[HN Gopher] Curating my corner of the Internet with a freehand w...
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Curating my corner of the Internet with a freehand web editor
Author : rchaud
Score : 80 points
Date : 2024-06-20 14:48 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (rafichaudhury.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rafichaudhury.com)
| musicale wrote:
| > Too much knowledge of code is required to create a hand-made
| website. Building one shouldn't be any more difficult than making
| a PowerPoint [presentation]
|
| I like this. I also wish designMode were more of a discoverable,
| easy-to-use feature in popular browsers.
|
| Hosting (and DNS etc.) are still a pain though, and usually cost
| money.
|
| > an abandonware WYSIWYG web editor called Hotglue
|
| > Hotglue is a fascinating open-source "anything goes, WYSIWYG"
| website making tool
|
| But it's open source (GPL), so anyone could revive (or un-
| abandon) it!
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Building one shouldn't be any more difficult than making a
| PowerPoint
|
| Once upon a time there was Microsoft Frontpage and Frontpage
| Express which brought becoming a webmaster to the masses.
|
| For all the rightful criticism they got, they were also what
| started me down the path of learning how websites are made.
| rchaud wrote:
| Even in 2024, the <table> element remains an easier, HTML-
| native way to build multi-column layouts than flexbox or
| grid. Is it responsive? No. Does it work acceptably in the
| absence of the above? Yes!
| Terr_ wrote:
| Later but also noteworthy: [Macromedia|Adobe] Dreamweaver.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Dreamweaver
| lukan wrote:
| "But it's open source (GPL), so anyone could revive (or un-
| abandon) it!"
|
| Not everyone has the skill, or time and energy, to pick up a
| dead project. Most projects are dead, because the codebase
| became no more fun to work with. So it likely won't be well
| documented, nor clean code and original creators might be not
| around for questions. Really challenging start conditions, that
| is why most abandoned projects stay abandoned and people
| motivated rather start a fresh one.
|
| (no idea about the state of hotglue, but it would surprise me,
| if it would be different here)
| smaudet wrote:
| > Not everyone has the skill, or time and energy, to pick up
| a dead project.
|
| To expound on that, usually when I encounter a "dead"
| project, the biggest hurdle(s) are the build assumptions that
| weren't addressed - large complex build systems that have
| many presumptions (usually dynamic run-times with macro
| libraries, that require specific versions of things to exist
| on your system, that themselves are also quite difficult to
| build/require specific starting conditions)...
|
| A good example, I see (quite often actually) build systems
| with nested build systems that are then _bootstrapping other
| builds_ - quite a technical marvel but unsurprising when a
| tweak to the "underlying build tools" causes strange errors
| and requires massive build-system surgeries...
|
| The lesson? Be as verbose as possible about exactly
| everything you know you depend on, in as clear (human
| readable) format as possible, and always strive to pick the
| simplest build tool possible - if you are compiling a
| language, use that compiler, not a system that has support
| for systems that can compile your language.
|
| Technical "shortcuts" are the bane of longevity of a software
| artifact.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Very much this. Please stop building Jenga towers.
|
| It's always alarming to encounter build instructions that
| start with "you need this specific version of this
| particular compiler for this particular obscure
| language..."
|
| Bonus points if your build process fetches modules from
| online endpoints that may or may not be there in five
| years' time.
|
| [And yes, I'm as guilty as anyone of creating over-
| engineered but ultimately fragile scripts to automate a
| build. My favourite is a bash script which parses a text
| file for filenames, matches against the file extension and
| processes them accordingly. If you edit the text file with
| a Windows-style editor so it acquires CR/LF line endings,
| the bash script can no longer parse it. Fun times.]
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Are you saying dependencies are bad?
|
| Are you saying all new languages are bad because they
| encourage you to pull in half the program via some
| language package manager, injecting problems from simple
| networking availability to supply chain attacks into what
| was otherwise a simple program?
|
| Are you saying we should only code everything in C and
| C++ and Bash with as few dependencies as possible?
|
| https://youtu.be/fDq_8y_drE8&t=85
| lukan wrote:
| I think he or she is just saying, try not to build overly
| complicated things. To which I very much agree.
| rchaud wrote:
| No worries about that with Hotglue (PHP), the deployment is
| no more complicated than dropping the unzipped project
| folder onto a webserver.
|
| I really wish I knew more PHP to fix some things, as
| Hotglue as it is already ticks a lot of boxes for me (non-
| SaaS, self-hostable). I tried to find a way to make public
| pages password-protected, but it didn't work when I used
| the Apache server method (conflicts with the authentication
| method used for editing the pages). And I don't know enough
| PHP to do it on the application side.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I don't think it is the software that is the blocker for people
| doing this. It's not like it was easy in the old days - if
| anything it is easier today to create a personal-if-bland site on
| one of the many free WYSIWYG editors that use templates (I know
| the article mentions this) yet they don't. And let's face it
| search engines were utter trash until early-google arrived so
| it's not like you could count on your site being easily found
| (...and some may argue the current utility of search engines - or
| lack of! - puts us back where we were pre-google era anyway...)
|
| I think there are some other reasons - I don't know which one(s)
| (if any) are most true or not:
|
| - maybe people still are doing it but we just don't see it now
| the net is so much larger? Look at Gemini protocol et al - people
| _are_ doing things but not in a necessarily eye-catching way
|
| - maybe video is the kids' new HTML? There is some weird/creative
| stuff on tiktok etc al. Even getting photos let alone 4k video
| into a computer was _hard_ in the early /mid 90s.
|
| - it just went out of fashion
|
| - the novelty wore off
|
| - people see the internet as a utility these days, and take it
| for granted
|
| - everyone is spending all their time trying to bootstrap a Like-
| OpenAi-But-For-Ride-Hailing start-up instead
|
| Tl;dr - motivated individuals will build something if they want
| to, but I think the motivation has gone. I don't think it is
| because they feel constrained by templates
| smaudet wrote:
| > puts us back where we were pre-google era anyway...
|
| Google (search) is becoming increasingly less relevant. I know
| of DuckDuckGo / Kagi, a quick search (on DuckDuckGo) shows a
| lot of other search engines such as Mojeek, Ecosia, Qwant,
| Brave:
|
| https://proton.me/blog/alternative-search-engines
|
| As well as a lot of what I'd call "domain specific" search
| engines like Wolfram Alpha, various targeted social media
| engines, etc:
|
| https://neilpatel.com/blog/alternative-search-engines/
|
| However I wonder if it would be technically feasible to
| distribute the search problem instead - Mastodon for search.
| Technically a node only needs to spend time spidering results
| with a simple variation on something like PageRank, then some
| trust/value mechanism needs worked out among the nodes.
|
| The problem with the rise of new competing engines is just
| that, their competition. Lets say one, e.g. Kagi, becomes the
| de-facto quality non-AI search engine in 5 years, there's
| nothing to stop them being bought/sold/bankrupted
| (financially/morally/infested with secret AI).
| rchaud wrote:
| > Tl;dr - motivated individuals will build something if they
| want to, but I think the motivation has gone.
|
| Author here: you are right, but it's a shame that those who are
| motivated skew towards building a "product" of some sort, like
| a Substack, or a "personal brand". This means they will be
| well-served by the existing business-focused options out there.
|
| And on the other side of the spectrum, there are creatives
| making cool things on itch.io, Blender, and elsewhere. It would
| be great if there was a "middle ground" option for the average
| weirdo that could use a pure drag-and-drop anywhere web canvas
| to express ideas, without being hamstrung by the steep learning
| curve of running anything beyond Medium.com.
| darrinm wrote:
| Shameless plug for my startup's freehand web editor
| https://hatch.one. You don't have to throw back to hotglue if you
| want to create your own site visually with tremendous creative
| freedom.
| ravetcofx wrote:
| And no affiliation, but I've been enjoying https://mmm.page
| which isn't open or self hostable, but also a long the same
| lines. (I think I found it here on HN)
| adolph wrote:
| While I'm sympathetic to the aims of this manifesto, I can't help
| but see the paradox of "free hand" being antithetical to html, a
| format that chose semantic over aesthetic, and legibility over
| expressiveness.
| rchaud wrote:
| Author here: Very true!
|
| I didn't go into it in the article itself, but you are correct.
| HTML has a pretty strict hierarchy of elements to maintain a
| semantic style. While this is helpful for those using screen
| readers, or running search crawlers or AI scrapers, it is
| unfortunate that this decision mostly excludes the ability to
| build freeform layouts without incurring SEO and potentially
| WCAG penalties.
| parpfish wrote:
| When I hear someone talk about their "corner" of the internet, I
| always think about what that means geometrically or
| topologically.
|
| Is the internet a shape made up of ALL corners?
| imadj wrote:
| > Is the internet a shape made up of ALL corners?
|
| Sounds like a Geodesic Sphere.
|
| Personally I see it more as an international city rich of
| intersections, and as such, full of different corners
| in-tension wrote:
| I love that interpretation. The Internet is made up of
| corners and corners are created by intersections.
|
| (Although I think I may have just reinvented the grid)
| parpfish wrote:
| Until this comment I never realized that there was a second
| interpretation of "my corner".
|
| I always thought of it like the corner in a room/cube
| vertex
|
| But this suggests it could be like "street corner" which
| makes a lot more sense
| masswerk wrote:
| Think of Antiquity, when the world was empirically a globe, but
| conceptionally a circle ( _orbs_ ), and still had corners for
| the 4 winds. :-)
| thih9 wrote:
| I opened this website on a laptop and it was a very satisfying
| read.
|
| I immediately noticed that the page uses full width of the
| screen; that there are no distractions in the form of ads,
| newsletter popups, unintuitive scrolling, or the like; and that
| the increase in information density was without compromising
| readability. Embedding social media content as screenshots is a
| nice touch too.
|
| An efficient way to prove your point.
|
| > our collective web experience frustrates more than it excites.
| It is a whiplash feed of ephemeral 'content' interspersed with
| ads and walled within 3 or 4 platforms with web-accessible front-
| ends (social media, newsletters, Discord channels). They'd all
| love for you to switch to the mobile app, though.
| rchaud wrote:
| Thank you, I intentionally went for this full-width format as I
| too don't like reading long articles in a skinny single column
| template that Medium and Substack default to.
|
| As this is a personal website that isn't selling anything, I
| have no need for email sign up popups and the like.
| rikroots wrote:
| > We can't expect to turn back the clock and have everyone
| writing HTML by hand again, not when we're all accustomed to
| typing text and uploading media via carefully manicured,
| intentionally minimal user interfaces.
|
| There are days when I feel like I'm the last person left who
| hand-codes personal websites for pleasure. Though I refuse to
| believe this is true!
|
| Then again, I doubt there's a freehand web editor that's ever
| been built that can cope with the sort of crazy I was building
| back in the day (and, against all probability, still works!)
|
| = A brief Akat lexicon -
| http://rikweb.co.uk/kalieda/wakat/index.php?page=lexicon
|
| = Vreski wards system -
| https://vreskiwards.rikweb.org.uk/index.html
|
| = Ewlah maps - https://rikweb.org.uk/map/
| in-tension wrote:
| I don't think people have actually stopped we just don't know how
| to find them, at least I don't.
|
| How did people find them in the old days?
|
| Does anyone else want a "search engine" that is just a database
| of websites crawled and you can query any combination of fields
| and filters you want?
|
| Also for me the issue in starting a personal website has always
| been the server and public IP adress (I'm into the diy).
| mglz wrote:
| There is!
|
| https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
|
| https://search.marginalia.nu/
| AlexDragusin wrote:
| I hand code my business website by hand, fun and it's actually
| fast once you know what are you doing. Best thing is you can
| actually optimize everything properly by building things to be
| exactly as needed and make fine refinements. Even with animations
| and stuff, it's total weight is below 1MB (854Kb).
|
| But this is not for everyone, not only the lack of knowledge
| (which is fine, not everyone has to write their websites
| manually) but also lack of interest. Great for tinkerers to deal
| with the challenges and make it do.
| oopsallmagic wrote:
| > We can't expect to turn back the clock and have everyone
| writing HTML by hand again, not when we're all accustomed to
| typing text and uploading media via carefully manicured,
| intentionally minimal user interfaces.
|
| I mean, I do it. That was always allowed! You've been able to
| write as much or as little HTML as you want since the Web was
| invented.
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(page generated 2024-06-22 23:01 UTC)