, and no fan of todays dominant
| "social" media sites.
| anyfactor wrote:
| For personal sites use classless CSS framework:
| https://github.com/dbohdan/classless-css
|
| I have used water.css, simple.css and Tufte.css and all of them
| are great.
| VMG wrote:
| The guide is aimed at non-tech people. Using any kind of
| framework is missing the point.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| No classes means that you just write plain html. I think non
| tech people could deal with adding a single script tag and
| having everything just work.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| bcjordan wrote:
| Super cool, love how they can be used for prototypes to cover
| that gap from "CS professor's plain HTML website with a 1998
| copyright notice" to "fiddling with margin and padding values".
| BareCSS in particular looks so nice I would never have believed
| it uses no classes or styles!
| https://github.com/longsien/BareCSS
| clairity wrote:
| nice, i'm building a personal css framework that builds on
| top of a classless base that is similar to bare.css, so i'll
| have to go raid it for ideas like how/where it employs grid
| and flexbox. =)
|
| ps - looks like they use some non-standard html elements and
| attributes to be completely classless. that's ok, but not
| generally what i'd want, though i'm quite tempted by the non-
| standard 'grid' tag.
| kobe_bryant wrote:
| I would suggest internal css in the head tag for a simple site.
| otherwise if the html loads too fast you'll see an unstyled page
| before it reads in the css file
| aborsy wrote:
| What are the main tools for creating the HTML and CSS files for a
| simple static site?
|
| I used to use jemdoc for an academic website. But now its
| documentation website has become a cryptocurrency website
|
| https://jemdoc.jaboc.net/
|
| Python has also transition to python3.
|
| Also where to search for good CSS styles?
| Reflecticon wrote:
| Amazing! Will definitely use this information for my author side.
|
| I have no programming skills and always wanted to have a self
| hosted website that is quick, small, without any fluff where
| people can download my stories. Maybe to interact with me and
| with each other too. End of story.
|
| But when I googled "website programming" it's mostly generic
| advice for design (everything looks like everything else) and
| bloated (slow) code.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| you don't need programming skills to self-host. most hosts
| offer one-click website options for e.g. wordpress
| jcynix wrote:
| You might want to look at some "elder self-hosting sites" (i.e
| pre f*book) like https://www.dreamwidth.org where you could
| easily set up an internet presence without fluff.
| lxe wrote:
| I wonder what happened to "upload the files via ftp and be done
| with it" deployment process? Setting up cloudflare, github,
| github pages, amazon, etc is just too in-the-trenches.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Where's the "This page is under construction" banner, and the
| visitor counter?
|
| (yes, I might be getting old)
| digitalsushi wrote:
| So last week HN said "hey, go read The Pragmatic Programmer if
| you havent", and, I finished chapter one up a night or two ago.
|
| It said, paraphrasing, "A single broken window in a
| neighborhood is often the catalyst that begins the transition
| from a nice neighborhood into a bad neighborhood. Everyone
| starts looking at that busted window and figuring everything's
| busted. Everyone starts to treat everything like it's busted
| and that's that, it's ruined". Ok, heavily paraphased.
|
| Putting a little notice up, "Hey, we see this! And we know it's
| gotta get fixed, so here's a plastic sign with a recent date on
| it so you know we're around and working on it" is better than
| just leaving the mess. And an "under construction" sign on a
| website is meant to be this treatment.
|
| I think the book is old enough that we hadn't invented the
| default-cynic who would immediately look for a 22 year old
| timestamp on the construction.gif and invalidate the entire
| concept with counterexample.
|
| I believe the concept is sound, even if in practice it's often
| abused.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 90% of the challenge of making my personal webpage is picking the
| colours. I still hate the green and it drives me nuts. But blue
| is too comfortable and boring. Maybe an auburn?
|
| Ugh. Is there a place I can share a link and get two minutes of
| free designer advice?
| masswerk wrote:
| Green is also the most challenging one, since our perception of
| green is twice as good as with other colours. Blue, btw, is
| generally perceived darker than the technical brightness of the
| color would suggest. A general advice may be to dial down
| saturation: especially when applied to larger areas, colours
| tend to be more intensive as they may appear in a colour
| picker.
| pplonski86 wrote:
| I'm working on an automatic designer. You just focus on the
| content and have instant preview how your website will look
| like in several different templates/designs.
|
| There is Genetic Algorithm that can mutate styles of the
| current templates (that you liked) and generate endless designs
| till you find the one you like the most.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I love the sound of this!
| dvko wrote:
| Try #FC0 or simply pick anything that matches the WCAG AAA
| compliance level and be done with it.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yes. Post it here and tell everyone it's perfect and it'll be
| destroyed in minutes.
|
| (There are websites that have color palettes available for
| selection iirc)
| bugfix-66 wrote:
| _"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to
| add, but when there is nothing left to take away. "_
|
| Destroy it: https://BUGFIX-66.com
|
| Single CPU Linode cloud instance ($5 per month), single Go
| executable generating/caching/serving the simplest/cleanest
| HTML... could it be simpler or cheaper and still work?
| sandreas wrote:
| It's not about perfection, it's about beauty:
|
| Beauty is the sum of the parts in arrangement, which
| eliminates the need to add, remove or change anything.
|
| Johann Carl Loth
|
| (translated from german, maybe some sense is lost)
| bugfix-66 wrote:
| Agreed, but commenter said "Call it perfect and HN will
| destroy it".
| sandreas wrote:
| Agreed :-)
| kixiQu wrote:
| If one of the things you wanted to "take away" was page
| margin, then sure.
|
| Even at a time when the physical costs of production were
| far, far more significant than today's, people thought it
| was important to give a text block some air
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canons_of_page_construction)
| so this isn't a frivolous innovation. IMO doesn't have to
| be a big shift or complicate things; body { margin-left:
| 2vw; } here would do a lot. Hell, you could toss it as an
| inline declaration on the body element itself if you're
| morally opposed to style tags.
| codegeek wrote:
| Sure. Line height sucks on your page. May be add a little
| bit of it. I would do: body {
| line-height: 1.6em; }
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jonahx wrote:
| Here's a quick take:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/B1vROtB.png
| Waterluvian wrote:
| In my opinion this is an objective step forward. Thank so
| much for the ideas.
|
| So:
|
| - serif title to be more distinct and formal
|
| - a calm blue (do you have the hex?)
|
| - no borders
|
| I'm thinking something isn't quite complete with the "latest
| posts" now that it's without a border. Maybe they need to be
| a bit more "condensed" so they don't bleed into eachother
| visually as much.
|
| I'm going to experiment with your ideas!
|
| Edit: I'm also deeply curious how someone looks at a page and
| decides things like "the title should be serif." In
| retrospect it looks so good but I have no clue how people get
| there. Just a good eye? Experience? Is it some sort of design
| rule/convention?
| jonahx wrote:
| #84a0ca is the hex for that grayish blue. If you open up
| dev tools in chrome or FF they have a colorpicker and you
| can tweak in real time.
|
| > I'm thinking something isn't quite complete with the
| "latest posts" now that it's without a border.
|
| No doubt you could improve it further. The borders felt
| like too much chrome. You could also experiment with a
| subtly different background color for the cards... not sure
| if it would work. Or more padding, etc. Basically, the idea
| is there are many way to achieve visual "separateness".
|
| > I'm also deeply curious how someone looks at a page and
| decides things like "the title should be serif."
|
| The proper mixing of serif / sans-serif is a standard
| technique. If you look at pretty much any web page that
| looks really well-designed to you, they'll have a "font
| palette" just like a color palatte. Often it will be just
| two fonts but sometimes more, and it's typically a mix of
| serif and sans.
|
| I am not a professional designer... I've just picked up a
| bit over the years.
| roflyear wrote:
| also, there is no reason why you need to have colors for
| your fonts. try to do black (or dark gray) and a lighter
| gray. maybe throw some colors around for some things but
| you don't need color everywhere.
| kixiQu wrote:
| The rabbit hole is fractally deep. Stuff like
| https://betterwebtype.com/web-typography-resources/ (so
| https://betterwebtype.com/articles/2018/08/15/guide-to-
| combi... though I'll warn you it's got a real annoying
| modal) scratches the surface of the stuff that someone
| might be thinking of... regarding type alone.
| ryandrake wrote:
| A simpler alternative: Don't worry about the colors. Just
| provide text and links, and let the user's preferences handle
| color and style. If the user did not configure their own
| preferences, browser defaults tend to be readable and
| accessible.
| sandreas wrote:
| Try https://coolors.co or http://colormind.io/
| WHA8m wrote:
| Not a designer, but curious. Just comment a link.
| [deleted]
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's in my bio. :)
|
| I'm not the biggest fan of the design but I don't mind it. I
| want minimal. I just hate the colour. Maybe the font needs to
| be smaller too.
| exodust wrote:
| I quite like this guy's choice of green text and background
| shade of grey... from a post I saw here recently...
|
| https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/nightdrive.html
|
| But go with your choices, it can take time over a few
| sessions. Notice colours in the real world and notice ones
| you like.
| dzuc wrote:
| W3C actually publishes some nice stylesheets:
| https://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/preview
| burgerrito wrote:
| Ahh about this. I recently found a very good Twitter thread
| about choosing a color for a non-designer. Sadly, I think I
| didn't save the thread and now I cannot find it.
|
| Can someone help me find it?
| Tomte wrote:
| Not only colour:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/i/events/879086180909764608
| rigmarole wrote:
| Was it perhaps https://twitter.com/kadlac ? I remember him
| for "non-designer" posts, and color.
| ca98am79 wrote:
| If you wish to make a personal webpage from scratch, you must
| first invent the universe.
| exodust wrote:
| If I want to make a fruit salad from scratch the fruit and bowl
| can already exist.
| do-me wrote:
| Pretty detailed guide! I'd just like to emphasize that nowadays
| you can literally create and deploy a personal homepage entirely
| for free. For the individual touch, buy a custom domain for a few
| bucks, link it and even add a free custom mail (e.g. with Zoho's
| free tier).
|
| It's remarkable how knowhow and budget requirements have dropped
| in recent years so that anyone can create something pretty good-
| looking in no time.
|
| Personally, I use the combination of:
|
| 1) Hugo + GitHub + Netlify + Zoho for my personal blog and email
| (summed up here: https://geo.rocks/post/setup) and 2) Material
| for MkDocs + GitHub for projects.
| nullandvoid wrote:
| Can vouch for cloudflare pages for frontend for an easy static
| frontend deployment experience. Manages HTTPS, configuring
| deployment on pushes to repo, connecting to custom domain etc all
| with a few clicks.
| duxup wrote:
| Same. My personal page was on heroku. I realized it had
| vanished and very quickly I put together a page, GitHub
| repository connected to cloudflare, connected an unused google
| domain, redirected my old domain (I wanted to use the new
| domain).
|
| No fuss. Whole process felt very "clean".
| sake wrote:
| Using absolute links is the complete opposite of what you should
| do. If the page you are linking to lives in the same path, there
| is no reason not to link to it relatively. It makes the path
| structure more modular.
| j_4 wrote:
| Absolute links would be great for CSS, but being broken when
| creating the page/browsing the files locally makes it a non-
| starter imo.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| What even is the <base> element?
| kaichanvong wrote:
| Your being completely ignorant making this statement (about a
| personal webpage that is built from scratch). It is 100% their
| choice. How they reach the conclusion to write their links is
| 100% theirs.
|
| "there is no reason not to link to it relatively." You have
| clearly been so isolated in your thinking, you are incorrect.
| Again, it is their link to share.
| rawTruthHurts wrote:
| Indeed. Why would you teach to do things right when you can
| teach how to do them wrong?
| kaichanvong wrote:
| Like I said. It is assumption of being 1 domain. Could be a
| personal web pages on 2 different domains. Ahah!
| bbkane wrote:
| I feel like the common case, especially for new HTML
| devs, is to use one website.
|
| And when they get more experienced, they'll probably want
| to migrate that site to a new host (for example my site
| was bbkane.github.io before I moved it to bbkane.com),
| which will break absolute links to the first (now down)
| domain. Yes, best practice is to set up a redirect from
| old to new anyway, but that's the kind of thing someone
| doing this for the first time doesn't think about.
|
| So there's definitely a case for beginners using relative
| links. And it's less repetitive to type!
| kaichanvong wrote:
| I'm also interested in how it is going to be for
| multicultural individuals (with their own personal
| webpages). You have 2 webpages English, German. Could be
| a collection of these pages only in English.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| Why no one pushing this ? this is so much simpler than hugo,
| jekyll, etc.
| neogodless wrote:
| I'm confused. This is a personal web site guide that encourages
| using a site generator like Hugo or Jekyll or Zola. (And it's
| on the front page of Hacker News, so it seems like it's
| interesting to many of us.)
|
| If you mean, why is no one pushing Zola, this site is obviously
| encouraging it, so it's inaccurate to assume "no one" is.
| vonwoodson wrote:
| 0/10 for recommending the garbage text editor neovim.
|
| Use real vim.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I assume by "real vim" you mean vim emulation in a serious
| editor/IDE.
| executesorder66 wrote:
| What's wrong with neovim?
| julianbuse wrote:
| Poe's law in action: I cannot determine whether this is satire
| or not.
| nullc wrote:
| Ed is the standard text editor.
| deworms wrote:
| I wouldn't use Cloudflare for deployments. They're known for
| arbitrarily taking over domains they manage and replacing their
| contents with their own PR pages with no advance warning. They're
| communicating with customers poorly too.
| neogodless wrote:
| Can you provide references to this claim?
| vehemenz wrote:
| If you've read the news in the past month, CloudFlare removed
| its DDoS protection and caching service from KiwiFarms based
| on series of false reports, essentially taking the site
| offline.
| exodust wrote:
| But didn't cloudfare backtrack on that and state they don't
| want to be moderators of content because they want to be
| seen as a utility? They used the example of a phone company
| who doesn't care/not liable if you say naughty things on
| the phone. They want to be like the phone company.
| deworms wrote:
| No, they didn't they still haven't restored service, and
| they cut it based on completely fake reports, without any
| warning or communication. They're not trustworthy.
| Heyso wrote:
| Keep it mind that you cannot use github as free host for
| anything.
|
| "GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free
| web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site,
| or any other website that is primarily directed at either
| facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial
| software as a service (SaaS)."
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> Keep it mind that you cannot use github as free host for
| anything.
|
| I found Github to be great for a static personal page. I found
| it notoriously buggy once attaching a domain. I've yet to find
| a good run-down of how to _consistently_ host static sites with
| domains + ssl on Github.
| catach wrote:
| I don't think a personal webpage falls under any of those
| categories.
| arutar wrote:
| It's cool to see this on HN.
|
| I originally wrote this article for a "microcourse" I ran at the
| University of St Andrews--aimed at a non-tech background--on
| building a personal webpage. Especially in mathematics, having a
| personal site (that you control) to host research and other
| information is pretty invaluable!
|
| Older personal math sites tend to have a very particular
| "historic" feel. While I personally have a lot of nostalgia for
| the look, I also think it's good to take advantage of some of the
| newer tools that are available today!
| tkgally wrote:
| It looks great! I started my personal static website more than
| twenty years ago, and I have maintained it ever since with only
| a text editor and FTP software. When I began, I learned what I
| needed from books (!). If I were starting now, your site would
| be the perfect introduction.
| mattl wrote:
| Hopefully SFTP nowadays?
| tkgally wrote:
| Yes, yes. Though the site is still http, not https. I need
| to get on that one of these days.
| bdamm wrote:
| Yes, for the sake of your visitors. If your site is only
| http, then middleboxes can use your site load to
| opportunistically attack the visitor.
|
| Of course, the probability that a visitor would not visit
| any other non-TLS site that day is low, but that
| probability is getting lower with every passing day.
| 2000UltraDeluxe wrote:
| Most modern web hosts support both SFTP and FTPS. The same
| applies for FTP clients.
| mattl wrote:
| I don't know if I've ever seen FTPS in the wild.
| sandreas wrote:
| I love to see that the effort of preparing a microcourse is
| publicly available. And also the fact, that you don't "promote"
| a single static site generator, but also wrap this into a HTML
| course.
|
| I once did a kind of "tutorial" for hugo[1], because I think
| it's documentation is hard to follow for beginners, but I
| should have thought to give some details about the "from
| scratch" technologies...
|
| Great work, thanks.
|
| [1]: https://pilabor.com/blog/2021/05/building-a-blog-with-
| hugo/
| i_feel_great wrote:
| Very helpful.
|
| Maybe a mention of using https://validator.w3.org/ would also
| be helpful to check that all the html is correct and complete.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| I would put "check for spec valid HTML" _far_ down the TODO-
| list. I'm a perfectionist, so I would run the validator at
| some point, but I find it's basically never helpful for
| identifying usability issues with a website. For a non-
| technical person setting up a personal site, does it really
| matter?
| berkes wrote:
| Browsers have gotten really good at it, but man, have I
| wasted hours, missed deadlines because of a stray
| `<li>item2<li>` and such.
|
| HTML validity and rapid feedback is just as important as
| the rapid feedback of unit-tests, a type-checker or a even
| a linter: it shows you mistakes when you make them, rather
| than later, when you'll merely run into their effects.
| jcynix wrote:
| Yes, validation is a good suggestion. And there's
| http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ too, both can be linked
| to from inside a web page via
| http://validator.w3.org/check/referer and
| http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer to ease
| repeated testing.
| EricHolden12 wrote:
| Oh man, this takes me back.
|
| i remember learning CSS/XHTML and getting your website to
| pass the validator so you could proudly show the badge on
| your website was a big deal.
| mro_name wrote:
| I am lazy and run html-tidy.org.
| skyfaller wrote:
| There's also a ... newer version? at
| https://validator.w3.org/nu/
|
| I'm not 100% sure what the difference is, but you can see the
| source code at https://github.com/validator/validator and
| report any issues.
| bitwize wrote:
| It _is_ cool to see this on HN! I keep thinking, don 't people
| who use the internet with any frequency already know this? But
| that was a quarter century ago, that knowledge may have been
| long forgotten among internet-using normies, and it needs to be
| documented and remembered.
| rob74 wrote:
| One nitpick: right at the beginning it mentions "JavaScript
| allows dynamic behaviour", and then explains at length what
| static and dynamic pages are, but doesn't refer back to
| JavaScript and what kind of dynamic behaviour it provides for
| websites that are "server-side static". I imagine that if
| someone who has really zero prior knowledge would read this,
| that might leave them confused...
| [deleted]
| eevilspock wrote:
| > _The syntax href= "../" specifies that we are referring to a
| file in the directory containing the current file._
|
| ".." navigates to the parent directory of the directory
| containing the current file.
|
| "." refers to the directory containing the current file.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| Gitlab gives you private repositories with pages.
| martinskou wrote:
| Statis is nice. But what about intra-site search? And form to
| email? Is there a best practice for this?
| buggythebug wrote:
| currenciessfe wrote:
| daptaq wrote:
| > For command-line editors, you could consider Neovim or Emacs.
|
| A friendly reminder that Emacs is not a "command-line editor".
| arutar wrote:
| That's a fair point, more precise phrasing would be "If you
| prefer a command-line interface, ..." which should be
| sufficiently vague to make almost everybody happy.
| daptaq wrote:
| I'd still object, Emacs has nothing to do with command-line
| interfaces.
| zoltar wrote:
| Of course it is. It's not just that, though.
| daptaq wrote:
| Emacs is a visual editor (which also applies to Neovim, btw).
| Ed is a command line editor. But even if we assume that
| "command line" means "terminal", then it would still be wrong
| to describe it as a "command line editor", in the same sense
| at is wrong to describe a computer as a facebook client.
| zoltar wrote:
| You are confusing line editor with command-line editors. If
| you interpret command-line editor as editing the command
| line, emacs has eshell. If you interpret it as an editor
| from a terminal, it's that, too.
|
| If you mean "line editor", emacs has batch mode.
| daptaq wrote:
| Aren't all "line editors" also "command line editors"?
| Either way, that is not my point. I just wanted to point
| out that Emacs shoudln't be boxed into the same category
| as Vim, because while Vim ist most commonly used in a
| terminal, Emacs isn't.
| SadWebDeveloper wrote:
| Recently took on the challenge on learning Hugo, its quick but
| his learning curve is high (compared against Jekyll and Gatsby),
| specially because the docs seems to be more curated towards
| content management and how to deal with markdown limitations
| rather than web/front-end design, therefore there is no tutorial
| hell for "how to design your own theme", you have to look at how
| others solve it to give you and idea and once you get a glimpse
| on how they do it, you can go fast without using shortcodes,
| partials and other "weird things hugo have".
|
| Only thing i will change in Hugo is how unopiniated tries to be,
| it always has at least 3 to 4 ways to the same thing and
| configurate the same thing with json, toml, yaml, etc...
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I picked hugo for a project because of some fever dream I was
| having about golang whilst learning that language. I still suck
| at both. And I probably don't use either enough to get good at
| the moment.
|
| Hugo has sharp edges and interestingly the thing I have noticed
| is that I would expect that Hugo should be getting to an almost
| finished sort of state with the project. Yet there seems to be
| a lot more stuff being added and just so much flexibility.
| Maybe I picked the wrong tool, but I agree with all of you're
| points about the non-opinionated nature being a disbenefit.
| anonu wrote:
| Big fan of https://docsify.js.org since theres no need to compile
| your static site. A small amount of js just renders markdown.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| I didn't know about Zola. I guess i just deemed Hugo "good
| enough" :)
|
| As for hosting, i personally use the free tier of Azure to host
| mine (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/app-
| service/stati...). It doesn't allow for anything "business
| related", but neither does Github.
|
| It does however provide free SSL certificates, which is/was
| something that github pages didn't do at the time, but i think
| they've since changed that.
| imran0 wrote:
| > I didn't know about Zola. I guess i just deemed Hugo "good
| enough" :)
|
| Zola is basically a stripped down Hugo. I don't see any reason
| choose it over hugo other than it's obligatory "written in
| rust" advantage.
| laurieg wrote:
| Really nice, focused write up. Very useful and to the point.
|
| HTML is really very accessible to someone with basic computer
| skills. It's a shame that a standard business website is now a
| facebook page.
|
| There is a local gym near me with a static HTML webpage, hosted
| on local ISP web hosting. It's quick to load, responsive and
| always up to date. Checking the opening times, address and
| special events is much easier than on some aggregator site or
| google maps (which is often out of date). It's also very easy to
| read on many devices.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >HTML is really very accessible to someone with basic computer
| skills. It's a shame that a standard business website is now a
| facebook page.
|
| It really is a shame. HTML and CSS are among the easiest ways
| of experiencing for yourself the power and possibilities of
| ordering a computer to do things for you.
| mypalmike wrote:
| CSS easy? I've been writing code since the 80s, and CSS is
| one of the most confounding things I've encountered.
| kilna wrote:
| Easy things are easy in CSS. Hard things are... possible.
| Sometimes barely so. Sometimes impossible without JS. BUT,
| the easy things are generally easy.
| mypalmike wrote:
| In job interviews, I've been handed code in various
| languages from assembly to C to Java and asked to figure
| out what that code does. It can be an interesting
| challenge, and while I'm certainly not the fastest to
| figure it out, I usually can.
|
| Give me a bunch of CSS and ask me what it will do... even
| with the docs in front of me, I am almost certain to get
| much of it wrong. And I suspect even experienced front
| end devs (I've never done front end professionally) would
| struggle with such a challenge.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| The problem with coding up a custom website for myself is I end
| up wanting to customize it to no end. It distracts me from
| actually writing. Add in a dose of graphic design ideas and
| very few words go down at all.
|
| I just finished replacing my custom site with a ghost site
| using a theme that is barely customizable at all. Hopefully,
| this will make it easier to avoid fiddling with it.
|
| The new site is more generic unfortunately, but on the plus
| side, I already have almost 20k words queued up for future
| posts
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| When discussing points such as yours, I always bring up
| https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ (which I like very much),
| http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ (which I like less) and
| https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ (which I like more than
| the second, but still less than the first). There is also
| https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/ but I do not remember
| where it fits chronologically.
|
| There are so many, so many sites that would be perfect with
| just basic HTML and _maybe_ some CSS
| capableweb wrote:
| Ironically, all of those (except
| https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/) try to pull in some
| kind of Analytics JS, which kind of defeats their point...
|
| One of them even pull in jQuery...
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Ah, interesting. I nevera actually started DevTools on them
| but yes - they betrayed my trust :)
| cxr wrote:
| 2 out of 4 have analytics (not "all of those (except [the
| last one]"), and none of them use jQuery.
| capableweb wrote:
| - https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ => GA
|
| - http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ => GA
|
| - https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ => Plausible +
| jQuery
|
| - https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/ => No JS
| included
|
| So 3/4 have analytics, + one with jQuery.
|
| Tested by looking at requests made in the network
| inspector of the browser developer tools.
| Sodman wrote:
| And the jQuery it pulls isn't even gzipped or otherwise
| encoded! Although at least it's minified.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| Does anyone have a day-to-day use blog/site that passes
| all the tests like this?
| capableweb wrote:
| I've heard news.ycombinator.com is pretty great when it
| comes to good readability, UX and being lightweight :)
| kredd wrote:
| Let's say you're a business owner, don't have many technical
| skills, and want to change opening hours for a given day (e.g.
| public holiday). You'll have to go at least 5 extra steps that
| require you to achieve that, than just pulling up your phone,
| going on your facebook page and changing the hours.
|
| I think we are collectively over estimating average public's
| willingness to go extra steps to achieve almost the same
| results that most of the public already expects.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I absolutely hate this ' let's just put it on Facebook'. My
| wife was planning to go to this boutique kids shoe shop.
| Checked the opening hours,etc. Went there just to see the shop
| closed. Calls the owner, and she's all surprised: oh but I did
| post on Facebook that I'll be open from 2pm..
| lbriner wrote:
| I do as well but let's be honest, many people who create
| sites for money will not necessarily coach the business to
| keep it simple, since they will earn less money from it.
|
| By the time you add a CMS (to help the business not screw up
| the markup), some design help and all the features that the
| business thinks are easy because "it is just a form", and you
| are paying several thousand dollars, way more than many small
| business think is worth it.
|
| The other alternative, I guess, is something like Shopify but
| many people I have talked to struggle to see why paying a
| monthly subscription is money well-spent to get something
| always up to date and fresh. They'll pay a shop assistant
| pittance which is still more than they would need to pay for
| Shopping-as-a-service and get less value.
| Minor49er wrote:
| I've had this happen too at Armageddon Shop in Cambridge.
| When I showed up, the two employees told me to leave because
| they posted on Facebook that they were closing two hours
| early due to nobody showing up
|
| I don't even use Facebook, and if I did, I wouldn't check
| every place I wanted to go on it before I went there
| mr_gibbins wrote:
| Unfortunately, businesses have to go to where the customers
| are. Many customers now are 100% Facebook-era, particularly
| true of the young and those older folk late to computing, and
| it might not occur to them to check
| https://www.widgetsRus.com before searching for Widgets R Us
| on Facebook.
|
| Updating a 'personal' site is also a PITA IF you don't know
| what you are doing or don't have a streamlined process, e.g.
| for me I'd just amend the .htm page to say I'm shut from 2pm
| and FTP it up, 2 minutes, but someone non-savvy will always
| prefer to post a new message on FB saying 'hey, shutting at
| 2pm today', takes even less time and less cognitive load.
|
| I'm not saying this is a good thing, by the way. But it's
| understandable.
|
| EDIT: Not to mention, updating a site on the move is
| difficult. Pull latest version of site (Github), amend .htm
| (some notepad app?), then an FTP client on the phone, log in,
| find, push the file, close, check. Versus opening the FB app
| and doing some typing.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Pull latest version of site (Github)
|
| What does that have to do with personal site vs Facebook?
| If Github is a problem, don't use Github if you regularly
| need to update and for some reason you can't do it using
| the web editor. I mean, WordPress is kind of a big deal.
|
| There's nothing wrong with Facebook if you like a kind of
| ugly website that randomly pops up crap to prevent people
| from viewing your site. If you're concerned about people
| that only use Facebook and no other sites, you can
| duplicate material on Facebook.
| mattl wrote:
| Is there a technical reason you're only using three letter
| extensions for HTML files?
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| The 8.3 filename structure has a long half-life.
| zakki wrote:
| I guess related to Windows file extension in the past. 3
| letters only.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| If we actually got the semantic web that was promised, back
| in the burgeoning xhtml days, then it seems like Facebook /
| own website could simply duplicate the latest data from the
| other page.
| Bakary wrote:
| Of all businesses a boutique kids shoe shop is sure to
| attract the Facebook crowd as it exists today in the West at
| least
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I have no doub it does, but checking a business' Facebook
| account to see if they are open would probably be the last
| thing I could come up with.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| > HTML is really very accessible to someone with basic computer
| skills
|
| While I think this is a bit of a stretch I think the _really_
| inaccessible part of it is knowing how to host and deploy it.
| barbs wrote:
| I wanted to ask for a link, then I thought the server on the
| local ISP might not have the resources to withstand HN traffic,
| then I thought such a small efficient website wouldn't require
| many resources!
| marcus_cemes wrote:
| It takes time to establish discoverability with a website, you
| either rely on a search engine, word of mouth, business cards,
| etc. A new small-business website won't magically start
| generating traffic without some significant effort.
|
| Using a platform like Facebook or Google Maps makes it easier
| to for other people to find your page when they want to look
| for it.
| executesorder66 wrote:
| True, but a local gym doesn't need global discovery and SEO
| optimization. They can just put the URL on their business
| cards, and in a few places at reception. A sticker on their
| door. 95% of their customers will see it and know where to
| go.
| clairity wrote:
| you can just point the facebook page and google to your
| website. problem solved.
| m-manu wrote:
| My homepage is on Github. Didn't know Cloudflare also provides
| free hosting. Thanks.
| _joel wrote:
| Ah, brings back memories of getting HTML 2/3 (no CSS iirc back
| then) books from the library way back when. Shame the library
| closed over a decade ago.
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