[HN Gopher] My website is ugly because I made it
___________________________________________________________________
My website is ugly because I made it
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 401 points
Date : 2025-05-28 11:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (goodinternetmagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (goodinternetmagazine.com)
| donatj wrote:
| Hah, yes! Whereas most of my developer friends have long ago
| moved to off-the-shelf Hugo or Jekyll templates for their
| personal sites, I stubbornly maintain my blog with entirely
| bespoke css and a backend only a parent could love.
|
| For me, the joy is not in _having_ a website, the joy is in
| building the website. Why would I want to hand off the _joyful_
| part?
|
| It's like maintaining a classic car. You can buy a reliable
| decent looking car, but that's not fun. If your goal is just to
| get somewhere, sure, but my goal is to have fun.
|
| I work on websites all day where I get less and less say in the
| design and functionality. Why would I not want total control over
| my own?
| yoz-y wrote:
| My argument to moving to a SSR is that I just spent all the
| time tweaking the backend. Now I can spend more time writing
| and tweaking just the theme.
| donatj wrote:
| But did you enjoy tweaking the backend?
| yoz-y wrote:
| I did yes. But I realized also that I could enjoy tinkering
| with something more generally useful and permanent instead.
| ebiester wrote:
| I think the difference is that I spent so much time tweaking
| the website that I wasn't writing. Moving back to Jekyll was
| entirely a move because I wanted to spend more of that time
| writing.
|
| At the same time, I know that it limits me in other ways (for
| example, I'd love to have a way to post to my blog in one
| section and federate to bluesky and mastodon, and I know it's
| possible, but I would have to build it. So I'll eventually move
| from Jekyll.)
| parpfish wrote:
| An actual LLM use case!
|
| A model that generates AI slop blog posts so you don't need
| to write content and can just focus on the fun parts of
| making the website
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I'd imagine almost any old model could do this?
| delfinom wrote:
| Why even waste money on an LLM. Just lorum ipsum the
| content since nobody is going to read it anyway
| parpfish wrote:
| but a model could write blog posts that describe changes
| to the website as a blog-style changelog (e.g., 'today i
| spent an hour playing with CSS to change padding' or 'i
| refactored the backend to do more async calls')
|
| a self-documenting blog about the blog.
| topaz0 wrote:
| \lipsum has been perfectly good at that for decades
| oxalorg wrote:
| Exactly this. My entire website is handcrafted, and not once
| but over the last decade almost ~10 times.
|
| It's fun and I almost end up revamping something every year.
|
| Everything handcrafted:
|
| - the matrix js code on home page. https://oxal.org click on
| the matrix for a surprise!
|
| - it's built using my own Static Site Generator:
| https://github.com/oxalorg/genox
|
| - my website uses a css theme, again handcrafted:
| https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura/
|
| - if you go to https://oxal.org/blog/ you will see a small
| cyborg following you (started with a base image generated by
| chatgpt and then edited and added animations manually in Piskel
| sprite editor)
|
| - it's deployed on a VPS manually, just run `make` (I've
| experimented with serving it via a handwritten C http server,
| but I haven't finished this toy project yet)
|
| - i have several shell scripts which uploads things to my
| websites in private locations (think gists, quick share videos,
| screenshots etc.).
|
| - the favicon is also pixel art, made when I was still in
| college! https://oxal.org/favicon-32x32.png
|
| - I even tried designing my own funky font but gave up and used
| a Naruto inspired font
|
| - and as a bonus, try to `view-page-source` on the home page
|
| I see my website and feel extremely proud of my journey as a
| software engineer, and I cherish this simple thing oh so
| dearly!
| miloignis wrote:
| I quite like the matrix w/ the surprise!
| runamuck wrote:
| The floating robot makes me smile. Reminds me of 90s
| silliness. I love it!
| navanchauhan wrote:
| It's good to see you here! For a long time I was just using
| your project Sakura CSS file to mane everything look pretty.
|
| Even though I have moved on to using a mix of LaTeX.css and a
| two column theme, I still love using Sakura whenever I'm
| crafting a hand rolled HTML page for something.
| chrisldgk wrote:
| That's hilarious, I was just using Sakura not long ago for a
| small mvp I made where I couldn't be arsed to write any css
| myself. Good stuff
| 90s_dev wrote:
| > For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in
| building the website.
|
| Sure, that's a fine purpose.
|
| But some websites just want to get a specific job done and be
| done with it.
|
| Like https://tellconanobrienyourfavoritepizzatoppings.com/
| natnatenathan wrote:
| I feel this exactly. However, I find more fun to create and
| modify the site vs actually writing articles, so my deployments
| are probably 5x my actual blog posts. I got into computers
| because I love to code. I will still be here, writing dumb
| things for my own fun long after AI is the primary creator of
| professional coders.
| sli wrote:
| I spent _far_ more time writing my own generator with Babashka
| than I have putting actual content on the site. I was almost
| disappointed when I finished it. It doesn 't support compiling
| stuff like TS or Elm, but the only JS on my site is a
| console.log that says there's no other JS on the entire site.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Years ago I had a JS banner nagging readers to disable JS
| henrebotha wrote:
| I'm spending more time than I'd like to admit thinking about
| how to achieve various ends using AsciiDoc(tor). I could just
| carry on with Jekyll, but why?
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| > For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in
| building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful
| part?
|
| I have a server to serve my website and a website to have
| something for my server to do.
| donatj wrote:
| Hah, this comment took off!
|
| My colophon if anyone is interested
|
| https://donatstudios.com/colophon
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I like your website a lot! Curious as to the stack, and/or do
| you have a blog post about the setup?
| justusthane wrote:
| Here's mine: https://www.justus.ws/
|
| It's built with the excellent Eleventy SSG, but all HTML and
| CSS is done by hand (as you can probably tell :)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in
| building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful
| part?_
|
| Part of the joy for my personal web sites is building in the
| Easter eggs.
|
| Connect via Lynx, and it's a different experience.
|
| Hover over something at a certain time of day, and something
| happens.
| bradly wrote:
| > For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in
| building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful
| part?
|
| This is Journey Before Destination, the first ideal spoken by
| the Knights Radiant and a common trope across mythologies as
| seen with Job's suffering and Hercules' 12 steps to recovery.
|
| Turns out they turned Hercules into a god to stop all the cool
| stuff he doing as a human :/ Don't let them take away your
| pain, don't let them take away your humanness. And if they do,
| just listen to some bird music instead.
|
| https://birdymusic.com Either the best looking or worst looking
| site you'll see today.
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| > For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in
| building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful
| part?
|
| To each their own. I wanted something functional. A stable
| platform which is organised. I also wanted to write more. Which
| I still haven't gotten to do. It's more of a functional project
| than an art project.
|
| That doesn't mean the OP's website is bad. But that is not why
| I created my website. But I have thought about Writing HTML in
| HTML after being inspired from Writing HTML in HTML by John
| Ankarstrom [1]. But it will be a forever art project and not my
| real estate on the internet. It's OK to want different things
| from the indieweb. That's what makes it diverse.
|
| 1- http://john.ankarstrom.se/html/
| p4bl0 wrote:
| > For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in
| building the website. Why would I want to hand off the _joyful_
| part?
|
| This is exactly it!
|
| My personal website https://pablo.rauzy.name/ is also entirely
| handcrafted, I use a few custom Bash scripts and a Makefile to
| build it (it is entirely static, no server side rendering, and
| not a single line of JS), and I have a lot of fun playing with
| CSS for example to make it responsive, have a mobile menu, etc.
| I probably (re)invented a few techniques in doing so but that's
| what's fun!
| WhyIsItAlwaysHN wrote:
| I love the idea of the colored links for navigation in your
| summary. Thanks for the inspiration!
| izietto wrote:
| Thing is, it looks better than many corporate websites out
| there. Kudos
| p4bl0 wrote:
| I'll add one thing: since April 2009 my website files are
| tracked using Git, which means I can go back to what it
| looked like at any point in time whenever I want (`git rev-
| list --count HEAD` gives me 2184 commits). It's been fun to
| show my students what my own website looked like when I was
| their age!
| bitwize wrote:
| I used to maintain a web site with a cobbled together script
| written in Guile. I still totally would do the same today.
|
| > For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in
| building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful
| part?
|
| Indeed. One of these days my company is going to pull my Claude
| usage logs and mark me down in my performance review for not
| using AI enough. But until that time comes I'm writing every
| line of code myself.
| oooyay wrote:
| Most of the tech blogs I run across are static sites. I
| understand the choice; to prioritize writing reads as pragmatic
| and I did that for a long time. At some point I got intrigued
| by being able to tailor my own editing experience and built my
| blog. It took months but now I use MarkdownIt and custom
| components in Vue to render the markdown in my posts. I built a
| commenting and moderation system.
|
| I started all of this before LLMs but once I started using them
| it sped up my delivery substantially, especially with agents.
| It also informed how I use coding agents at work, which I think
| I've been able to adopt with relative ease and a higher success
| rate than most.
|
| https://ooo-yay.com/blog if you're curious.
| kapitanjakc wrote:
| I don't have a personal site yet. But when I do, I plan to make
| it with HTML+CSS+JS/JQ only
|
| Maybe apache or nginx as webservers
|
| host it on shared stuff or AWS free tier
|
| I just need to figure out how to center a div, and then I'll be
| in the business.
| qznc wrote:
| Within minutes you could start at https://neocities.org/
| donatj wrote:
| I've never understood the whole centering a div meme.
| width: 60%; // define your width as desired margin: 0
| auto;
|
| Now go start your blog!
| cuu508 wrote:
| Now center div with unknown height vertically :-)
|
| And no cheating by using flexbox!
| arp242 wrote:
| ^ Comment flagged for sadomasochism.
| skydhash wrote:
| how do you center something on an axis with no limits
| placed to form a segments. That's mathematically impossible
| unless you placed the limits first.
| whatnow37373 wrote:
| Powerful the Force is, young Padawan, as is the strength
| of your doubts. Release them you must.
| o_m wrote:
| That's the old hacky way of doing it. place-content makes it
| even easier.
| reconnecting wrote:
| <center> </center>
|
| It's been working for the second century.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I'll still bust this out if it's some quick page that's not
| going to last long (like some kind of "service down for
| maintenance" page that's only going to be visible for a few
| minutes, or something)
|
| It's "bad" but you know what? It fucking works, it's
| concise, and I can remember it no matter how long I go
| between writing HTML/CSS.
|
| Hell I wouldn't be surprised if the paths it takes through
| a typical browser engine also makes it burn 5% or fewer as
| many cycles as CSS centering methods.
| nocman wrote:
| I'm not sure if you are being serious about not understanding
| "the whole centering a div meme". Your example handles a
| trivial case, but does not address the whole of the problem.
|
| As others have pointed out, vertical centering is often the
| problem being discussed (although difficulties with
| horizontal centering do happen). Anyone I know that has
| written any non-trivial web application has run into the
| situation where they spent _way_ more time than they thought
| they should have to getting some element in a web application
| centered on the page the way they wanted it to be.
|
| This article is a good example of the complexity, I think:
|
| https://css-tricks.com/centering-css-complete-guide/
|
| The author makes a decision tree, which illustrates the
| complexity fairly well, and then there's a conversation in
| the comments between the author and a reader about whether
| parts of the decision tree are correct.
|
| CSS is extremely complicated. It's easy to get lost in the
| complexity, and it can be very frustrating when you know how
| you want something to look, but can't quite figure out how to
| get it to happen.
|
| That's why the meme is so popular. _LOTS_ of people who deal
| with CSS can relate.
| neepi wrote:
| AWS free tier. S3+cloudfront has cost me $0.00 for the last
| year. This is incidentally the best price.
|
| My (single page) personal site is HTML+CSS (no JS) based on a
| template generated by ChatGPT because I don't give a crap.
| Trying to make something that works on a mobile device and
| desktop is beyond my meagre skills. This worked fine.
| bradly wrote:
| >AWS free tier. S3+cloudfront has cost me $0.00 for the last
| year. This is incidentally the best price.
|
| I haven't tried this setup, but I'm using Cloudflare to serve
| my static sites for $0.00 as well. My mini rails apps I've
| down to $6/month VPS that I'm happy enough with as well for
| anything a bit spicy.
| neepi wrote:
| I would do that but I dislike Cloudflare because they
| wanted by DNS as well. I keep my DNS / CDN separate. Too
| many eggs in one basket otherwise.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| GitHub has free hosting.
| reconnecting wrote:
| GitHub has poor browsers backward compatibility. Considering
| it's owned by Microsoft, we should probably start counting
| the days until it ends up behind a login wall like LinkedIn.
| dominiwe wrote:
| I did the same: https://domi.work/
|
| And it's also ugly :)
| dguest wrote:
| I love this:
|
| - Most of it is CSS, which when removed still produces a
| pretty functional website.
|
| - Most of the CSS is just one (commented out) background
| image
|
| - There are about 5 lines of java script, which seem to just
| exist to obfuscate your email.
| dominiwe wrote:
| Wow, I completely forgot about that image! Thank you for
| reminding me (it is now gone).
|
| It was an experiment a while back and it was inline in
| order to keep it all in one file. Actually that made me
| realize, my site is dynamic: Because I edit this one html
| file live on the server to make changes, whoever loads my
| website repeatedly while I'm doing that is going to see
| changes live.
| edu wrote:
| What I'm doing for my site is similar, I just sprinkle 11ty on
| top for the static generation, and then publish on netlify
| pages.
| immibis wrote:
| If your budget isn't literally zero, avoid AWS and get a cheap
| VPS from Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, OVH, or Hetzner Cloud,
| IMO.
|
| The problem with AWS is their extortionate egress fees which
| are about 50-100 times the market price.
| smetj wrote:
| Static generation. Tables. End of story.
| reconnecting wrote:
| We made a static, table-based, zero-CSS website [1] for open-
| source security platform, and the other day there were
| complaints on hn that it's broken on mobiles. So be careful.
|
| [1] https://www.tirreno.com/
| inatreecrown2 wrote:
| Inspiring for me to see this, I have yet to make my own website.
| luckyandroid wrote:
| Even with frameworks, I don't see any joy in making something
| that just looks and feels the same as any other site. I
| understand it from a business point of view, but if you're trying
| to just showcase yourself or your work having flavor makes more
| sense even if it's not the most optimal thing for SEO or
| retention.
|
| Really hate how modern website building sites moved towards
| structured, samey sites. I miss the days of Geocities and
| Freewebs, the unreadable text against cluttered background
| images, the auto playing music, the trailing cursors, the
| spinning skeletons in front of crappy looking flames.
| jasir wrote:
| The current one looks quite nice to me, of course that's
| subjective :D The lighter lines on the home page are a bit harder
| to read, but if you consider it as a canvas to explore (i.e.
| click on random things) instead of an toc/index to find a
| specific page from, it's fun and serves the purpose.
|
| I liked the heading fonts on the pages, "Austin News" according
| to Firefox. But then I looked it up for future use but it starts
| at 350$, so a bit steep for me :D
|
| I used to have https://zaeem.dev/eye/ as my homepage for years,
| no text at all. Until I remade the site this year.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| This article reminded of the days when building anything wasn't
| driven by neither the fear of being judged or the need to impress
| a future employer, but because I just felt like it.
|
| I think there's a lack of kind of approach in general. There's a
| time and place when you build because the end goal is your client
| or boss, but it's ultimately the inner itch of experimentation
| that shapes your skillset and taste.
| susam wrote:
| > This article reminded of the days when building anything
| wasn't driven by neither the fear of being judged or the need
| to impress a future employer, but because I just felt like it.
|
| Those days are now! There are still plenty of us who create
| websites and small projects purely for the fun of it. I still
| maintain a personal wesite that began as a university dorm room
| intranet portal, and I do it for myself. I have a blog with a
| small audience, but I also have quirky, obscure pages that
| exist purely for my own amusement. If someone else happens to
| stumble upon them and enjoy them, that's just a bonus!
|
| I know there are plenty of others who do the same. I often come
| across such websites and projects right here on this forum!
|
| The mainstream web these days is full of walled gardens and
| loud and chaotic social media platforms, so this kind of
| quirky, creative web might seem like a small fraction by
| comparison. But it's still out there, and it's very much alive.
| mcdonje wrote:
| The pic of the ugly site looks like it's full of blog posts, but
| this post is on a different site for some reason.
|
| I would've rather been sent to the ugly site if it doesn't have
| marketing cookies and a membership popup.
| BlackLotus89 wrote:
| If you look at the screencap you see a mail to
| hello@taylor.town.
|
| My first instinct was the same as yours so hf visiting
| https://taylor.town/
|
| Edit: after posting this the taylor.town site became much
| slower - so maybe that's the hn hug of death gripping again
| neogodless wrote:
| And the original linked article actually links at the bottom
|
| > Taylor Troesh is mayor of taylor.town, author of
| scrapscript, and connoisseur of crap.
|
| And on taylor.town is a link to the magazine article which
| they contributed.
|
| Each of the blog screenshots has a caption like this:
|
| > taylor.town in 202x
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Clicking on the article on that site gets me back to the HN
| link.
|
| I guess that's just a landing page with links to articles he
| wrote, but doesn't host himself? Strange.
|
| And it really is ugly _right now_ with the spotted background
| and slightly rotated links.
|
| Is he aiming for the "I just discovered a new feature and so
| need to use it" vibe? Like when someone makes a PowerPoint
| presentation and now uses the completely over the top
| transitions across slides?
|
| But design is subjective, and if you're doing something in
| your free time, you better enjoy it! So if he has fun making
| that ugly thing, great ( * _ * )
| nemomarx wrote:
| the background looks a lot like an old geocities page to me
| so I have to assume it's a fashion choice
| handsclean wrote:
| The fact that people can't see beauty in a thing like this
| feels to me like people looking at a field of flowers and
| calling it ugly for all the ways it doesn't look like Disney
| Land.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah presumably because the ugly site has an awful background
| and poor font/colour choices that make it kind of hard to read.
| E.g.
|
| https://taylor.town/wealth-000
|
| I made my website myself too and it isn't ugly. This guy's
| website is ugly because he decided to make it ugly out of some
| misguided sense of self-importance.
| GingerMidas wrote:
| Self-important - sure, the author says as much themselves.
|
| But how is it misguided? OP is having fun on their personal
| site. Where would you _guide_ them instead?
| lynndotpy wrote:
| Yeah, I thought this was one of those critiques of the
| enshittified web.
|
| I think this website is bad, but I also think it is very funny
| to have:
|
| (1) a banner about print editions (2) a cookie consent u (3) a
| header 'Good Internet' peeking through the now-familiar modern
| hallmarks of the bad internet, and (4) the first four words of
| the headline, which is being eclipsed by the cookie popup (5)
| Once you remove the cookie banner, there is now also a
| persistent cookie settings button, and a persistent "+ Become a
| Member" button.
|
| taylor.town is a very good internet website by comparison
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| I am so into this philosophy. My web site is an expression of me
| and no-one else. If someone tells me it looks ugly or non-
| professional (I have heard both, although my site is not so weird
| as this one) I can tell them that I like it that way.
|
| We need more of this kind of non-conformity on the web - and in
| general.
| badgersnake wrote:
| I have a personal site with a bootstrap and ScalaJS-react
| frontend and I regret it massively. 'Old fashioned' server side
| templating (e.g. JSP) would have been a way better choice.
| esafak wrote:
| How so, less work?
| severusdd wrote:
| Every polished template looks the same, but each handrolled site
| is weird in its own way. I'll happily take wabi-sabi HTML for
| personal projects over yet another Tailwind landing page!
| xyst wrote:
| Reminds me of a home I was interested in buying. Shades of grey,
| everywhere. White marble counter tops, of course. Very sterile.
|
| Nothing wrong with it. It's a choice. But does scream "millennial
| aesthetic". Maybe that's what caused the vitriol that spurred
| this blog post
| nonethewiser wrote:
| His website circa 2023 was not ugly. It was minamalist.
|
| NOW its ugly.
|
| Its funny because I initially agreed with him when I thought his
| website was the same as the 2023 version. Which I didnt find
| ugly. But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a
| more negative disposition towards his message.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| His original design was clean, minimalist and... unremarkable.
|
| Now it's an intentionally-jumbled chaos. Ugly or not, it's
| remarkable. After all... we are busy remarking on it.
|
| The new design has impracticalities / downsides, specifically
| it's hard to visually locate a specific link if you leave and
| came back, but... that's not something that matters to him.
|
| He wants /unsettling/, /dischordant/, /interesting/, and more
| importantly _/ MINE/_.
| jjulius wrote:
| >But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a more
| negative disposition towards his message.
|
| Why? The whole message is about finding joy in creating
| whatever you want, something that is ostensibly _you_ , in a
| way in which you find joy in creating it, regardless of what
| other people think of the final product.
|
| The fact that many people here find it ugly and off-putting
| only makes the site, and the message in this piece, _more_
| endearing to me. If you 're griping about the appearance, or
| think that the message is lost because of the ugliness, you've
| missed the point.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I just use WordPress, with slightly-modified themes. I make sure
| they load quickly, and work on phones.
|
| Web sites aren't my specialty, or my goals. I just want somewhere
| to post my ramblings.
| jbd0 wrote:
| It's ugly because an "accept cookies" pop-up obscures half of the
| page.
| nemomarx wrote:
| that's on the blogging site - the actual Taylor.town doesn't
| have that.
|
| I'm not sure why the author hosts their blog posts on this
| platform and not their own website though
| bru wrote:
| Just this one article, as part of the magazine. Most are
| directly on his website.
| coldpie wrote:
| Open up your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie
| Notices list. If you're forced to use a shit-tier phone web
| browser like Chrome or Safari, you can also use the Kill Sticky
| bookmarklet to clean up most of this crap[1].
|
| If you are a web dev reading this and you've implemented a
| cookie popup on a website, please do the world a favor and find
| a different industry to work in.
|
| [1] https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-
| web...
| whatnow37373 wrote:
| At this point I will intentionally include a cookie banner even
| if my sites doesn't need it. It exudes this ... je ne sais
| quoi.
| aendruk wrote:
| Yeah literally two thirds of this is adversarial.
| https://0x0.st/83AB.png I reflexively noped out.
| smjburton wrote:
| Great article OP. This is exactly what made the "old web" so
| great: there were no defined standards so people were compelled
| to experiment. It was a little more chaotic, but it felt more
| rewarding when you came across a cool website with a unique
| design. The modern web on the other hand is very structured and
| formulaic, served mostly through the same templates and
| frameworks. Instead of being a place to explore, it's largely
| become a place to consume content in a predictable fashion.
| yeeyang wrote:
| lol,yes
| sph wrote:
| It was good and minimal before, now it's all form and no function
| (no dates, no ordering of posts).
|
| Honestly, unremarkable post for an unremarkable idea. Smells like
| a PR push to publicize the author's website more than anything.
| Sure it's your website, you can do anything you want, but that is
| hardly a ground-breaking concept, is it?
|
| (The posted website has been created 2 days ago, and already has
| 5 posts created all on the same day, asking for paid membership,
| hoping to trend on HN. s/good/dead/internetmagazine.com)
| Eleuthero wrote:
| Aesthetic and trends are part of it, I think it looks purely
| mehdix wrote:
| > It's an itch - a feeling that something is really important,
| and you need to do something about it, and nobody else can
| possibly do it except you.
|
| Might be difficult to believe, but I strongly believe there are
| things that no one else on this planet would do except one of us.
| guywithahat wrote:
| It is a bit of a shame he's changed the website in-between
| getting the email and this being posted on HN, I would have liked
| to see the original CSS rotate and non-JS scrolljacking website.
| justusthane wrote:
| It hasn't changed. The linked page is an article _about_ his
| website posted on a different site. Here is the site he 's
| talking about: https://taylor.town/
| ayaros wrote:
| Hey, my site is handcrafted too. But ugly? Speak for yourselves,
| but I've tried to make mine beautiful. Handcrafted doesn't _have_
| to mean ugly...
|
| But of course, it's at the point where it's grown into something
| unwieldy. I feel like it's overdue for a redesign/rewrite. Just
| gotta figure out a clever UI design that works on desktop _and_
| mobile. Not only that, but it also needs to work without any JS,
| because I don 't want my site to be nonfunctional without JS...
| rchaud wrote:
| There's 'ugly yet interesting' and then there's 'ugly and
| boring'. This is the latter I'm afraid.
|
| At its core, the homepage is still showing the output of a CMS
| looping through a folder of markdown files (probably) and
| displaying the title wrapped in a hyperlink. There appears to be
| zero information architecture - no visually distinct categories,
| no icons, images or dates, so everything is equally weighted,
| just in a slightly "wacky" format.
|
| Most dev blogs get their traffic from something showing up on
| organic search, so the site homepage doesn't really matter,
| unless the dev actively wants to make it interesting, and
| encourage exploration. Despite the attempt at breaking that mold,
| this website feels much the same as those ones using a boring
| default Ghost template.
| jjulius wrote:
| I feel like you've missed the point of the author's piece.
| rchaud wrote:
| I don't think I did. The homepage is the only thing that's
| unique about the design. Had you arrived on any page besides
| that, you would think this is a bog-standard developer's
| blogsite, one skinny column amid a sea of white space.
|
| It's possible to have an ugly site that's still easily
| navigable and visually interesting, even if the author is the
| only user.
| jjulius wrote:
| Respectfully, to the author's point, none of that matters
| and neither does anything in your previous post. The author
| likes it, and has fun creating it and enjoys molding and
| re-shaping it to their own changing desires over the years.
| That's what they find important to them, not anything that
| you've mentioned. As the author writes...
|
| >Somebody with good taste could've made my website, but
| then it wouldn't be mine.
|
| >To bake bread, many feel compelled to grow wheat, mine
| salt, culture yeast, etc. Not me. My puerile palate yearns
| for buckets of Olive Garden breadsticks.
|
| >That's okay. Your "mine" is not my "mine."
|
| ... and...
|
| >Soon it will become something else entirely. Because it's
| my website and I'm perpetually becoming somebody else.
|
| >You'll change too. Your passions and values will
| pollinate; your ugly thing - whatever it is - will come
| alive again and again.
|
| They've created something that is authentically "them", in
| a way that is authentically "them". And they love that. Not
| having images, or icons, or categories, or being easily
| navigable, or having a blog post section that looks "bog-
| standard" to you or anybody else are all completely
| irrelevant.
|
| Hell yes, more power to them, I say.
| ninininino wrote:
| No need to be afraid, the point is the author isn't creating it
| to please an audience. They are creating it to please themself.
| So your opinion isn't relevant to the author or this linked
| written piece.
| nooooooooo_ wrote:
| Honestly, I don't really understand the reasoning here. While the
| author's website doesn't look bad to me, creating and maintaining
| your own site doesn't mean it cannot also look "good". Sure,
| "good taste" is subjective, but most of us probably use the
| internet daily and are exposed to countless designs, and
| eventually develop at least a general sense of what constitutes
| good UI/UX and what doesn't. CSS can be awfully unintuitive, but
| if you're capable of building and styling a website, you're
| certainly capable of making it look nice. Saying "it looks bad to
| others because I made it myself" sounds like some kind of self-
| flagellation.
| susam wrote:
| I made my website [1] totally from scratch too! Using 100%
| handcrafted HTML and CSS and a little bit of Common Lisp.
| Hopefully it is not too ugly!
|
| Like some of the other comments here, I don't use Hugo, Jekyll,
| Pelican, etc. either! I know they are solid tools and they serve
| many people well. But I haven't found them useful for my own
| needs. I prefer not to subject my website to the constraints of a
| large and complex framework when I can write my own that is
| smaller, simpler, and fully under my control.
|
| I have a small Common Lisp (CL) program to automate a few things
| like applying consistent layout to all pages, generating RSS
| feeds, creating tag list pages, etc. But otherwise, all content
| on my site, including all of the HTML and CSS, is 100%
| handcrafted. Perhaps the only exception is KaTeX, because
| handcrafting a parser and renderer for a subset of LaTeX is not a
| problem I want to take on in order to maintain my website.
|
| I've put together a little colophon page [2] in case anyone wants
| to read more about it.
|
| Some people rightfully worry that maintaining your own program
| like this might become a major burden, potentially taking more
| time than actually publishing articles on your website. At least
| for me, that hasn't been the case. The CL program has become
| quite stable. Its commit history [1] shows that I don't tinker
| with it too often these days. I certainly have more lines of
| published content than I do code in the program. The CL program
| is about 1000 lines long but I have about 55000 lines of content.
|
| [1] https://susam.net/
|
| [2] https://susam.net/colophon.html
|
| [3] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/commits/main/site.lisp
| hackerbeat wrote:
| New website gives me headaches. The one before was much better.
| hackerbeat wrote:
| PS: Just use Bear Blog everyone.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Well, if your website content is not very static, your website
| will almost without fail not be "made by you", but made by some
| kind of site generator. And while _that_ could be made by you
| (which seems to be the case for Taylor Town), I would suspect
| that, these days, it's possible to factor out enough "made by me"
| aspects of a site, and use a generic/non-bespoke static site
| generation mechanism.
|
| Anyway, some people write their own HTML+CSS, some people build
| their own table, other people build their own car. I usually
| can't decide which kind of DIY I like best :-\
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Barry Kauler's website uses a CMS that's a static generator using
| SeaMonkey as the wysiwyg component:
|
| https://bkhome.org/shellcms/
| hinkley wrote:
| I lived in a garden neighborhood for a time. I did a lot of work
| on our place and my partner and friends would praise me but all I
| could see was the weeds or the poor pruning job done by the
| previous owners.
|
| There was a retired lady three blocks away who had by far the
| best garden in a half mile radius. It was amazing.
|
| I lived there almost four years before I started noticing her
| weeds, her mistakes.
|
| In a lot of things we can see other people's flaws but miss our
| own. But when we make something, that situation seems to be
| reversed. What we make isn't that special, and everyone else's
| creations are so much better.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Doesn't seem like the thing with the best usability for me (how
| my eyes scan information, in that regard the old site would be
| better), but it does seem aesthetically different and kinda cool.
| Plus, good job on not putting a whole bunch of JS into the site
| and letting it actually _perform_ well without making my CPU sad.
|
| That said, https://taylor.town/android-chrome-512x512.png is
| about 225 KB and probably doesn't need to be quite that big. The
| first optimizer I found online turned it into a 55 KB image.
| There, this time I'm the nitpicky nerd, bwah.
|
| Not to miss the point though: it's cool that people are making
| things that are different!
| naet wrote:
| My website is pretty because I made it. Or at least it is to my
| tastes, I'm sure someone else would tell me otherwise.
|
| The author of this article's site is taylor.town, not the site
| the article was posted on. For what it's worth taylor town looks
| nice enough to me. Actually a lot nicer than the
| goodinternetmagazine site hosting this article...
| doubleorseven wrote:
| I remember when 'Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers' by Kendrik Lamar
| was out on 05/22 and I was thinking to my self, OMG it's only May
| and the best album of the year is out.
|
| The words I just read takes me back to that same feeling. Thank
| you for that.
| nluken wrote:
| Might go against the grain here but I actually quite like the
| website, as minimal as the new one is. I don't want to oversell
| it, since it's not really super "out there", but the author put
| some nice humanist touches there like the hand drawn mouse that
| lights up when you hover over a link.
|
| Could use some color, but it serves its purpose and I don't find
| it sacrifices readability as much as some others in this thread
| are claiming.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| That's also the very reason why it is an absolute madness to give
| up programming because AI is (supposedly) capable of doing it on
| your behalf.
|
| We invented the car, the motorbike and the jetpack, yet people
| still hike and ride bikes. It would be dumb to stop doing things
| that you like just because one can do it better with a machine.
| wpollock wrote:
| You don't know ugly. Your site is fine!
|
| I wrote my website by hand in Notepad (and vi) in the 1990s. In
| the late 1990s, I rewrote it to use CSS. I tried to use a dark
| background (research suggested that was easier on the eyes, and
| it saved power), I tried to pick properly contrasting colors.
| This was the result: <https://wpollock.com/>.
|
| I used this site for 30 years, and never once received a
| compliment on its design. Some of us have no artistic sense, I
| guess.
| dgellow wrote:
| For what it's worth, I find it instantly familiar and
| comforting! Here is your first compliment :)
| dgellow wrote:
| I genuinely find it beautiful
| mrinterweb wrote:
| The spirit of this reminds me back to earlier days of the
| internet. I know a lot of people bemoaned Flash sites for weird
| navigation, and other issues. Not saying the Flash criticism
| wasn't warranted, but I did appreciate the creativity some people
| put into making their site unique. Too much of the internet feel
| homogeneous now, and with AI generated content, that is only
| going to get worse. I appreciate the portions of the internet
| that don't want to conform.
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