38 ms·

The other day I started an HTML document from scratch, in VSCode. I kinda blacked out and came to 5 seconds later, and thanks to autocomplete and muscle memory

The other day I started an HTML document from scratch, in VSCode. I kinda blacked out and came to 5 seconds later, and thanks to autocomplete and muscle memory, the whole skeleton of a document was there. HTML and Head and title and body and all that. It was so fast & fluid. I'm ashamed to say I'd kinda forgotten how easy it is to just write fucking HTML. It's even got me reconsidering things like Markdown—I mean, fine for webforms and such, but if I'm just writing a document, is it of any use? Toss in a script to add a menu & header to every page & dump the output in a folder and I'm not sure I need more, now, and I can write that in Perl or Bash or Python or whatever in a minute or three and it'll run everywhere, nothing to install.

marvinblum 6y ago
This! I wrote my personal website [1] a few days ago (after it was blank for years) and went for concrete css [2] and plain HTML together with some Go code to serve the files. I set up a server on Hetzner Cloud [3] and my site was up within minutes using Traefik to get a SSL certificate from Letsencrypt. All in all it took me about 2 hours. If you start to play around with a CMS it can take you days if not weeks. Just write plain HTML, boring but sometimes very efficent. [1] https://marvinblum.de/ https://marvinblum.de/ [2] https://concrete.style/ https://concrete.style/ [3] https://www.hetzner.com/ https://www.hetzner.com/ Edit: Bonus! I did the same for my brothers website: https://schnittfest.gmbh/ https://schnittfest.gmbh/ Just if you're curious.
- qnsi 6y ago
  I heard in a jazz bar that you can host static sites for free at Zeit and use plain css for grid now, but I am unable to verify the rumours as my work limits Internet only to hackernews
  - marvinblum 6y ago
    Sure, but I'm on Hetzner anyways for different reasons. I didn't say it's ideal, just that it's simpler to write HTML+CSS sometimes. How you serve the files doesn't matter.
    - qnsi 6y ago
      Cool. I am sometimes posting for lurkers maybe someone gets inspiration
  - lvncelot 6y ago
    tcp over hackernews comments?
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > my work limits Internet only to hackernews A workplace of dreams. What else do you need anyway?
- tilolebo 6y ago
  Very nice and < 125 kB, well done.
- Tehchops 6y ago
  Well done. Looks quite good for the level of simplicity.
- louismerlin 6y ago
  Thanks for using my css microframework <3 It means a lot to me !
justinmeiners 6y ago
The primary advantage of markdown is that it is more readable in plaintext.
- anderspitman 6y ago
  I second this. I'm all in on Markdown and other ASCII-readable formats. By all means, render out to HTML to make things pretty, but consider keeping the source in plain text. You can browse my personal site with curl or even netcat: curl https://anderspitman.net/txt/19 https://anderspitman.net/txt/19 nc txt.anderspitman.net 3838 <<< /txt/19
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    Web browsers are terrible plain text readers. Especially mobile browsers. The problems are manifold. If your plain text document has line breaks to enforce some column width it will rarely match a browser's viewport width. This means the browser will break lines to fit in the viewport but still respect line breaks. So you get lines broken by the viewport and then line breaks a few words later. The text does not flow well at all. If you only have line breaks at the end of paragraphs the text might flow better but the default viewport width on mobile browsers is (usually) 980px. Desktop browsers set their viewport width to the window width. In either case text ends up hard to read because lines end up really long. You also lose hyperlinking which makes the web...a web. If you want a plain text website just make it HTML with a minimal or no stylesheet. A single viewport meta tag will keep the page readable everywhere. Setting it to the device width will make mobile browsers reflow the text based on the screen size. No one is going to read your blog with netcat or just curl into a pager.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      No one is going to read your blog with netcat or just curl into a pager. Idk, maybe we should revive the world of information served raw over TCP or telnet. HTTP is out of control.
      - 6y ago
soulnothing 6y ago
I was trying to redo my project and consulting site. I did one side in hugo. The other I tried react and type script. I just said the heck with it. I did a basic html page, using an open source css lib, cirrus[1]. Changes are very simple, and I use gitlab pages. My blog is still backed by ghost. But I think raw html is still very powerful. [1] https://spiderpig86.github.io/Cirrus/ https://spiderpig86.github.io/Cirrus/
test6554 6y ago
I just converted a site to mostly static html because the old cms was out of date and nobody wanted to pay to migrate the site to the newest cms version (for like a decade). Well eventually the hosting provider no longer supported such an old version of php and the old cms did not support the new php... So it was either re-code the whole site for the new cms or dump it to html and html (with php header and footer) won.
moreaccountspls 6y ago
I may have seen this on here, but someone made their blog with just html and the posix tool m4: https://github.com/technomancy/technomancy.us https://github.com/technomancy/technomancy.us If I ever make a static dev blog, I'm doing the same. I've tried hugo, and it just felt way overcomplicated for what I was trying to accomplish.
tyre 6y ago
I did the same for my site (https://maddo.xxx https://maddo.xxx) Turns out html covers pretty much everything. Learned a few cool things along the way like: - `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)` (Still working on nailing down color contrast there) - doing footnotes via anchor tags that (a) automatically number themselves in text with counters and (b) automatically highlight the footnote using the `:target` selector. not a single line of JS. The biggest perf issue by far is a font that's 64KB, which is probably including more than it needs to. Deploying is 1 line of `scp`. Recently I got all fancy and added 30 lines of bash to support flags for only deploying assets or posts. all of it is so fast. Coming from rails and react and all of that, it's refreshing.
- Yhippa 6y ago
  I like the way you present your work history at the bottom. If I was an interviewer it's got everything I need to know and nothing more.

marvinblum 6y ago

This! I wrote my personal website [1] a few days ago (after it was blank for years) and went for concrete css [2] and plain HTML together with some Go code to serve the files. I set up a server on Hetzner Cloud [3] and my site was up within minutes using Traefik to get a SSL certificate from Letsencrypt. All in all it took me about 2 hours. If you start to play around with a CMS it can take you days if not weeks. Just write plain HTML, boring but sometimes very efficent. [1] https://marvinblum.de/ https://marvinblum.de/ [2] https://concrete.style/ https://concrete.style/ [3] https://www.hetzner.com/ https://www.hetzner.com/ Edit: Bonus! I did the same for my brothers website: https://schnittfest.gmbh/ https://schnittfest.gmbh/ Just if you're curious.

qnsi 6y ago
I heard in a jazz bar that you can host static sites for free at Zeit and use plain css for grid now, but I am unable to verify the rumours as my work limits Internet only to hackernews
- marvinblum 6y ago
  Sure, but I'm on Hetzner anyways for different reasons. I didn't say it's ideal, just that it's simpler to write HTML+CSS sometimes. How you serve the files doesn't matter.
  - qnsi 6y ago
    Cool. I am sometimes posting for lurkers maybe someone gets inspiration
- lvncelot 6y ago
  tcp over hackernews comments?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > my work limits Internet only to hackernews A workplace of dreams. What else do you need anyway?
tilolebo 6y ago
Very nice and < 125 kB, well done.
Tehchops 6y ago
Well done. Looks quite good for the level of simplicity.
louismerlin 6y ago
Thanks for using my css microframework <3 It means a lot to me !

justinmeiners 6y ago

The primary advantage of markdown is that it is more readable in plaintext.

anderspitman 6y ago
I second this. I'm all in on Markdown and other ASCII-readable formats. By all means, render out to HTML to make things pretty, but consider keeping the source in plain text. You can browse my personal site with curl or even netcat: curl https://anderspitman.net/txt/19 https://anderspitman.net/txt/19 nc txt.anderspitman.net 3838 <<< /txt/19
- giantrobot 6y ago
  Web browsers are terrible plain text readers. Especially mobile browsers. The problems are manifold. If your plain text document has line breaks to enforce some column width it will rarely match a browser's viewport width. This means the browser will break lines to fit in the viewport but still respect line breaks. So you get lines broken by the viewport and then line breaks a few words later. The text does not flow well at all. If you only have line breaks at the end of paragraphs the text might flow better but the default viewport width on mobile browsers is (usually) 980px. Desktop browsers set their viewport width to the window width. In either case text ends up hard to read because lines end up really long. You also lose hyperlinking which makes the web...a web. If you want a plain text website just make it HTML with a minimal or no stylesheet. A single viewport meta tag will keep the page readable everywhere. Setting it to the device width will make mobile browsers reflow the text based on the screen size. No one is going to read your blog with netcat or just curl into a pager.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    No one is going to read your blog with netcat or just curl into a pager. Idk, maybe we should revive the world of information served raw over TCP or telnet. HTTP is out of control.
    - 6y ago

soulnothing 6y ago

I was trying to redo my project and consulting site. I did one side in hugo. The other I tried react and type script. I just said the heck with it. I did a basic html page, using an open source css lib, cirrus[1]. Changes are very simple, and I use gitlab pages. My blog is still backed by ghost. But I think raw html is still very powerful. [1] https://spiderpig86.github.io/Cirrus/ https://spiderpig86.github.io/Cirrus/

test6554 6y ago

I just converted a site to mostly static html because the old cms was out of date and nobody wanted to pay to migrate the site to the newest cms version (for like a decade). Well eventually the hosting provider no longer supported such an old version of php and the old cms did not support the new php... So it was either re-code the whole site for the new cms or dump it to html and html (with php header and footer) won.

moreaccountspls 6y ago

I may have seen this on here, but someone made their blog with just html and the posix tool m4: https://github.com/technomancy/technomancy.us https://github.com/technomancy/technomancy.us If I ever make a static dev blog, I'm doing the same. I've tried hugo, and it just felt way overcomplicated for what I was trying to accomplish.

tyre 6y ago

I did the same for my site (https://maddo.xxx https://maddo.xxx) Turns out html covers pretty much everything. Learned a few cool things along the way like: - `@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)` (Still working on nailing down color contrast there) - doing footnotes via anchor tags that (a) automatically number themselves in text with counters and (b) automatically highlight the footnote using the `:target` selector. not a single line of JS. The biggest perf issue by far is a font that's 64KB, which is probably including more than it needs to. Deploying is 1 line of `scp`. Recently I got all fancy and added 30 lines of bash to support flags for only deploying assets or posts. all of it is so fast. Coming from rails and react and all of that, it's refreshing.

Yhippa 6y ago
I like the way you present your work history at the bottom. If I was an interviewer it's got everything I need to know and nothing more.