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Sometimes I read articles like this and think I'm past it. It's like the whole web has turned in to this pool of mud and no-one realises what it was like before

Sometimes I read articles like this and think I'm past it. It's like the whole web has turned in to this pool of mud and no-one realises what it was like before. A blog is a text file on a screen. There's really no need to do it on a proprietary system, you can literally upload a text file to your own host, but if you can't be bothered, somewhere like GitHub Pages. You want an image? Here's a tag: <img> If the idea is that it doesn't look pretty enough - well, a Medium blog doesn't look like anything at all because I've closed it after closing the first three popups. Here is a link to my own personal blog: https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/blog.txt https://files.esotericnonsense.com/public/blog.txt You're reading this comment right now on a site that gets it right.

maxxxxx 8y ago
"A blog is a text file on a screen. There's really no need to do it on a proprietary system, you can literally upload a text file to your own host, but if you can't be bothered, somewhere like GitHub Pages. You want an image? Here's a tag: <img>" Don't be surprised if someone has this "idea" soon and makes a killing with it. A lot of people seem to get tired with the current stream of "innovation" that makes the web slower and more complex.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- esotericn 8y ago
  > Don't be surprised if someone has this "idea" soon and makes a killing with it. Let's change the world. You can find my contact details in my bio[1, 2, 3]. [1] please note that by e-mailing me you are agreeing to my privacy policy which states that all e-mails may be read by me [2] your IP address will be logged and tracked by both your ISP and Hacker News when you click the link to my bio [3] [modal] this isn't actually anything, I just wanted to put something in your face [ yes ] [ yes ] [4] alert('ha! gotcha! there's another one!') edit: [5] would you like to sign up to my newsletter? [ no ] (there isn't one)
- felipetavares 8y ago
  Already happened. ~ clubs.
tpaschalis 8y ago
Yes, this a thousand times. One example, Dan Luu [1] gets this absolutely right. His blog would probably look similar on Lynx, or any text-only browser, yet is better than 99.99% of stuff "out there". [1] https://danluu.com/ https://danluu.com/
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  It's funny how something as old fashioned as this blog feels like a breath of fresh air. That's how Google design used to be but is not anymore.
- vlaaad 8y ago
  It's funny that it still has tracking and is painful to read on the desktop because of full-width lines of text.
  - esotericn 8y ago
    On the latter point, just resize the browser window. Pow, you have a choice about how wide the lines are.
    - foo101 8y ago
      I know people keep saying this, but resizing the browser is not really a viable solution with today's messed up web. Sure, I can resize the browser for this blog using full width lines but then I have to resize my browser again for another website because the other website chooses to waste half of the horizontal real estate with meaningless stuff. As a user, I can't keep resizing the browser for every site I visit.
      - asdff 8y ago
        Just have your narrow width as your second browser size. One double click on the tab bar in firefox and you are there. I have a big monitor too but I kinda hate full screen browser windows just because no website is really made for it. Either the line width gets out of control, or it just wraps anyway and I have two huge swaths of blank space on each side of the content.
specialp 8y ago
15 years ago there were plenty of people paying $5 a month for shared hosting FTPing hand made HTML over. Now it is way easier and even tech people aren't hosting their own in general which is bad. Right now there are great JAM stacks out there. You could have your markdown formatted content in Git, rendered by Hugo, and then pushed to Cloudfront backed S3 for literally pennies a month and CDN'ed all around the world but hardly anyone does it. As tech people I think we are the most to blame posting to Medium because it is technologically easier than ever before to self host, yet most are too lazy.
- akho 8y ago
  FTPing HTML was infinitely easier than Git+Hugo+S3+Cloudfront. And even if you can somehow cut through all the complexity of modern hosting — you still have to make those HTMLs. Only now they have to be responsive, look no worse than whatever is out there, look nice when posted on Facebook or Twitter, render well in various read later apps, and generally work with a wide ecosystem. And then you have to continue to make your site work with all the new stuff, preferably without breaking older pages. You can indeed be simpler than most websites out there, and not lose anything important. But don’t kid yourself — the web is much more complex than it used to be.
  - specialp 8y ago
    You are correct it isn't trivial but I'd argue some stuff is even easier than in the past. Like the whole responsive design (or a design at all) is already accomplished by using any one of many themes offered for Hugo. Then you don't even have to know HTML, you can have a one page Markdown reference to do almost everything. I might want to work on something like this to make it more accessible to others, but my main argument is that for tech people this is trivial and here they are still using Medium. https://habd.as/zero-to-http-2-aws-hugo/ https://habd.as/zero-to-http-2-aws-hugo/ Is an example of how to do this. It has some steps but is not that hard. I think it can be even easier by scripting most of this out for less technical people.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  Good luck getting your non-technical friend to ever use this workflow, much less set it up.
asdff 8y ago
> It's like the whole web has turned in to this pool of mud and no-one realises what it was like before. Every website is trying to reinvent the wheel. Foolish! I hate the grid/huge amount of white space layout that is so pervasive now. Websites that have their information in a nice and clean, condensed list view are unicorns now. Condensed lists are literally the best layout to convey information in a given space, take a look at how outlook or apple mail gives you the exact same information in their super condensed list views as they do in the 'mobile friendly' expanded view, except they give you much more information at a time without having to endlessly scroll. It would be acceptable if I was literally using my elbow to tap on a touchscreen, but I'm using a mouse and keyboard and I can comfortably click on something 10 pixels wide. Take a look at any of the half dozen or so food delivery service websites. On my 13" screen on grubhub, I can see 5 search results at a time. 5! Each result takes up 1 full inch of screen real estate when it could be one single line of text. If it was single spaced, that would be 40 lines and therefore 40 results I could view at a time. But because the modern web is designed to be accommodating for a 500lb gorilla to poke at a touchscreen, I have to deal with only being able to see 1/8 the information that I could potentially see.
- gerbilly 8y ago
  > except they give you much more information at a time without having to endlessly scroll. I think getting people to scroll isn't an accident, they want you to have to scroll. Scrolling a website makes you physically interact with it, and I bet that has some psychological effects that work out in favour of the content creators. Whenever I am in a place where you have to wait a lot, like at a bus station, nearly everyone is swiping at their phone. They all look like crack addicts scratching for rocks in an alleyway.
  - FiveSquared 8y ago
    But who tf wants to wait for a bus? And its hella awkward talking to strangers.
    - drdeadringer 8y ago
enraged_camel 8y ago
>>A blog is a text file on a screen. A blog used to be a text file on a screen. Like most words in the English language however, its meaning has changed overtime, as people's expectations have changed. I personally like Medium because of its highlights feature and its unobtrusive comment system. In fact, I often scroll down to the comments first to see what people are saying, much like I (and many others) check the comments on HN submissions first before deciding whether to bother with the actual submission. Don't get me wrong, medium has a lot of annoying issues. But this whole "let's go back to the stone ages" crap with regards to tech needs to stop.
spunker540 8y ago
My workplace blocks your site because it has not yet been categorized. Medium on the other hand works just fine. I'm not saying that's right, but it is something to consider!
xena 8y ago
I tried to do it right: https://christine.website/blog https://christine.website/blog The only javascript on any page is for the service worker that allows offline loading of pages.

maxxxxx 8y ago

"A blog is a text file on a screen. There's really no need to do it on a proprietary system, you can literally upload a text file to your own host, but if you can't be bothered, somewhere like GitHub Pages. You want an image? Here's a tag: <img>" Don't be surprised if someone has this "idea" soon and makes a killing with it. A lot of people seem to get tired with the current stream of "innovation" that makes the web slower and more complex.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
esotericn 8y ago
> Don't be surprised if someone has this "idea" soon and makes a killing with it. Let's change the world. You can find my contact details in my bio[1, 2, 3]. [1] please note that by e-mailing me you are agreeing to my privacy policy which states that all e-mails may be read by me [2] your IP address will be logged and tracked by both your ISP and Hacker News when you click the link to my bio [3] [modal] this isn't actually anything, I just wanted to put something in your face [ yes ] [ yes ] [4] alert('ha! gotcha! there's another one!') edit: [5] would you like to sign up to my newsletter? [ no ] (there isn't one)
felipetavares 8y ago
Already happened. ~ clubs.

tpaschalis 8y ago

Yes, this a thousand times. One example, Dan Luu [1] gets this absolutely right. His blog would probably look similar on Lynx, or any text-only browser, yet is better than 99.99% of stuff "out there". [1] https://danluu.com/ https://danluu.com/

maxxxxx 8y ago
It's funny how something as old fashioned as this blog feels like a breath of fresh air. That's how Google design used to be but is not anymore.
vlaaad 8y ago
It's funny that it still has tracking and is painful to read on the desktop because of full-width lines of text.
- esotericn 8y ago
  On the latter point, just resize the browser window. Pow, you have a choice about how wide the lines are.
  - foo101 8y ago
    I know people keep saying this, but resizing the browser is not really a viable solution with today's messed up web. Sure, I can resize the browser for this blog using full width lines but then I have to resize my browser again for another website because the other website chooses to waste half of the horizontal real estate with meaningless stuff. As a user, I can't keep resizing the browser for every site I visit.
    - asdff 8y ago
      Just have your narrow width as your second browser size. One double click on the tab bar in firefox and you are there. I have a big monitor too but I kinda hate full screen browser windows just because no website is really made for it. Either the line width gets out of control, or it just wraps anyway and I have two huge swaths of blank space on each side of the content.

specialp 8y ago

15 years ago there were plenty of people paying $5 a month for shared hosting FTPing hand made HTML over. Now it is way easier and even tech people aren't hosting their own in general which is bad. Right now there are great JAM stacks out there. You could have your markdown formatted content in Git, rendered by Hugo, and then pushed to Cloudfront backed S3 for literally pennies a month and CDN'ed all around the world but hardly anyone does it. As tech people I think we are the most to blame posting to Medium because it is technologically easier than ever before to self host, yet most are too lazy.

akho 8y ago
FTPing HTML was infinitely easier than Git+Hugo+S3+Cloudfront. And even if you can somehow cut through all the complexity of modern hosting — you still have to make those HTMLs. Only now they have to be responsive, look no worse than whatever is out there, look nice when posted on Facebook or Twitter, render well in various read later apps, and generally work with a wide ecosystem. And then you have to continue to make your site work with all the new stuff, preferably without breaking older pages. You can indeed be simpler than most websites out there, and not lose anything important. But don’t kid yourself — the web is much more complex than it used to be.
- specialp 8y ago
  You are correct it isn't trivial but I'd argue some stuff is even easier than in the past. Like the whole responsive design (or a design at all) is already accomplished by using any one of many themes offered for Hugo. Then you don't even have to know HTML, you can have a one page Markdown reference to do almost everything. I might want to work on something like this to make it more accessible to others, but my main argument is that for tech people this is trivial and here they are still using Medium. https://habd.as/zero-to-http-2-aws-hugo/ https://habd.as/zero-to-http-2-aws-hugo/ Is an example of how to do this. It has some steps but is not that hard. I think it can be even easier by scripting most of this out for less technical people.
egypturnash 8y ago
Good luck getting your non-technical friend to ever use this workflow, much less set it up.

asdff 8y ago

> It's like the whole web has turned in to this pool of mud and no-one realises what it was like before. Every website is trying to reinvent the wheel. Foolish! I hate the grid/huge amount of white space layout that is so pervasive now. Websites that have their information in a nice and clean, condensed list view are unicorns now. Condensed lists are literally the best layout to convey information in a given space, take a look at how outlook or apple mail gives you the exact same information in their super condensed list views as they do in the 'mobile friendly' expanded view, except they give you much more information at a time without having to endlessly scroll. It would be acceptable if I was literally using my elbow to tap on a touchscreen, but I'm using a mouse and keyboard and I can comfortably click on something 10 pixels wide. Take a look at any of the half dozen or so food delivery service websites. On my 13" screen on grubhub, I can see 5 search results at a time. 5! Each result takes up 1 full inch of screen real estate when it could be one single line of text. If it was single spaced, that would be 40 lines and therefore 40 results I could view at a time. But because the modern web is designed to be accommodating for a 500lb gorilla to poke at a touchscreen, I have to deal with only being able to see 1/8 the information that I could potentially see.

gerbilly 8y ago
> except they give you much more information at a time without having to endlessly scroll. I think getting people to scroll isn't an accident, they want you to have to scroll. Scrolling a website makes you physically interact with it, and I bet that has some psychological effects that work out in favour of the content creators. Whenever I am in a place where you have to wait a lot, like at a bus station, nearly everyone is swiping at their phone. They all look like crack addicts scratching for rocks in an alleyway.
- FiveSquared 8y ago
  But who tf wants to wait for a bus? And its hella awkward talking to strangers.
  - drdeadringer 8y ago

enraged_camel 8y ago

>>A blog is a text file on a screen. A blog used to be a text file on a screen. Like most words in the English language however, its meaning has changed overtime, as people's expectations have changed. I personally like Medium because of its highlights feature and its unobtrusive comment system. In fact, I often scroll down to the comments first to see what people are saying, much like I (and many others) check the comments on HN submissions first before deciding whether to bother with the actual submission. Don't get me wrong, medium has a lot of annoying issues. But this whole "let's go back to the stone ages" crap with regards to tech needs to stop.

spunker540 8y ago

My workplace blocks your site because it has not yet been categorized. Medium on the other hand works just fine. I'm not saying that's right, but it is something to consider!

xena 8y ago

I tried to do it right: https://christine.website/blog https://christine.website/blog The only javascript on any page is for the service worker that allows offline loading of pages.