[HN Gopher] How to make a damn website (2024)
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How to make a damn website (2024)
Author : birdculture
Score : 104 points
Date : 2026-01-13 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lmnt.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (lmnt.me)
| stevetron wrote:
| That's how I did it in GradSchool. I took over the web page
| another student started for the grad-level algorithms class I was
| taking. The student who started it discovered he had volunteered
| for too many things. I jumped on it when they needed to change
| because I needed the extra credit.
|
| Armed with a CD copy of the web site, I moved it over to my
| hosted space. I setup password-access, and setup the syuidy
| group, and from there on, I frequently put in one-liner
| paragraphs from the professor, she sometimes managed to get them
| to me soon enough that I could put them in before class started
| that day.
| amelius wrote:
| And then you find out that the company running the server
| misconfigured caching, and suddenly half your userbase sees a
| different version than the other half.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Still using Seamonkey Composer here (descendant of Netscape
| Composer/Kompozer):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey#Composer
| NoSalt wrote:
| The title should be "How to make a damn blog.", as that appears
| to be the primary focus of the article.
| adamhartenz wrote:
| A blog is a type of website
| celsius1414 wrote:
| Kids these days forgetting what blog is short for! ;)
| susam wrote:
| In the past, I've had a few visitors to my website look at
| a possibly silly post and ask me why it was even worth
| blogging about.
|
| That is when I bring out the expanded form of 'blog' in all
| its glory. It is my _weblog_. Of course I am going to log
| whatever I want for myself, regardless of whether it is
| interesting to others. I do not need to subscribe to
| someone else 's notion of what is interesting in order to
| decide what belongs on my own weblog.
| NoSalt wrote:
| Yes, but the author's title framed it as a generic "website",
| not a specific web log site.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think the intent was making a blog has additional
| requirements one might not need to just make a website, a la
| what the "The Hard Way" section tries to argue against, not a
| claim a blog is not also a website (anything the page says
| not to use will also lead you to having a website as well -
| just with more than minimal work).
|
| E.g. the section covering RSS for your post is longer than
| the section covering HTML, you don't really need a fixed
| structure, and you don't need to think of a story to write
| unless that's what you want to do. You can just post a
| picture of your cat and try to add googly eyes later if
| that's what floats your boat. Or just "Hello World" and let
| your mind go from there.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| That resonates with https://plainvanillaweb.com/ - which inspired
| me to ditch my own CMS and use plain html on my website.
| susam wrote:
| This is a nice post. Thanks for sharing it here. The only thing I
| would like to add to this fine article is that it is perfectly
| fine for a personal website to simply be a loose collection of
| pages arranged in an arbitrary manner. Not every personal website
| needs to be a blog.
|
| Very often I see aspiring website authors quickly make life
| complicated for themselves by deciding they need a blog, which
| then leads to numerous questions about tools and processes that
| can easily draw anyone into busywork. That time could otherwise
| have been spent on actually writing posts, articles, games,
| demos, etc. for their website that one can look back with joy
| months or years later.
|
| Website busywork is probably fine for people who genuinely want
| to spend their time thinking about tools and processes. But if
| you just want to put your thoughts out there, it can be more
| fruitful to simply publish HTML, written directly or converted
| from your favourite text format such Markdown, AsciiDoc, etc.
|
| This is a topic I care about quite a bit and my complete thoughts
| about this would be too long for an HN comment, so I will just
| share a link to a post I wrote about this recently, in case
| someone finds value in it: https://susam.net/writing-first-
| tooling-second.html
|
| I would genuinely like to see more personal websites, because
| they make the Web more diverse and more interesting.
| jraph wrote:
| A blog is nice for readers who'd like to follow your thoughts
| without having to poll your website (thanks to RSS).
|
| But indeed, a loose collection of simple pages is better than
| nothing at all...
|
| You are completely right, just write the damn thing and the
| blog can come later.
| al_borland wrote:
| I ran across this[0] post about a month ago, which makes an
| argument against the chronological blog, and to rather embrace
| the digital garden. I quite liked the idea. For so long it's
| felt like a blog is the default, but I find browsing pages
| without a blog much more interesting. I think it also removes
| that pressure to post all the time, as adding content is simply
| adding content. It doesn't matter when it was last updated.
| Looking at my history (which I had to use to find this), I
| deleted all my started and abandoned blogs the same day I read
| this.
|
| edit... Ironically, I just clicked "All Articles" on his home
| page and it's a chronological blog... At least there is some
| curation to it.
|
| [0] https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden/
| sifik wrote:
| if you wish to explore what others plp do with their gardens,
| there is this gallery for that https://vaults.obsidian-
| community.com/
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Love all of this, your comment, parent comment, OP, etc.
|
| When I next start a website I'm just going to channel my old
| Geocities days.
|
| edit: Easter egg! https://www.google.com/search?q=geocities
| rchaud wrote:
| Sites written by hand don't need RSS. If you absolutely need RSS,
| you can start a WordPress blog before you can say "what the hell
| is XML?"
| henning wrote:
| People might want to use RSS to check on your site for updates
| whether you write it by hand or use some kind of CMS to
| generate it for you.
|
| WordPress was a technical mess before their founder had a
| psychotic break and their company posted features advocating
| for business owners to put bait-and-switch AI slop on their
| websites.
| publicdebates wrote:
| Maybe <1% of visitors might. They're not worth wasting any
| time satisfying.
| rchaud wrote:
| That's called a bookmark, which is native to all browsers,
| while RSS is not.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Do you think that bookmarks serve the same purpose as a RSS
| feed?
| aendruk wrote:
| What do you think RSS is for?
| deadbabe wrote:
| I love websites, something about stumbling across someone's
| random content put together with old school hand typed code just
| stirs a warm and fuzzy feeling, especially if the do something
| "weird" that doesn't follow any kind of modern trend or
| convention.
| nxobject wrote:
| Another technique (or consideration?) that deserves attention is
| how to get output from notebook engines (e.g. Quarto) to play
| well with your existing plain text website... while Quarto does a
| decent job of plain text websites, it does the best job if it
| takes over the whole website.
| jgord wrote:
| I wrote a very lite touch web list maker, so people / I can have
| a simple fast way to make a list of stuff, and share the url.
|
| http://pho.tiyuti.com
|
| Just lists of title, pic, blurb, url
| dizzy9 wrote:
| I have seen at least one blog where the author updated his RSS
| feed manually, but it's one of the first pieces of busywork that
| you want to automate away, after applying the page template and
| entering <p> tags at every double-newline. Jekyll is useful for
| that; it builds automatically in GitHub Pages, which also
| conveniently serves as a free web host.
| yawaramin wrote:
| > This is honestly all you need.
|
| No, you need less than that! :-) +-------------
| -------------------------------------------------------------+
| | how-to-make-a-damn-website.html
| | +------------------------------------------------------
| --------------------+ | <title>How to Make a Damn
| Website</title> | |
| <h1>How to Make a Damn Website</h1>
| | |
| | |
| | | <p>A lot of people want to make a website but don't
| know where to start | | or they get stuck.</p>
| | +------------------------------------------------------
| --------------------+
|
| HTML is very forgiving! You can start _really_ simple and work
| your way up to more complexity when you need it.
| susam wrote:
| Web browsers are indeed forgiving when it comes to incomplete
| HTML. Some time ago, I did a small experiment to see what
| minimal HTML is required to display a simple 'Hello' page while
| adhering to the specification, passing HTML Tidy validation and
| also satisfying the Nu HTML Checker. As far as I can tell, it
| is this: <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en">
| <meta charset="UTF-8"> <title>Hello</title> <body>
| <p>Hello!
|
| Remove any tag and the validation fails. Here is how the Tidy
| check looks: $ tidy -qe minimal.html $
|
| And here's a Nu check link:
| https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fsusam.net%2Fc...
| SahAssar wrote:
| The body tag is unnecessary, tidy might complain but that is
| not the spec. The meta tag is generally unnecessary (the
| content encoding should be set by the server in the headers
| since it applies to not just HTML). The html tag is
| unnecessary if you do not want to declare the language of the
| document (which is generally a warning).
|
| So I guess smallest without errors should be
| <!DOCTYPE html><title>a</title>
|
| And smallest without errors or warnings should be
| <!DOCTYPE html><html lang><title>a</title>
|
| And then any content that is not links, scripts, meta tags,
| etc. will automatically be within a body after like
| <!DOCTYPE html><html lang><title>a</title><p>a
| layer8 wrote:
| To be mobile-friendly, I'd remove the block-drawing characters.
| ;)
| foxfired wrote:
| The blog that I started ~13 years ago started as 3 .html files.
| Everything else followed as needed (styling, rss, comments,
| etc.). If you can get past building it, the next question becomes
| "What should I write about?" [0]
|
| My answer is usually that you can write whatever you want on your
| websites. It's yours after all. None of the limitations that
| exist on third-party platforms exist. You can make all the pages
| read upside down if you want to.
|
| [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-should-i-write-about
| neal_jones wrote:
| Been thinking about this lately. Thanks for sharing.
| focusedone wrote:
| https://1kb.club/
|
| Doesn't take much.
| pastel8739 wrote:
| It's not clear to me who this is useful for. If you have a server
| already, yes, it's trivial to put up an HTML page. But most
| people with servers, I would guess, already know that. Most
| people _don't_have servers, though, and it seems to me that thats
| what the "easier" ways of getting started (hosted wordpress,
| Cloudflare pages, github pages, etc.) are for. I agree, though,
| that it's good to start with plain HTML. I'd probably recommend
| that new people go with a serverless setup like Cloudflare pages
| rather than get into administrating a VM, though.
| blakewatson wrote:
| Probably not too useful for many in this audience, but I wrote a
| web book for *absolute beginners* learning HTML. It's very much
| in the same spirit as the OP's post.
|
| https://htmlforpeople.com/
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(page generated 2026-01-13 23:00 UTC)