19 ms·

Building a personal website in 2021

534 points by mkosmul 5y ago

forgotmypw17 5y ago
I agree with most of these sentiments. I've often wished I started doing something like this 20 years ago, and have a website which has been around for that long. So I decided to do the next best thing: Make a website which COULD HAVE been around for 20+ years, and make it compatible with the 20+ years worth of browsers since 1995, around when I started using the Web and HTTP/1.1 became common (the latter allowing support of cheap shared web hosting using the Host: header)
- rchaud 5y ago
  I had a website I built using Dreamweaver in college 15 years ago. The hosting was provided by the school, everyone had a FTP server under their name that they could put files on. The site of course was removed after I graduated, but I still had some of the articles I put on in Word form. Many years later, when I learned HTML/CSS, I'd post those old articles on the new sites I created. I believe I still have some music reviews I wrote wayy back in 2004.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I think that what you do is really cool: https://origami.kosmulski.org/about https://origami.kosmulski.org/about I'm a big fan of "do what you love."
- mkosmul 5y ago
  Thank you
hnal943 5y ago
have you checked out 11ty? It's similar to Jekyll but doesn't have dependencies on Ruby.
- mkosmul 5y ago
  No, I didn't know it - thank you. It's probably too late to switch at this stage, but I'll have a look. It's always good to know some alternatives/replacements.
- ochronus 5y ago
  It depends on NodeJS instead.
- willio58 5y ago
  11ty is great and it supports Jekyll-like templating and others too.
rayrag 5y ago
Two tips: - don't justify text, it doesn't look good and it makes text harder to (https://designforhackers.com/blog/justify-text-html-css/ https://designforhackers.com/blog/justify-text-html-css/) - 'On this page' section is too long. And once I scroll down I don't see it anymore so I can't use it for navigation. Look at https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.0/getting-started/introduction/ https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.0/getting-started/introducti... or https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation to see how useful can it be.
- mkosmul 5y ago
  Thank you for the tips. As for justification, I actually compared my "before" and "after" layouts and found the one with justification better for my taste. The link you posted has some very interesting thoughts, though, and certainly justified text on a web page is a completely different level of typography than text justified e.g. in LaTeX.
  - forgotpwd16 5y ago
    Maybe it was intentional but bullet points aren't justified although the rest of the text is. Also text looks pretty big for me.
- forgotpwd16 5y ago
  Ironically I find the first article easier to read when justified (side-by-side comparison at https://ibb.co/9tvZ75W https://ibb.co/9tvZ75W). When not justified the uneven lines get my attention and I'm losing my reading rhythm. As the article lacks a published date, I do not know whether this is result of technology having advanced since. Nevertheless there're spaces that look bad around the images but maybe a better web design could help with this. Also there's the usual lack of any surveys that articles on design tend to have.
  - bruce343434 5y ago
    The very first support link it gives disproves the article: hyphenation IS widely supported. In my opinion the article reads as if the author collected evidence to support his preference. Now, it does seem as if text justification is a highly subjective matter.
kevincox 5y ago
> I also spent a little time on redirecting the addresses of [...] my old website to [...] the new one. Failing to do this would have cost me a lot in search engine rankings since all the incoming links collected over the years would be gone [...] I was disappointing that the main reason that they valued keeping past links alive was SEO. To me the innate benefit of not breaking links and bookmarks on your readers (or future readers) should be enough.
- mkosmul 5y ago
  This is a very good point - good you brought it up. I do care about not breaking links, though I did not mention that in the text. Actually, you can still reach my site by using the address it used even before the previous one, and there are still links on the web using that very old address, thanks to two levels of redirects.
papito 5y ago
I spent some up front time setting up Supervisor, Jekyll, and a light server listening to Github actions that, upon an update, just pulls the latest on commit and reruns the static publisher. I even have a staging branch/subdomain. The first point - easy to update - is critical. If there is any friction to the process, you will just never do it. Your personal time is inherently much more valuable than your work time. And if you are creating your new personal site, I highly recommend scrapping everything you know and doing it with Grid and Flex.
- robbiemitchell 5y ago
  Hosts like Netlify also do this magic. Pushing to Master on Github runs any Jekyll plugins you want and deploys the site, including things like image optimization and CDN if you want.
ignoramous 5y ago
In 2021? I'd prefer serverless and low-code. If I only need a blog (and not a website) I'd consider posting on substack.com, dev.to, or hashnode.com instead. > Easy to update: I usually post 1-2 pictures to social media each week, and I wanted adding a picture to my site to be as easy as posting it on any other platform... I could buy a domain and redirect it to my flickr, facebook, or instagram feed There exists no-code apps that post your social media feeds to a weblog. One of the better ones I know is milkshake.app https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20154181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20154181 > The best approach would be to have data separated from presentation as much as possible, i.e. for each model to just define a few fields such as: name, model type, image, etc., and use some kind of templates to present this data to the end user. Low-code builders like onuniverse.com, glideapps.com, draftbit.com (mobile apps), and pory.io come to mind, though none of them let you publish websites via another provider. > Longevity: since I would be putting in a lot of work, I wanted to be able to expand and maintain the site for at least 5-10 years without major overhaul. Sound like serverless services like netlify.com, pages.github.com, vercel.com, pages.dev fit the bill to deploy the site to?
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  I would try to use github.com to host sources of the website and cloudflare pages to publish the website. It's completely free and probably as reliable and fast as possible.
  - hedora 5y ago
    Using cloudflare breaks tor.
    - jtbayly 5y ago
      Can’t you turn that off?
- askonomm 5y ago
  The person specifically mentions longevity and yet you mention a myriad of third-party tools to depend on.
rectang 5y ago
> Longevity: since I would be putting in a lot of work, I wanted to be able to expand and maintain the site for at least 5-10 years without major overhaul (but, technology being what it is, I was aware I would probably have to perform some maintenance work onhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173728ce https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173728ce every 3 years or so). With that criteria, I wonder about the choice of Jekyll, which is huge and complicated. I'd be looking for something with fewer moving parts. I suppose one nice thing is by that limiting yourself to static html output it becomes easier to switch from one generator to another.
- mkosmul 5y ago
  Yes - with all contents stored in nice Markdown-formatted files, switching to an alternative site generator should be relatively easy.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    Should be, but all the customizations (themes, logics) will not transfer.
- temp8964 5y ago
  Exactly for longevity (5, 10, 15 years), I will not use any static site generator. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I have better confidence of longevity on Wordpress / Mediawiki than static site generators.
  - mjthompson 5y ago
    A static site generator that works now will probably still work in 10 years, even if updates cease. And it will be safe to use. After all, it just churns out HTML that you put somewhere. The same can't be said of WordPress or MediaWiki. You will not be able to run these at all if they become unsupported and will have to migrate, or risk facing security issues. Sure, SSGs are not for everyone, but the potential for deprecation isn't a major issue, at least for a personal site.
primaryobjects 5y ago
I also went with a static site generator during my own blog upgrade and chose Hexo. My tech stack is: Hexo Markdown Node.js Heroku Here is my whole story! http://www.primaryobjects.com/2015/12/15/a-tale-of-migrating-to-a-static-web-site/ http://www.primaryobjects.com/2015/12/15/a-tale-of-migrating...
- rikroots 5y ago
  I discovered Hexo when I decided to build myself a micro-blogging site about my code learning experiences 3 years ago. I was impressed with the whole experience then - I was after a simple-yet-not-stupid static site generator and that's what Hexo gave me. I did have to write my own tooling to get the site to deploy to AWS S3 but I assume that they will have a plugin for that sort of scenario nowadays.
snowwrestler 5y ago
It’s a good example of how each person’s experience guides their sense of simplicity. This person felt like Wordpress was too complicated, despite it being a system you can use to set up a site with literally no coding at all (using Wordpress.com or one of the many hosting providers with one-click installs). You can live-swap themes to see which one you like, again with just some clicking. Meanwhile he is hand-editing .htaccess files to get the URL structure he wants and switching from JPG to WebP (a change with no real-world SEO value) to try to help SEO. This is not to condemn or criticize! It’s just that when people have experience with having their hands directly on software development, they may be more likely to prefer a web stack that mimics that feel. “Easier” for a coder is going to be different from “easier” for an artist with no coding experience. Look how many artists use Squarespace or Wix for example, which did not even make the list for this effort apparently.
- mkosmul 5y ago
  Very true. Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder.
- hnedeotes 5y ago
  I agree, but I also think that when developers talk about simplicity it's in terms of understanding the bits and moving parts that make the whole. Like creating a nextjs app, or a wordpress website, those things are all "simple" to execute - as in easy - you type a command/click somewhere and it's done, you've got the structure and all plumbing done. You can understand all the pieces after working with them for a while and they mostly cover everything you need for their use case (which in this case makes some things simple, creating a new page, or blog entry, uploading an image, etc). With Squarespace and such it's the same, it's simple, specially for someone who isn't a webdev - but what it's doing is not simple and when you need to stray from what it does and how it works (specially in visual builders) simple things become very complex or even not doable. They're probably still the best tools for a given range of websites/purposes, even if you know how to code, but definitively running transpilers, pre and post processors, chunking files, merging code, scoping blocks of html and css, stacks of middleware, etc, is the opposite of simple.
  - 5y ago
bmitc 5y ago
I've been having decision paralysis about setting up my own personal website. I would personally like to avoid some bloated frameworks or tools like Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix, etc. I'm also not really sure I even want a blog. I'd like to have a collection of articles that aren't just written once and then moved on from but rather are updated and refined over time. I've looked at static website generators, but don't really feel they're that simple. So I've been looking to just do things from scratch. Maybe it would be nice to write articles in markdown and have a custom static website generator that takes these and publishes them. It could be a fun F# or Racket project. The idea of simple HTML and CSS being loaded for maximum speed and old school web with a little something for interactive graphs and other things is something that sits well for me. Although, I just took on a new Elixir job, and something with Liveview and Livebook for interactivity could be really cool. Anyone else struggle with this and end up coming up with a solution or finding one?
- mkosmul 5y ago
  This blog's author wrote his own minimalistic static site generator: https://prog21.dadgum.com/ https://prog21.dadgum.com/ But, I think, doing things from scratch can be risky: ready-made solutions have a learning curve, but they also do lots of useful things which you might need, and writing all of that from scratch is really lots of work. For me, it's always about find the right point on the spectrum between "write it myself to do exactly what I need" and "huge, bloated thing that claims to do everything anyone might ever need"
- vbsteven 5y ago
  I chose Jekyll as a static site generator because it was simple enough to understand what it does. Its build step is just taking a directory of markdown files and converting them to html pages using a template. It feels like the next logical step after writing all pages in html by hand.
- jdthedisciple 5y ago
  I am struggling with the exact same problem at the moment. I am currently contemplating using just http and php, whereby I just save my posts as textfiles along with maybe 1 image file in a folder ( say /posts/{id}/) and the php just takes all those and turns them into HTML using some type of template like the author mentioned. Then do some basic SEO to improve visibility. I'm no webdev myself and have no experience with building anything on the web but I think this could suffice.
______- 5y ago
I don't have a personal website, but I operate various online services like pastebins, image uploader sites, and other online tools that many people use. People would get more utility out of those than a personal blog, since I learned (a bit late) that I'm not especially good at writing and communicating my ideas very well. I can get across an idea, but it usually misses nuance and I find writing personal stuff very embarrassing later on down the road, when I start regretting ever hitting publish. Out of all the personal blogposts I have written, roughly three I am proud of, the rest just embarrass me.
minimaxir 5y ago
If you're building a personal website from scratch in 2021 (especially a blog), I strongly recommend Hugo (https://gohugo.io https://gohugo.io) over Jekyll. I had used Jekyll for a decade and very often hit random quirks that have been completely eliminated with modern Hugo. However, there's a bit of a migration process if you are moving from Jekyll to Hugo despite both being Markdown-based blogs. If you want a more advanced framework for a personal website, I recommend Wowchemy (https://wowchemy.com/ https://wowchemy.com/) on top of Hugo, which gives the tools needed out-of-the-box like lazy loading/SEO/object-oriented collections, albeit with a massive learning curve.
- hnarn 5y ago
  There are some cases where re-writes in Go or Rust are just so good that the "originals" become almost entirely obsolete. Hugo is one of those tools, ESbuild seems to be another, or ripgrep for Rust for example.
  - nickjj 5y ago
    > There are some cases where re-writes in Go or Rust are just so good that the "originals" become almost entirely obsolete. Why's that? I use Jekyll here and even with over 500+ articles (posts + drafts) it takes around 2 seconds to get live reload feedback in Jekyll while writing. Jekyll also handles the entire asset pipeline complete with md5 tagging of assets without using Webpack or any build tools. It also lets you write plugins with a few lines of Ruby to add new template filters and other things. For example I wrote a custom Jekyll plugin that lets me write bullet lists like this after a specific type of header: - 0:45 -- Something - 1:45 -- Another thing - 1:03:31 -- And another thing And it automatically converts the timestamp numbers into clickable links that jump to that point in an audio player. AFAIK Hugo has no way to do anything like that, at least no where near as easy as Jekyll. With Hugo wouldn't I have to compile a custom build of Hugo for such a thing? But with Jekyll it was adding 1 file into a directory and writing 20 lines of "business logic code" to add a new filter. Now I just do {{ content | audioseek }} when I want clickable timestamps. I also wrote another plugin that automatically adds certain rel attributes to external links by adding {{ content | extlinks }}. Things like the above are why I continue using Jekyll because personally I haven't found another SSG that comes close to how easy it makes it to add custom behavior. I don't mind the 2 second live reload wait and I wouldn't switch away from Jekyll for a speed boost alone. At some point the speed is "good enough". Sure I would love a 100ms reload but I wouldn't give up everything else for that.
codebolt 5y ago
The main argument for static site for me was the simplicity and price of hosting. It's also CDN friendly which means a huge performance boost. Hosting a static site on Azure costs me 2-3$/mo which is well within the free credits I get from my work-sponsored MSDN subscription.
arp242 5y ago
I think the big number 1 that trumps all others when building a person website is: focus on writing content. This is by far the hardest part. All the other stuff: it's just tangential. Wordpress, Blogger, Jekyll, Hugo, Medium, hand-written HTML files: IMHO it doesn't really matter if you don't have any content. Just use whatever is easiest to get started with and gets out of your way when writing. For me, personally, it would be writing Markdown in Vim and converting that. For other people, it's something else. Later, when you actually have some content going you can start focusing on tooling, layout, and so forth. Converting things to another platform usually isn't too hard. But chances are, you will never actually get any content going. I've seen a lot of people create personal websites, write one or two things on it, and then basically don't do anything with it. I've built some websites for various friends/non-profits over the years, and about 90% of the time they never actually wrote any content. These days I ask people to write content first, and then I'll build the website for them. Most of the time I never hear about it again. That's okay, it's really hard to write content and a lot of people (myself included, before I had more experience with this sort of thing) tend to be way too optimistic about it and underestimate just how hard this can be. And people will read your website regardless if your content is good. Is Paul Graham's website the peak of web design? Not really. People still read it. Dan Luu's website? Pretty much the most basic HTML file you can get. Still widely read. That being said, if your goal is also to learn more if you're young or inexperienced: then sure, muck around with these tools all you want. I learned a lot from building my personal website over the years in all sorts of tools (geocities, hand-written HTML, shell scripts, PHP, Python, PHP again but this time with MongoDB, back to shell script, and finally settled Jekyll) and for much of this time I didn't have a lot of content. That was okay, because I learned a lot from the process.
- dundercoder 5y ago
  I agree. The problem is the tangential stuff _feels_ important and leads you to want to perfect it before even starting content.
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  Why write content no one reads? It's 2021. Build a cathedral of a website for a single tweet, it will say a lot more about you. Although I wish, obviously, we all read more.
__turbobrew__ 5y ago
It took me about an hour to set up an AWS static website backed by S3 and cached by cloudfront. I use Jekyll and simply sync the _site folder to s3 to update my website. Some nice things about this setup: 1.) AWS static sites don’t insert trackers 2.) There is zero maintenance 3.) Cloudfront + static website is very fast 4.) Setup can scale near infinitely (so can your bill) Downsides: 1.) You are locked into AWS. Although migrating to another provider to serve static files would be trivial. 2.) If your website took off in popularity the bill might be more than you are comfortable with.
- cudgy 5y ago
  Those are some major downsides …
majewsky 5y ago
I love how the first comment at the end of the page asks which CDN and which load balancer the site is using, as if he's filling entire racks with this simple static website. Absolutely hilarious.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  Turns out Nginx can serve a lot of static pages very quickly. The largest page on my blog is 70KB. On a VPC with a gigabit connection, I should be able to push about 1,400 requests per second. My blog is never going to be so popular that I need to support more throughput than that.
  - LambdaComplex 5y ago
    I think oftentimes the benefit of a CDN is not (just) performance, but also cost--sure, nginx can serve your pages plenty fast enough, but how much is your hosting provider charging you for that network traffic? The answer is generally "more than a CDN would be" (once you've used up your free bandwidth for the month, of course)
    - kstrauser 5y ago
      True, but I think you’d have to have one hell of a popular blog before those lines crossed.
toto444 5y ago
Has anyone noted the use of Github for commenting at the bottom ? That is quite a nice way to have social features without being too 'social'.
m01 5y ago
I was glad to see the author start with the context & requirements, rather than with the tech stack.
BayesianDice 5y ago
I agree with comments saying that a key point is producing content. I'd spent a couple of years of considering starting a blog (with no commercial/monetisation, but somewhere to post thoughts on technology / games / books I find interesting) and trying out various platforms/solutions and producing very little. Then I finally got started with a simple Hugo/Github/Netlify setup, with the plan of adding more technology bells and whistles if readership or my inspiration to continue producing content justifies it. A question on which I'd be interested in views: how important or otherwise do people consider the ability to sign up for a mailing list / newsletter to be informed of new content? I dislike the in-your-face modal pop-ups etc. - but am wondering if readers, if they like existing articles on a site, would appreciate a low-key, unobtrusive option of signing up for an email notification.
- Siira 5y ago
  Give us RSS, and we’ll pull if we want to. Email pushes, which is user-hostile.
  - BayesianDice 5y ago
    Thank you for the comment. The site already has RSS, and I'd agree there are good technical grounds for preferring it, but I get the impression that its use among users is declining, which is why I was considering other mechanisms. I find it an interesting point of view to consider a feature which alternatively allows users to opt-in to email notifications - but which doesn't disadvantage them at all if they don't - as "user-hostile". (But of course I've seen sites which want to coerce visitors to hand over an email address to be able to access the content they were expecting, and depending on context, I can see cases where that could be considered aggressive.)
  - exolymph 5y ago
    Um, not if the user signed up for it? Believe it or not lots of people sign up for email lists — especially editorial ones but also commercial ones — on purpose. Not just normies either, I bet there are plenty of people on HN who've subscribed to a bunch of bloggers' lists. I certainly have.
- 5y ago
avilay 5y ago
Surprised not to see ghost in here. They have a paid managed version at https://ghost.org https://ghost.org and it is fairly easy to set up with any of the public cloud providers. I have set mine up with Digital Ocean (https://ghost.org/docs/install/digitalocean/ https://ghost.org/docs/install/digitalocean/).
swayvil 5y ago
For my site this is index.php <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <link rel="stylesheet" href="../style.css"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"> </head> <body> <div class="main"> <?php include "../Parsedown.php"; $pd=new Parsedown(); $mc=file_get_contents("../contentHeader.md"); echo $pd->text($mc); $mc=file_get_contents("contentMain.md"); echo $pd->text($mc); $mc=file_get_contents("../contentFooter.md"); echo $pd->text($mc); ?> </div> </body> </html> The rest is Parsedown.php, markdown content and some images. Arranged in a directory tree. An index and a contentMain.md in every directory. After trying several "simple" Content Management Systems, this is where I arrived. I wish I did it 10 years ago.
roachpepe 5y ago
Thanks for the article, it's a very readable journal, sharing experiences and writing up also the reasoning behind decisions contributes to future builders. Maybe someone already said it but I'll echo anyway - unless it's all about going outside the comfort zone to learn new tools, the person building should always first picture what needs to be built, then pick the right materials and tools for the project. Taking their own skills into account when using said tools of course. Preferably even think a little ahead about your content to come if the site is meant to last for years when picking the tech. Ask yourself some "whatifs". Like what if you want to later on make some trade for yourself and set up shop for your crafts or skillset, can it be done easily enough as well? TL;DR - Useful and well written article, there's never enough easy-read, non-commercial, experience-based journals about site building basics to help newcomers. Cheers!
austincheney 5y ago
If a personal website for a software developer should reflect current capabilities or employment trends then it should conform to this checklist: * Use React. Every paragraph, yes each one, should be a JSX component. If anybody asks you about this just respond with something unrelated about test automation. * A fancy logo front and center above the fold over a gradient. Catch that eye but leave the user hanging on what the site is actually about because pausing for dramatic effect is most important. * Mention somewhere that accessibility is important and stand behind that statement with great pride. In the next statement forget about accessibility completely like a bad case of mania and add a bunch of unnecessary JavaScript and specifically describe how much you hate JavaScript. * Something about Agile. This should compromise the bulk of all human consumable content. It doesn’t have to any make sense and can be completely out of order. * Actually push all content to the end and just worry about which tools to use then use Twitter feeds for all content. Sarcasm aside actual content comprised of words makes for a good litmus test to discriminate interested users from people who find such things a chore. It’s the difference between employment recruiters and internal developers filtering those potential candidates.
- anoncake 5y ago
  > It doesn’t have to any make sense and can be completely out of order. No, the order of paragraphs is important. A/B testing is necessary to find out the best one.
- cyberdelica 5y ago
  You need to shovel in "unit testing" somehow.
darekkay 5y ago
I've migrated [1] my blog to Eleventy this year and it is a pleasure to work with. I especially like the data model and the flexibility. [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/hexo-to-eleventy/ https://darekkay.com/blog/hexo-to-eleventy/
32gbsd 5y ago
That is a long article only to end up with a website that looks like every other website. Could as well be wordpress or a facebook page.
lernerzhang 5y ago
Why not just Medium or Quora?
- FourthProtocol 5y ago
  Because they're too restrictive. They're also not something you have too much control over. My site started out with only my resume. I then added photos because why should Facebook benefit? Then came some work stuff I wanted to publish. And then I got into radio control and I posted up builds. In between all of that I play around with some JS ideas/apps/databases. Maybe Medium and Quora are enough for some, but for some they're just a sandpit when what you really want is a warehouse with a bandsaw, drill press, 3D printer and coffee machine.
ExcavateGrandMa 5y ago
"Creating a website would certainly cost me a lot of work" first sentence brings you in a closed room with a table in middle and a plat of speculo cakes which are very yummy...
bothra90 5y ago
I really wish more design docs / project reports looked like this article - talking about the whys, goals / non-goals, options considered, prototypes built, challenges, and solutions, learnings and next steps. Kudos!
towardsclarity 5y ago
Downside of building a website in 2021: tons of options to choose from, lots of potential technical complexity. Upside: there are many "one click" options (Substack, Webflow, etc) that make it dead simple.
Natales 5y ago
I started writing blog-like text entries in my .plan file in the mid 80s, so others could use finger in UNIX and read what I was thinking. I later learnt HTML just so I could keep writing my thoughts. I lost content, I got spam, I had to learn to defend myself when the Internet became aggressive. It wasn't like that early on. We believed it was for the betterment of humankind. I know, how naive. I went through the "Wordpress phase", the static phase (Pelican, then Hugo) but I ultimately decided to define what I wanted to share, and I realized few people really cared about long writings, but rather, the nitty gritty. So I chose to use the Zettlekasten model where I focus on specifics, narrow, single-topic. I chose TiddlyWiki (the Drift distribution specifically), and I have two files, one public, one private. As simple as that. My default is public. If I have a thought, learning, recipe, experience, anything that could be useful to anyone else, I put it on the public file. Otherwise, it goes in the private. As simple as that. And thanks to CloudFlare's JS compression, the whole thing works great for me. https://ramirosalas.com https://ramirosalas.com
strenholme 5y ago
I have a personal website, once that has been online since 1997. The reason I have it is because I have written a lot of content over the years, and because having it on my own static HTML page website is because why should I write a bunch of content for free to benefit a social media website or commercial blog service? More sense to have it on my own website. Shameless plug: https://samiam.org/ https://samiam.org/
Lammy 5y ago
> Another matter, one of personal taste and experience, is that as a developer, I am used to working with text files, and editing a bunch of files in an IDE felt like a convenient option compared to having to edit each page in a web interface in the browser. I'm a big fan of "Jekyll Admin" as a way to get the best of both worlds: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-admin/ https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-admin/ https://jekyll.github.io/jekyll-admin/self-hosting https://jekyll.github.io/jekyll-admin/self-hosting
lukaesch 5y ago
Instead of building a website from scratch, you could use SoTrusty and create an order page with videos or photos of your products. 100% Google Lighthouse SEO, >90% Performance (depending on content) out of the box. Here an example of a store in Germany: https://menu.sotrusty.com/item-una-feinschneiderei https://menu.sotrusty.com/item-una-feinschneiderei What do you think about it? I appreciate any feedback. Thanks :)
cutups 5y ago
Sometimes I wish I had a website that was just a collection of everything I've shared or written on other platforms, just fully under my control and backed up for later. Is there anything that can spider content based on providing integration creds with various platforms?
bobbydreamer 5y ago
Content is king actually that keeps the site going. Even if you have a personal site and only users are 10 bots and 20 random users. First website I had made is in 2007 it was full flash site. It was pretty much decent and hosted it on bravehost. After hosting it, I was done, didn't do anything much. Ten years later 2017 I upgraded my site it was full handmade with css and it had lots of things planned but again after 5 posts didn't touch much. After that still my thought was making the site more attractive and I had ideas for posts/articles. I was collecting stuffs https://bobbydreamer.com/things-that-my-new-site-should-have https://bobbydreamer.com/things-that-my-new-site-should-have One epiphany, what's the point of making the things attractive, if I dont continually add something. So I stopped everything I was doing https://bobbydreamer.com/epiphany-moment https://bobbydreamer.com/epiphany-moment Looked into SSGs, picked Gatsby for speed they had some starter templates, picked the one from LekoArts started using it. I had read fantastic blog posts from certain people from HackerNews but they had only one or two posts with the depth they had in their posts, I wish they had written more. Looking at all of that consistency is the key. Here I have noted down the steps on how I did it and I follow it to add posts mostly once a month. https://bobbydreamer.com/how-i-made-this-site https://bobbydreamer.com/how-i-made-this-site What I use to make this site 1. Content in markdown(MDX) 2. Using firebase for hosting 3. GitHub as version control.

534 points by mkosmul 5y ago

I agree with most of these sentiments. I've often wished I started doing something like this 20 years ago, and have a website which has been around for that long. So I decided to do the next best thing: Make a website which COULD HAVE been around for 20+ years, and make it compatible with the 20+ years worth of browsers since 1995, around when I started using the Web and HTTP/1.1 became common (the latter allowing support of cheap shared web hosting using the Host: header)

rchaud 5y ago
I had a website I built using Dreamweaver in college 15 years ago. The hosting was provided by the school, everyone had a FTP server under their name that they could put files on. The site of course was removed after I graduated, but I still had some of the articles I put on in Word form. Many years later, when I learned HTML/CSS, I'd post those old articles on the new sites I created. I believe I still have some music reviews I wrote wayy back in 2004.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I think that what you do is really cool: https://origami.kosmulski.org/about https://origami.kosmulski.org/about I'm a big fan of "do what you love."

mkosmul 5y ago
Thank you

hnal943 5y ago

have you checked out 11ty? It's similar to Jekyll but doesn't have dependencies on Ruby.

mkosmul 5y ago
No, I didn't know it - thank you. It's probably too late to switch at this stage, but I'll have a look. It's always good to know some alternatives/replacements.
ochronus 5y ago
It depends on NodeJS instead.
willio58 5y ago
11ty is great and it supports Jekyll-like templating and others too.

rayrag 5y ago

Two tips: - don't justify text, it doesn't look good and it makes text harder to (https://designforhackers.com/blog/justify-text-html-css/ https://designforhackers.com/blog/justify-text-html-css/) - 'On this page' section is too long. And once I scroll down I don't see it anymore so I can't use it for navigation. Look at https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.0/getting-started/introduction/ https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.0/getting-started/introducti... or https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation https://tailwindcss.com/docs/installation to see how useful can it be.

mkosmul 5y ago
Thank you for the tips. As for justification, I actually compared my "before" and "after" layouts and found the one with justification better for my taste. The link you posted has some very interesting thoughts, though, and certainly justified text on a web page is a completely different level of typography than text justified e.g. in LaTeX.
- forgotpwd16 5y ago
  Maybe it was intentional but bullet points aren't justified although the rest of the text is. Also text looks pretty big for me.
forgotpwd16 5y ago
Ironically I find the first article easier to read when justified (side-by-side comparison at https://ibb.co/9tvZ75W https://ibb.co/9tvZ75W). When not justified the uneven lines get my attention and I'm losing my reading rhythm. As the article lacks a published date, I do not know whether this is result of technology having advanced since. Nevertheless there're spaces that look bad around the images but maybe a better web design could help with this. Also there's the usual lack of any surveys that articles on design tend to have.
- bruce343434 5y ago
  The very first support link it gives disproves the article: hyphenation IS widely supported. In my opinion the article reads as if the author collected evidence to support his preference. Now, it does seem as if text justification is a highly subjective matter.

kevincox 5y ago

> I also spent a little time on redirecting the addresses of [...] my old website to [...] the new one. Failing to do this would have cost me a lot in search engine rankings since all the incoming links collected over the years would be gone [...] I was disappointing that the main reason that they valued keeping past links alive was SEO. To me the innate benefit of not breaking links and bookmarks on your readers (or future readers) should be enough.

mkosmul 5y ago
This is a very good point - good you brought it up. I do care about not breaking links, though I did not mention that in the text. Actually, you can still reach my site by using the address it used even before the previous one, and there are still links on the web using that very old address, thanks to two levels of redirects.

papito 5y ago

I spent some up front time setting up Supervisor, Jekyll, and a light server listening to Github actions that, upon an update, just pulls the latest on commit and reruns the static publisher. I even have a staging branch/subdomain. The first point - easy to update - is critical. If there is any friction to the process, you will just never do it. Your personal time is inherently much more valuable than your work time. And if you are creating your new personal site, I highly recommend scrapping everything you know and doing it with Grid and Flex.

robbiemitchell 5y ago
Hosts like Netlify also do this magic. Pushing to Master on Github runs any Jekyll plugins you want and deploys the site, including things like image optimization and CDN if you want.

ignoramous 5y ago

In 2021? I'd prefer serverless and low-code. If I only need a blog (and not a website) I'd consider posting on substack.com, dev.to, or hashnode.com instead. > Easy to update: I usually post 1-2 pictures to social media each week, and I wanted adding a picture to my site to be as easy as posting it on any other platform... I could buy a domain and redirect it to my flickr, facebook, or instagram feed There exists no-code apps that post your social media feeds to a weblog. One of the better ones I know is milkshake.app https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20154181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20154181 > The best approach would be to have data separated from presentation as much as possible, i.e. for each model to just define a few fields such as: name, model type, image, etc., and use some kind of templates to present this data to the end user. Low-code builders like onuniverse.com, glideapps.com, draftbit.com (mobile apps), and pory.io come to mind, though none of them let you publish websites via another provider. > Longevity: since I would be putting in a lot of work, I wanted to be able to expand and maintain the site for at least 5-10 years without major overhaul. Sound like serverless services like netlify.com, pages.github.com, vercel.com, pages.dev fit the bill to deploy the site to?

vbezhenar 5y ago
I would try to use github.com to host sources of the website and cloudflare pages to publish the website. It's completely free and probably as reliable and fast as possible.
- hedora 5y ago
  Using cloudflare breaks tor.
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    Can’t you turn that off?
askonomm 5y ago
The person specifically mentions longevity and yet you mention a myriad of third-party tools to depend on.

rectang 5y ago

> Longevity: since I would be putting in a lot of work, I wanted to be able to expand and maintain the site for at least 5-10 years without major overhaul (but, technology being what it is, I was aware I would probably have to perform some maintenance work onhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173728ce https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173728ce every 3 years or so). With that criteria, I wonder about the choice of Jekyll, which is huge and complicated. I'd be looking for something with fewer moving parts. I suppose one nice thing is by that limiting yourself to static html output it becomes easier to switch from one generator to another.

mkosmul 5y ago
Yes - with all contents stored in nice Markdown-formatted files, switching to an alternative site generator should be relatively easy.
- temp8964 5y ago
  Should be, but all the customizations (themes, logics) will not transfer.
temp8964 5y ago
Exactly for longevity (5, 10, 15 years), I will not use any static site generator. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I have better confidence of longevity on Wordpress / Mediawiki than static site generators.
- mjthompson 5y ago
  A static site generator that works now will probably still work in 10 years, even if updates cease. And it will be safe to use. After all, it just churns out HTML that you put somewhere. The same can't be said of WordPress or MediaWiki. You will not be able to run these at all if they become unsupported and will have to migrate, or risk facing security issues. Sure, SSGs are not for everyone, but the potential for deprecation isn't a major issue, at least for a personal site.

primaryobjects 5y ago

I also went with a static site generator during my own blog upgrade and chose Hexo. My tech stack is: Hexo Markdown Node.js Heroku Here is my whole story! http://www.primaryobjects.com/2015/12/15/a-tale-of-migrating-to-a-static-web-site/ http://www.primaryobjects.com/2015/12/15/a-tale-of-migrating...

rikroots 5y ago
I discovered Hexo when I decided to build myself a micro-blogging site about my code learning experiences 3 years ago. I was impressed with the whole experience then - I was after a simple-yet-not-stupid static site generator and that's what Hexo gave me. I did have to write my own tooling to get the site to deploy to AWS S3 but I assume that they will have a plugin for that sort of scenario nowadays.

snowwrestler 5y ago

It’s a good example of how each person’s experience guides their sense of simplicity. This person felt like Wordpress was too complicated, despite it being a system you can use to set up a site with literally no coding at all (using Wordpress.com or one of the many hosting providers with one-click installs). You can live-swap themes to see which one you like, again with just some clicking. Meanwhile he is hand-editing .htaccess files to get the URL structure he wants and switching from JPG to WebP (a change with no real-world SEO value) to try to help SEO. This is not to condemn or criticize! It’s just that when people have experience with having their hands directly on software development, they may be more likely to prefer a web stack that mimics that feel. “Easier” for a coder is going to be different from “easier” for an artist with no coding experience. Look how many artists use Squarespace or Wix for example, which did not even make the list for this effort apparently.

mkosmul 5y ago
Very true. Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder.
hnedeotes 5y ago
I agree, but I also think that when developers talk about simplicity it's in terms of understanding the bits and moving parts that make the whole. Like creating a nextjs app, or a wordpress website, those things are all "simple" to execute - as in easy - you type a command/click somewhere and it's done, you've got the structure and all plumbing done. You can understand all the pieces after working with them for a while and they mostly cover everything you need for their use case (which in this case makes some things simple, creating a new page, or blog entry, uploading an image, etc). With Squarespace and such it's the same, it's simple, specially for someone who isn't a webdev - but what it's doing is not simple and when you need to stray from what it does and how it works (specially in visual builders) simple things become very complex or even not doable. They're probably still the best tools for a given range of websites/purposes, even if you know how to code, but definitively running transpilers, pre and post processors, chunking files, merging code, scoping blocks of html and css, stacks of middleware, etc, is the opposite of simple.
- 5y ago

bmitc 5y ago

I've been having decision paralysis about setting up my own personal website. I would personally like to avoid some bloated frameworks or tools like Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix, etc. I'm also not really sure I even want a blog. I'd like to have a collection of articles that aren't just written once and then moved on from but rather are updated and refined over time. I've looked at static website generators, but don't really feel they're that simple. So I've been looking to just do things from scratch. Maybe it would be nice to write articles in markdown and have a custom static website generator that takes these and publishes them. It could be a fun F# or Racket project. The idea of simple HTML and CSS being loaded for maximum speed and old school web with a little something for interactive graphs and other things is something that sits well for me. Although, I just took on a new Elixir job, and something with Liveview and Livebook for interactivity could be really cool. Anyone else struggle with this and end up coming up with a solution or finding one?

mkosmul 5y ago
This blog's author wrote his own minimalistic static site generator: https://prog21.dadgum.com/ https://prog21.dadgum.com/ But, I think, doing things from scratch can be risky: ready-made solutions have a learning curve, but they also do lots of useful things which you might need, and writing all of that from scratch is really lots of work. For me, it's always about find the right point on the spectrum between "write it myself to do exactly what I need" and "huge, bloated thing that claims to do everything anyone might ever need"
vbsteven 5y ago
I chose Jekyll as a static site generator because it was simple enough to understand what it does. Its build step is just taking a directory of markdown files and converting them to html pages using a template. It feels like the next logical step after writing all pages in html by hand.
jdthedisciple 5y ago
I am struggling with the exact same problem at the moment. I am currently contemplating using just http and php, whereby I just save my posts as textfiles along with maybe 1 image file in a folder ( say /posts/{id}/) and the php just takes all those and turns them into HTML using some type of template like the author mentioned. Then do some basic SEO to improve visibility. I'm no webdev myself and have no experience with building anything on the web but I think this could suffice.

______- 5y ago

I don't have a personal website, but I operate various online services like pastebins, image uploader sites, and other online tools that many people use. People would get more utility out of those than a personal blog, since I learned (a bit late) that I'm not especially good at writing and communicating my ideas very well. I can get across an idea, but it usually misses nuance and I find writing personal stuff very embarrassing later on down the road, when I start regretting ever hitting publish. Out of all the personal blogposts I have written, roughly three I am proud of, the rest just embarrass me.

minimaxir 5y ago

If you're building a personal website from scratch in 2021 (especially a blog), I strongly recommend Hugo (https://gohugo.io https://gohugo.io) over Jekyll. I had used Jekyll for a decade and very often hit random quirks that have been completely eliminated with modern Hugo. However, there's a bit of a migration process if you are moving from Jekyll to Hugo despite both being Markdown-based blogs. If you want a more advanced framework for a personal website, I recommend Wowchemy (https://wowchemy.com/ https://wowchemy.com/) on top of Hugo, which gives the tools needed out-of-the-box like lazy loading/SEO/object-oriented collections, albeit with a massive learning curve.

hnarn 5y ago
There are some cases where re-writes in Go or Rust are just so good that the "originals" become almost entirely obsolete. Hugo is one of those tools, ESbuild seems to be another, or ripgrep for Rust for example.
- nickjj 5y ago
  > There are some cases where re-writes in Go or Rust are just so good that the "originals" become almost entirely obsolete. Why's that? I use Jekyll here and even with over 500+ articles (posts + drafts) it takes around 2 seconds to get live reload feedback in Jekyll while writing. Jekyll also handles the entire asset pipeline complete with md5 tagging of assets without using Webpack or any build tools. It also lets you write plugins with a few lines of Ruby to add new template filters and other things. For example I wrote a custom Jekyll plugin that lets me write bullet lists like this after a specific type of header: - 0:45 -- Something - 1:45 -- Another thing - 1:03:31 -- And another thing And it automatically converts the timestamp numbers into clickable links that jump to that point in an audio player. AFAIK Hugo has no way to do anything like that, at least no where near as easy as Jekyll. With Hugo wouldn't I have to compile a custom build of Hugo for such a thing? But with Jekyll it was adding 1 file into a directory and writing 20 lines of "business logic code" to add a new filter. Now I just do {{ content | audioseek }} when I want clickable timestamps. I also wrote another plugin that automatically adds certain rel attributes to external links by adding {{ content | extlinks }}. Things like the above are why I continue using Jekyll because personally I haven't found another SSG that comes close to how easy it makes it to add custom behavior. I don't mind the 2 second live reload wait and I wouldn't switch away from Jekyll for a speed boost alone. At some point the speed is "good enough". Sure I would love a 100ms reload but I wouldn't give up everything else for that.

codebolt 5y ago

The main argument for static site for me was the simplicity and price of hosting. It's also CDN friendly which means a huge performance boost. Hosting a static site on Azure costs me 2-3$/mo which is well within the free credits I get from my work-sponsored MSDN subscription.

arp242 5y ago

I think the big number 1 that trumps all others when building a person website is: focus on writing content. This is by far the hardest part. All the other stuff: it's just tangential. Wordpress, Blogger, Jekyll, Hugo, Medium, hand-written HTML files: IMHO it doesn't really matter if you don't have any content. Just use whatever is easiest to get started with and gets out of your way when writing. For me, personally, it would be writing Markdown in Vim and converting that. For other people, it's something else. Later, when you actually have some content going you can start focusing on tooling, layout, and so forth. Converting things to another platform usually isn't too hard. But chances are, you will never actually get any content going. I've seen a lot of people create personal websites, write one or two things on it, and then basically don't do anything with it. I've built some websites for various friends/non-profits over the years, and about 90% of the time they never actually wrote any content. These days I ask people to write content first, and then I'll build the website for them. Most of the time I never hear about it again. That's okay, it's really hard to write content and a lot of people (myself included, before I had more experience with this sort of thing) tend to be way too optimistic about it and underestimate just how hard this can be. And people will read your website regardless if your content is good. Is Paul Graham's website the peak of web design? Not really. People still read it. Dan Luu's website? Pretty much the most basic HTML file you can get. Still widely read. That being said, if your goal is also to learn more if you're young or inexperienced: then sure, muck around with these tools all you want. I learned a lot from building my personal website over the years in all sorts of tools (geocities, hand-written HTML, shell scripts, PHP, Python, PHP again but this time with MongoDB, back to shell script, and finally settled Jekyll) and for much of this time I didn't have a lot of content. That was okay, because I learned a lot from the process.

dundercoder 5y ago
I agree. The problem is the tangential stuff _feels_ important and leads you to want to perfect it before even starting content.
an_opabinia 5y ago
Why write content no one reads? It's 2021. Build a cathedral of a website for a single tweet, it will say a lot more about you. Although I wish, obviously, we all read more.

__turbobrew__ 5y ago

It took me about an hour to set up an AWS static website backed by S3 and cached by cloudfront. I use Jekyll and simply sync the _site folder to s3 to update my website. Some nice things about this setup: 1.) AWS static sites don’t insert trackers 2.) There is zero maintenance 3.) Cloudfront + static website is very fast 4.) Setup can scale near infinitely (so can your bill) Downsides: 1.) You are locked into AWS. Although migrating to another provider to serve static files would be trivial. 2.) If your website took off in popularity the bill might be more than you are comfortable with.

cudgy 5y ago
Those are some major downsides …

majewsky 5y ago

I love how the first comment at the end of the page asks which CDN and which load balancer the site is using, as if he's filling entire racks with this simple static website. Absolutely hilarious.

kstrauser 5y ago
Turns out Nginx can serve a lot of static pages very quickly. The largest page on my blog is 70KB. On a VPC with a gigabit connection, I should be able to push about 1,400 requests per second. My blog is never going to be so popular that I need to support more throughput than that.
- LambdaComplex 5y ago
  I think oftentimes the benefit of a CDN is not (just) performance, but also cost--sure, nginx can serve your pages plenty fast enough, but how much is your hosting provider charging you for that network traffic? The answer is generally "more than a CDN would be" (once you've used up your free bandwidth for the month, of course)
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    True, but I think you’d have to have one hell of a popular blog before those lines crossed.

toto444 5y ago

Has anyone noted the use of Github for commenting at the bottom ? That is quite a nice way to have social features without being too 'social'.

m01 5y ago

I was glad to see the author start with the context & requirements, rather than with the tech stack.

BayesianDice 5y ago

I agree with comments saying that a key point is producing content. I'd spent a couple of years of considering starting a blog (with no commercial/monetisation, but somewhere to post thoughts on technology / games / books I find interesting) and trying out various platforms/solutions and producing very little. Then I finally got started with a simple Hugo/Github/Netlify setup, with the plan of adding more technology bells and whistles if readership or my inspiration to continue producing content justifies it. A question on which I'd be interested in views: how important or otherwise do people consider the ability to sign up for a mailing list / newsletter to be informed of new content? I dislike the in-your-face modal pop-ups etc. - but am wondering if readers, if they like existing articles on a site, would appreciate a low-key, unobtrusive option of signing up for an email notification.

Siira 5y ago
Give us RSS, and we’ll pull if we want to. Email pushes, which is user-hostile.
- BayesianDice 5y ago
  Thank you for the comment. The site already has RSS, and I'd agree there are good technical grounds for preferring it, but I get the impression that its use among users is declining, which is why I was considering other mechanisms. I find it an interesting point of view to consider a feature which alternatively allows users to opt-in to email notifications - but which doesn't disadvantage them at all if they don't - as "user-hostile". (But of course I've seen sites which want to coerce visitors to hand over an email address to be able to access the content they were expecting, and depending on context, I can see cases where that could be considered aggressive.)
- exolymph 5y ago
  Um, not if the user signed up for it? Believe it or not lots of people sign up for email lists — especially editorial ones but also commercial ones — on purpose. Not just normies either, I bet there are plenty of people on HN who've subscribed to a bunch of bloggers' lists. I certainly have.
5y ago

avilay 5y ago

Surprised not to see ghost in here. They have a paid managed version at https://ghost.org https://ghost.org and it is fairly easy to set up with any of the public cloud providers. I have set mine up with Digital Ocean (https://ghost.org/docs/install/digitalocean/ https://ghost.org/docs/install/digitalocean/).

swayvil 5y ago

For my site this is index.php <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <link rel="stylesheet" href="../style.css"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"> </head> <body> <div class="main"> <?php include "../Parsedown.php"; $pd=new Parsedown(); $mc=file_get_contents("../contentHeader.md"); echo $pd->text($mc); $mc=file_get_contents("contentMain.md"); echo $pd->text($mc); $mc=file_get_contents("../contentFooter.md"); echo $pd->text($mc); ?> </div> </body> </html> The rest is Parsedown.php, markdown content and some images. Arranged in a directory tree. An index and a contentMain.md in every directory. After trying several "simple" Content Management Systems, this is where I arrived. I wish I did it 10 years ago.

roachpepe 5y ago

Thanks for the article, it's a very readable journal, sharing experiences and writing up also the reasoning behind decisions contributes to future builders. Maybe someone already said it but I'll echo anyway - unless it's all about going outside the comfort zone to learn new tools, the person building should always first picture what needs to be built, then pick the right materials and tools for the project. Taking their own skills into account when using said tools of course. Preferably even think a little ahead about your content to come if the site is meant to last for years when picking the tech. Ask yourself some "whatifs". Like what if you want to later on make some trade for yourself and set up shop for your crafts or skillset, can it be done easily enough as well? TL;DR - Useful and well written article, there's never enough easy-read, non-commercial, experience-based journals about site building basics to help newcomers. Cheers!

austincheney 5y ago

If a personal website for a software developer should reflect current capabilities or employment trends then it should conform to this checklist: * Use React. Every paragraph, yes each one, should be a JSX component. If anybody asks you about this just respond with something unrelated about test automation. * A fancy logo front and center above the fold over a gradient. Catch that eye but leave the user hanging on what the site is actually about because pausing for dramatic effect is most important. * Mention somewhere that accessibility is important and stand behind that statement with great pride. In the next statement forget about accessibility completely like a bad case of mania and add a bunch of unnecessary JavaScript and specifically describe how much you hate JavaScript. * Something about Agile. This should compromise the bulk of all human consumable content. It doesn’t have to any make sense and can be completely out of order. * Actually push all content to the end and just worry about which tools to use then use Twitter feeds for all content. Sarcasm aside actual content comprised of words makes for a good litmus test to discriminate interested users from people who find such things a chore. It’s the difference between employment recruiters and internal developers filtering those potential candidates.

anoncake 5y ago
> It doesn’t have to any make sense and can be completely out of order. No, the order of paragraphs is important. A/B testing is necessary to find out the best one.
cyberdelica 5y ago
You need to shovel in "unit testing" somehow.

darekkay 5y ago

I've migrated [1] my blog to Eleventy this year and it is a pleasure to work with. I especially like the data model and the flexibility. [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/hexo-to-eleventy/ https://darekkay.com/blog/hexo-to-eleventy/

32gbsd 5y ago

That is a long article only to end up with a website that looks like every other website. Could as well be wordpress or a facebook page.

lernerzhang 5y ago

Why not just Medium or Quora?

FourthProtocol 5y ago
Because they're too restrictive. They're also not something you have too much control over. My site started out with only my resume. I then added photos because why should Facebook benefit? Then came some work stuff I wanted to publish. And then I got into radio control and I posted up builds. In between all of that I play around with some JS ideas/apps/databases. Maybe Medium and Quora are enough for some, but for some they're just a sandpit when what you really want is a warehouse with a bandsaw, drill press, 3D printer and coffee machine.

ExcavateGrandMa 5y ago

"Creating a website would certainly cost me a lot of work" first sentence brings you in a closed room with a table in middle and a plat of speculo cakes which are very yummy...

bothra90 5y ago

I really wish more design docs / project reports looked like this article - talking about the whys, goals / non-goals, options considered, prototypes built, challenges, and solutions, learnings and next steps. Kudos!

towardsclarity 5y ago

Downside of building a website in 2021: tons of options to choose from, lots of potential technical complexity. Upside: there are many "one click" options (Substack, Webflow, etc) that make it dead simple.

Natales 5y ago

I started writing blog-like text entries in my .plan file in the mid 80s, so others could use finger in UNIX and read what I was thinking. I later learnt HTML just so I could keep writing my thoughts. I lost content, I got spam, I had to learn to defend myself when the Internet became aggressive. It wasn't like that early on. We believed it was for the betterment of humankind. I know, how naive. I went through the "Wordpress phase", the static phase (Pelican, then Hugo) but I ultimately decided to define what I wanted to share, and I realized few people really cared about long writings, but rather, the nitty gritty. So I chose to use the Zettlekasten model where I focus on specifics, narrow, single-topic. I chose TiddlyWiki (the Drift distribution specifically), and I have two files, one public, one private. As simple as that. My default is public. If I have a thought, learning, recipe, experience, anything that could be useful to anyone else, I put it on the public file. Otherwise, it goes in the private. As simple as that. And thanks to CloudFlare's JS compression, the whole thing works great for me. https://ramirosalas.com https://ramirosalas.com

strenholme 5y ago

I have a personal website, once that has been online since 1997. The reason I have it is because I have written a lot of content over the years, and because having it on my own static HTML page website is because why should I write a bunch of content for free to benefit a social media website or commercial blog service? More sense to have it on my own website. Shameless plug: https://samiam.org/ https://samiam.org/

Lammy 5y ago

> Another matter, one of personal taste and experience, is that as a developer, I am used to working with text files, and editing a bunch of files in an IDE felt like a convenient option compared to having to edit each page in a web interface in the browser. I'm a big fan of "Jekyll Admin" as a way to get the best of both worlds: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-admin/ https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-admin/ https://jekyll.github.io/jekyll-admin/self-hosting https://jekyll.github.io/jekyll-admin/self-hosting

lukaesch 5y ago

Instead of building a website from scratch, you could use SoTrusty and create an order page with videos or photos of your products. 100% Google Lighthouse SEO, >90% Performance (depending on content) out of the box. Here an example of a store in Germany: https://menu.sotrusty.com/item-una-feinschneiderei https://menu.sotrusty.com/item-una-feinschneiderei What do you think about it? I appreciate any feedback. Thanks :)

cutups 5y ago

Sometimes I wish I had a website that was just a collection of everything I've shared or written on other platforms, just fully under my control and backed up for later. Is there anything that can spider content based on providing integration creds with various platforms?

bobbydreamer 5y ago

Content is king actually that keeps the site going. Even if you have a personal site and only users are 10 bots and 20 random users. First website I had made is in 2007 it was full flash site. It was pretty much decent and hosted it on bravehost. After hosting it, I was done, didn't do anything much. Ten years later 2017 I upgraded my site it was full handmade with css and it had lots of things planned but again after 5 posts didn't touch much. After that still my thought was making the site more attractive and I had ideas for posts/articles. I was collecting stuffs https://bobbydreamer.com/things-that-my-new-site-should-have https://bobbydreamer.com/things-that-my-new-site-should-have One epiphany, what's the point of making the things attractive, if I dont continually add something. So I stopped everything I was doing https://bobbydreamer.com/epiphany-moment https://bobbydreamer.com/epiphany-moment Looked into SSGs, picked Gatsby for speed they had some starter templates, picked the one from LekoArts started using it. I had read fantastic blog posts from certain people from HackerNews but they had only one or two posts with the depth they had in their posts, I wish they had written more. Looking at all of that consistency is the key. Here I have noted down the steps on how I did it and I follow it to add posts mostly once a month. https://bobbydreamer.com/how-i-made-this-site https://bobbydreamer.com/how-i-made-this-site What I use to make this site 1. Content in markdown(MDX) 2. Using firebase for hosting 3. GitHub as version control.