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.
width: 60%; // define your width as desired
margin: 0 auto;
And no cheating by using flexbox!
It's been working for the second century.
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.
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.
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.
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 $6/month VPS that I'm happy enough with as well for anything a bit spicy.
And it's also ugly :)
- Most of it is CSS, which when removed still produces a pretty functional website.
- Most of the CSS is just one (commented out) background image
- There are about 5 lines of java script, which seem to just exist to obfuscate your email.
It was an experiment a while back and it was inline in order to keep it all in one file. Actually that made me realize, my site is dynamic: Because I edit this one html file live on the server to make changes, whoever loads my website repeatedly while I'm doing that is going to see changes live.
The problem with AWS is their extortionate egress fees which are about 50-100 times the market price.
Really hate how modern website building sites moved towards structured, samey sites. I miss the days of Geocities and Freewebs, the unreadable text against cluttered background images, the auto playing music, the trailing cursors, the spinning skeletons in front of crappy looking flames.
I liked the heading fonts on the pages, "Austin News" according to Firefox. But then I looked it up for future use but it starts at 350$, 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.
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.
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.
I would've rather been sent to the ugly site if it doesn't have marketing cookies and a membership popup.
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
> 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
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 ( • ‿ • )
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.
But how is it misguided? OP is having fun on their personal site. Where would you guide them instead?
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
We need more of this kind of non-conformity on the web - and in general.
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
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.
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/.
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.
Web sites aren’t my specialty, or my goals. I just want somewhere to post my ramblings.
I'm not sure why the author hosts their blog posts on this platform and not their own website though
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...
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)
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.
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...
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.
It's possible to have an ugly site that's still easily navigable and visually interesting, even if the author is the only user.
>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.
Boring? I guess I don't really care - internal joy and contentment will always supercede "boring".
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.
[2] https://susam.net/colophon.html
[3] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/commits/main/site.lisp
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 :-\
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.
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!
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...
The words I just read takes me back to that same feeling. Thank you for that.
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.
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.
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.
This one is a bit messy, but it feels personal. Like someone is using CSS to write a diary. Not perfect, but warm and alive. That feeling of making something just for yourself really means something.
donatj•1d ago
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•23h ago
donatj•22h ago
yoz-y•21h ago
ebiester•21h ago
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•21h ago
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•20h ago
delfinom•18h ago
parpfish•17h ago
a self-documenting blog about the blog.
topaz0•17h ago
oxalorg•21h ago
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•21h ago
runamuck•20h ago
navanchauhan•19h ago
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•14h ago
LoulouMonkey•12h ago
Great work!
mgfist•8h ago
(it's not me, I also don't know him personally)
90s_dev•21h ago
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•21h ago
sli•20h ago
01HNNWZ0MV43FF•17h ago
henrebotha•20h ago
AndrewStephens•20h ago
I have a server to serve my website and a website to have something for my server to do.
donatj•20h ago
My colophon if anyone is interested
https://donatstudios.com/colophon
indigodaddy•20h ago
justusthane•20h ago
It's built with the excellent Eleventy SSG, but all HTML and CSS is done by hand (as you can probably tell :)
reaperducer•19h ago
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•19h ago
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•19h ago
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•19h ago
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•18h ago
izietto•17h ago
p4bl0•16h ago
bitwize•19h ago
> 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•18h ago
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.
LoulouMonkey•12h ago
I started with Hugo and ended up building my own static site generator (https://github.com/julien-blanchard/Loulou).
It's been nothing but fun all along. And as you said, building something yourself really makes a huge difference.
https://blanchardjulien.com/