[HN Gopher] Hot Page - a graphical site builder
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Hot Page - a graphical site builder
Author : microflash
Score : 287 points
Date : 2024-08-24 11:30 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hot.page)
(TXT) w3m dump (hot.page)
| AstroJetson wrote:
| Thanks so much or the early Saturday morning flashback to my
| Geocities page. Can you add a spinning "under construction" sign,
| those were my favorites.
| microflash wrote:
| Not my project so can't change anything but I posted this
| because I got those Geocities vibes too :)
| WebBurnout wrote:
| You should have seen the previous home page:
| https://old.hot.page/ I really loved the idea of nodding to Web
| 1.0 but it was a little toooo clunky heh
| jsjohnst wrote:
| Where's the AI? Feels like an obvious add-on for something like
| this. :)
| crimsoneer wrote:
| My god man, not everything needs AI.
| croes wrote:
| According to MS it does.
| rchaud wrote:
| OpenAI's biggest bagholder thinking AI is a universal
| hammer for every nail isn't surprising. Those O365 and
| Azure subscriptions aren't going to sell themselves.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > My god man, not everything needs AI.
|
| 1. This is a tongue in cheek website builder, something
| generative AI would be great at making images (Dalle, Imagen,
| MJ) and text (GPT4, Claude, Gemini, etc) for a product like
| this
|
| 2. Basically every website builder of substance has AI
| features now
|
| So maybe chill with the hyperbolic language? ;)
| scopeh wrote:
| He does have a point though, not everything needs AI.
| __jonas wrote:
| > 1. This is a tongue in cheek website builder, something
| generative AI would be great at making images (Dalle,
| Imagen, MJ) and text (GPT4, Claude, Gemini, etc) for a
| product like this
|
| I don't think so at all, AI generated stuff usually has a
| certain soulless generic air to it that I don't think would
| suit this.
|
| Probably completely fine for websites that want/need to
| look like every other website, like classic site builders,
| Squarespace etc. or internal business apps, forms and such,
| but for something that seems a bit targeted at letting
| people be creative, gen AI would do more harm than good I
| feel.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > I don't think so at all, AI generated stuff usually has
| a certain soulless generic air to it that I don't think
| would suit this.
|
| I can't believe I'm forced to defend myself here as I
| generally agree with the premise that adding AI doesn't
| make something better (hence the smiley face in my
| original post), but FFS the FUD and hyperbole is simply
| in bad form. LOOK at the examples on the site. TRY the
| experience. Then come back and try and tell me you can't
| generate endless amounts of images _just like_ that
| what's shown trivially with AI. You are entitled to your
| own opinion about AI, but that doesn't make you factually
| right.
| __jonas wrote:
| Yeah I'll be honest, I didn't look at the examples in
| great detail, from the visuals I thought this was more
| along the lines of hotglue.me, but now that I'm looking
| at them, some of the examples are indeed pretty generic
| and could be churned out by AI no problem, I don't doubt
| it.
|
| I think the disagreement is less on whether it's
| technically possible to use AI to help with this and more
| on whether it's a good idea to do that.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > more on whether it's a good idea to do that
|
| If you want to shift goal posts to that, then we are in
| agreement, adding AI to something without real care in
| how it works with the experience isn't a good idea.
| rchaud wrote:
| No thanks. Leave that slop to Squarespace/Wix. Those are
| publicly traded companies that will happily add AI stock
| photo 'integrations' to pump their share price.
|
| There's nothing stopping anybody from using AI tools
| directly to generate images, and uploading them onto their
| site on this platform, if they want to.
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| No way!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It only uses all-natural organic intelligence, trained with
| love by caring people!
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| Strange but lovely design
| breck wrote:
| This is so good. Can I invest? https://flash.breckyunits.com/
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Love the aesthetic they're using here. Reminds me of another
| project in this same vein https://mmm.page/
| macsparrow wrote:
| Really cool! Love the demo option to try it out instead of just
| signing up.
| spacebacon wrote:
| Great nostalgic design. You've built something nice here.
| ianred wrote:
| The pricing, bandwidth 5GB for $9 a month? This sounds
| unreasonably high
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| This...isn't S3. Bandwidth is just part of how they're
| segmenting.
| ianred wrote:
| What does it have to do with S3? Average webpage with JS will
| weight at about 200kb per initial load, without images. Do
| the math how many page views and indexing bots will consume
| before the real user can even find the page.
| rsyring wrote:
| Their point was, you can't compare to the low prices you
| get on bandwidth from a service like S3.
|
| I agree though, pricing seems high. I guess a CDN could be
| put in front of it.
| tln wrote:
| Thats a good point especially since 200kb seems a little
| low TBH. Is that excluding images?
| gigatree wrote:
| The creator's Twitter looks sketchy - a couple months old,
| handful of ChatGPT posts, then this.
| dools wrote:
| Could also just mean they're shit at social media
| WebBurnout wrote:
| this (I know because they're my accounts)
| tecleandor wrote:
| Being a clone of Hotglue doesn't help either.
| WebBurnout wrote:
| It's sketchy because I don't really like social media heh. I
| only created these social accounts to promote Hot Page so
| that's why they are only a few months old. I somehow hoped my
| writing was better than ChatGPT. Now I kinda wish I had just
| used it -- that would have saved a lot of time!
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Inspired by Hotglue[1], the opensource content manipulation
| system thats also self-hostable (duh)?
|
| [1]https://hotglue.me/
| tecleandor wrote:
| Ah, you beat me to it. Looks like a closed source hotglue
| clone/saas/inspiration. They shouldn't have used that similar
| name if they're not related to the original project.
|
| Anyway, it's sad Hotglue hasn't seen development in the last
| years, some friends use it for their personal sites...
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I don't think it is very similar. Personally i thought of
| HoTMeTaL, an old HTML/page editor that was popular for a little
| bit during the 90s and had a similar approach of showing the
| page in a visual quasi-WYSIWYG + quasi-element-tree mode.
| AstroJetson wrote:
| Wow, it's been a minute since I used HoTMeTal, I loved that
| editor. I cranked out a lot of HTML with it, once you got the
| hang of what it wanted you to do, it would be your best
| friend. We switched to Dreamweaver, of course that lasted
| until Adobe bought it. But thanks for the memory, this thread
| has been the Saturday treat.
| rchaud wrote:
| Hotglue was the first thing I thought of as well. Truly
| freeform web design that allowed for custom code and styles via
| editing the <head> section. Installation for the most part
| required nothing besides dropping a folder into a PHP-enabled
| web server.
|
| I wrote a blog post reviewing it a couple of months back:
| https://rafichaudhury.com/site/blog/Freehand-Web
| ch-rs wrote:
| I read your post at the time and found it really inspiring!
|
| I've been working on my own Hotglue fork to hack in some of
| the features we were missing like draft pages and responsive
| "safe areas" like MMM.page.
| rchaud wrote:
| That's great news! Thanks for taking up the project (and
| reading my post!). I do webdev as a hobby so unfortunately
| I cannot contribute to the source code as I don't know
| enough PHP. The responsive safe zone idea is a great one to
| implement.
|
| Is it possible to password-protect pages as well? I tried
| to do it by setting an .htaccess rule for the folder I had
| them in, but wasn't able to get it to work.
| WebBurnout wrote:
| Hey, Hot Page is my project but somehow I was not aware of Hot
| Glue. And reviewing it now I would hazard to say the projects
| are superficially similar. Hot Page is a visual/drag-and-drop
| web editor that uses no abstractions so the whole time you're
| using it you have complete control of the resulting DOM (all
| elements, nesting, attributes, CSS rules, etc). So it's kind of
| like CodePen but for building real sites. I wrote more about
| this philosophy here: https://hot.page/takes/picking-the-right-
| abstraction
| kamikazeturtles wrote:
| The landing page looks really nice!
|
| How does one create web pages like this without using a tool like
| the above? Would animating html elements with javascript be
| sufficient?
| talksnocode wrote:
| You can use CSS to style the pages that way with a combination
| of font, box-shadow offsets without blur and overriding the
| box-shadow using :hover pseudo selector (also adding a
| translation effect).
| dartharva wrote:
| While checking this out I came across this site
| (https://alice.hot.page/) in its showcase as one of the examples
| and legit spent five minutes reading Alice in Wonderland and I
| think I need to introspect how I spend my time a little..
| d0ugal wrote:
| It sounds like you went down the rabbit hole...
| kamikaz1k wrote:
| That down down down scroll affect was really cool, thanks for
| pointing to it
| drewhk wrote:
| The email verification email itself does not show up properly in
| Fastmail for some reason. I had to switch to the text only view
| to get the actual link...
| WebBurnout wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback!
| ulrischa wrote:
| I hope there will be an editor like Gutenberg for webcomponents.
| With the possibility to define all kinds of constraints (what
| components are allowed as subelements and so on)
| WebBurnout wrote:
| Hey, Hot Page is my project and that's pretty much where we're
| going with this. The idea is to use Web Components and real DOM
| instead of the "blocks" abstraction present in so many editors
| these days.
| WebBurnout wrote:
| Hey, I'm Tim and I created Hot Page. This is a long-time side
| project that I'm now bootstrapping with the help of a couple of
| friends. The idea is to take the convenience of a drag-and-drop
| editor (Squarespace, Wix, etc), but never lose the connection to
| the basic building blocks of web pages: HTML elements, CSS rules,
| etc. The advent of Web Components makes this a really powerful
| model.
|
| Although I'm of course pleasantly surprised to see this on the
| front page of HN, I was planning on waiting a few months to post
| it myself because we are working on some ways to make the editor
| much more powerful. We have a long roadmap of new features like:
|
| * more ways to edit CSS properties visually (without losing the
| 1:1 connection to the CSS generated)
|
| * inline CSS (style attribute) editor for elements that let's you
| use :hover and media queries
|
| * a library of code "snippets" that lives in the left panel along
| side the basic elements
|
| * tighter integration with web components
|
| * integrating VS code language servers for accurate auto
| completion everywhere
|
| * and a whole lot more.
|
| I'm a long time lurker on HN and have long loved the community
| here. All of your thoughts and feedback are greatly appreciated,
| especially on our marketing because that is proving to be a real
| challenge. AMA
|
| edit: roadmap
| microflash wrote:
| Sorry for spoiling your planned launch on HN. I stumbled across
| it by accident (such are serendipities on web), thought it was
| cool and fat fingered it here. Looking forward to things coming
| in future.
| WebBurnout wrote:
| Thanks for posting it! Obviously it's better to launch early
| and often but I'm much more of a programmer than a marketer
| and I was afraid it wouldn't get much traction. I've never
| been so happy to be wrong heh
| AstroJetson wrote:
| Well since microflash has jumped ahead, let me also jump in.
|
| https://fx.hot.page/ has some of the web components on it.
| While the slinky one is silly fun, the gallery one is very
| cool. Looks like it's light weight and easy to use. I was
| impressed by the annotated source code page where you explain
| in detail what is going on. While jumping, swirling,
| multicolored text is your mission, your forte is the
| documentation you've written. Nice job.
| WebBurnout wrote:
| Wow, this comment just made the last 7 months of long hours
| totally worth it. You have understood and distilled the
| essence of this project so accurately. This is my first time
| launching something like this, so it's just a great feeling
| to know there are people on the other side of the screen who
| are getting it.
| spankalee wrote:
| The combination of web components + a visual app builder is a
| _really_ compelling space. I 'm working on something myself,
| and I love see more approaches our there!
|
| Your style is just obviously incredible. I hope some of that
| bleeds into your customers sites so there's more fun silly, but
| also real, things out there on the web.
|
| One thing I'm working on in parallel to a visual builder is a
| web components catalog and custom elements manifest validator.
| I hope this will help boost the set of quality web components
| available to tools like this, and that the catalog will be
| embeddable in them.
|
| Good luck!
| metadat wrote:
| I'm really digging the Hypercard-nod styling, how did you do
| this?
|
| E.g. Start from zero, or was there a pre-existing CSS kit used
| as the base?
|
| <3
| WebBurnout wrote:
| The editor side of the site has no CSS frameworks, just plain
| React with Typescript. I used a lot of Hypercard as a kid so
| that might explain something. Also our designer really loves
| pixel art and totally ran with the web 1.0 mandate that I
| gave him. Some of the design choices have been a little
| controversial, but I'm glad you dig it! Hopefully users don't
| find it distracting so we can stick with it
| pogue wrote:
| Are you able to self host what you generate or export it to
| other web hosting sites? Or is everything created hosted on
| your end?
| WebBurnout wrote:
| We are working on a feature to let paid users download their
| sites as a zip file or export them to cloud storage buckets
| (s3/aws, google cloud, etc). So far though it's meant to be
| used with our hosting. Free accounts have an advertisement
| for Hot Page itself but they let you connect your own domain
| for free.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I'm glad the weird-flashy trend is back. We've been on the
| clean/flat design land for too long.
|
| Even if we're more self ware now and a bit a cynicism and self-
| deprecation is inevitable, but that's postmodernism for you.
| susam wrote:
| Looks quite nice! Oddly enough, it transported me back nearly 20
| years to my student days. I didn't have the money to buy domain
| names but I wanted to set up a few websites on the World Wide
| Web!
|
| My search for free hosting led me to Geocities. However, websites
| there were hosted under paths like geocities.com/foo, rather than
| the subdomain format I wanted (foo.geocities.com).
|
| Eventually, I discovered 20m.com, which as the name indicates,
| offered 20 MB of free hosting space. The best part was that it
| allowed me to publish my website under a subdomain.
|
| Remarkably, one of the sites I created back then is still up and
| running: http://encoders.20m.com/ (Please don't judge the content
| though. I was young, naive and I was just messing with the Web!)
| davchana wrote:
| Similar story of me in 2002. Although I didn't come across
| geocities, and directly found freeservers.com & made a site
| davinder.8m.net , which is still up. I lost its password from
| 2007 to 2022, and recovered it back when I recovered my yahoo
| email account.
| shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
| I don't know if it's fair to say here that I don't like the name
| personally, and I think women would hesitate before putting their
| name in a subdomain.
| ax0ar wrote:
| It says you can use custom domains though.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| "Hot" doesn't always mean "sexy". And one look at the actual
| website says that loud and clear. They'd definitely prefer
| hosting on say Neocities, but that's more because Neocities has
| cats and is overall cuter in presentation.
| sfilmeyer wrote:
| >They'd definitely prefer hosting on say Neocities, but
| that's more because Neocities has cats and is overall cuter
| in presentation.
|
| At the risk of misunderstanding what you're saying, who is
| "They" in this?
| timnetworks wrote:
| Lots of people signed up with Hotmail.
| shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
| Exactly, Hotmail became Outlook.
| bahmboo wrote:
| Hotmail did ok with their name
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Reminded me of one of the early HTML editors, HoTMetaL.
| toastau wrote:
| Looks cool. If any staff are here, your discord server button in
| the footer has a bad URL (to a channel not a server). Got an
| invite code?
| WebBurnout wrote:
| Oh wow, thanks for flagging that. Unfortunately our discord is
| more of a want-to-be discord at this point. But please join!
| you will be able to chat with me and my cofounders at least
|
| https://discord.gg/uSwA2znH
| timnetworks wrote:
| I am also a Tim and this is great. Geocities for Adults.
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| Very cool!
|
| > Use The Hottest Code, Like Bootstrap
|
| Made me chuckle
| gitroom wrote:
| Love the comic design!
| volkk wrote:
| i'm truly obsessed with this design. who was the person that
| designed it?
| iampims wrote:
| Nice work.
|
| The "about" link at the bottom of the home page links to
| https://hot.page/manifesto which is 404 Not Found.
| WebBurnout wrote:
| Thanks for flagging!
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(page generated 2024-08-24 23:00 UTC)