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I run a local aggregator website for things to eat, drink, and do in Los Angeles. I’m not a designer, so I opted for the Craigslist approach, but a little more

I run a local aggregator website for things to eat, drink, and do in Los Angeles. I’m not a designer, so I opted for the Craigslist approach, but a little more polished. I went super minimal with it and it seems people are responding well to the design. I didn’t use a style framework under the philosophy that everything on the web looks the same. I wanted the website to kinda shock people with how, uhh, handmade it looked. Like there was a real person behind it because there is. I guess this is all to say you don’t always have to worry about design, UX, SEO, etc. Sometimes you want companies to look polished and professional, but sometimes you just want them to solve the problem for you as fast and efficient as possible. Tangentially - the project got me excited about building “quiet” websites - mostly text based, no database, no comment section with people to moderate. Just unique information in a simple, accessible format. I don’t want people to be checking my website every day looking for emotionally charged SEO packed news to react to. I want people to check out my site and then go into the real world and have fun with the information they found.

canyon289 4y ago
Can you share the website? This sounds very interesting to me as someone from LA, especially as most other sites are ad filled and annoying
- polalavik 4y ago
  sure! its veryla.io - would love to hear your feedback
  - thestepafter 4y ago
    Very well done! This was a breath of fresh air compared to most sites these days. How often do the links change and how much time do you typically spend each week curating?
    - polalavik 4y ago
      Thanks! I typically do a complete refresh on Sunday night / Monday morning and will pepper in a couple links throughout the week (not always though). I have a bunch of stuff I’ve saved through the years so that helps, but sometimes curating can take 4-8 hours a week.
      - mwint 4y ago
        What does that curating process look like?
  - metadat 4y ago
    Clickable: https://veryla.io https://veryla.io Nice design, I find it refreshing :)
  - groffee 4y ago
    Love the link about hidden oil wells, had no idea!
  - Tade0 4y ago
    The fact that it loads essentially immediately is a major selling point.
    - _tom_ 4y ago
      I ran a quick test, averaged 268 milliseconds. Yep, that's "essentially immediately. We forget how fast the web can be, because of all the bloated sites out there.
    - genewitch 4y ago
      to go with sibling, i ran a few tests, and 73% of the site is jscript, which contributes to half the load time. The tracker uses 40% of the load time. Remember when sites used to serve requests based on the browser identifier rather than trying to contemporaneously display and format text with jscript? This site is "fast" - it fully loads in 1 second, sure. one of my own purely nodejs + jscript site also finishes rendering content in 750ms, with 480ms of that spent decrypting into the drag-resize container. Meanwhile, Dan Luu's site completes rendering an entire blog post in 300ms, first byte to fully rendered. this doesn't mean anything, really - i just expected it to waterfall differently based on "how fast it felt".
      - Tade0 4y ago
        > Remember when sites used to serve requests based on the browser identifier rather than trying to contemporaneously display and format text with jscript? I remember when my window to the world was a 56k modem, which took its sweet time to load the page I wanted.
        genewitch 4y ago
        i've had to use 56k in the last ten years for a primary connection. I used pfsense to cache and compress as much as possible, but more interestingly to me, i use 3K with PACTOR radio modems way more often. A "you have no new mail" handshake and chatter takes minutes[1]. This all ignores that spoken word over a mediocre connection (anything except actual copper landlines, in my - get off my lawn - opinion) is way lower bandwidth than even early modems in the 300-2400 baud range. Realistically, my favorite method of communication is to actually have a spoken word conversation with people, in person. This is untenable for my friends that have moved away from me, and me from other friends. That in mind, the matrix people have worked on and have published extensions to the matrix ecosystem that allow sub-kilobyte messages to pass on the network, fully encrypted and fully fledged messages. They are targeting sub 4000 baud connections (in general, i think their actual goal is much slower transmission than that). I don't have the time or inclination to try and run a matrix "node" on ham bands, but i do know it is technically possible. And that's almost good enough for me. For your edification though, the last time i used only a 56k connection was back in the very late 90s, and i spent a lot of time on IRC rather than "the world wide web" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA6JRB560eM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA6JRB560eM A youtube video shot handheld of a radio and a modem checking email wireless-like. The modem, i've heard, is around $800. I got it for free to participate in emergency communications and teach other people how to use it.
  - wdr1 4y ago
    Do you have an RSS feed?
    - polalavik 4y ago
      just made one! one for an alert when the homepage of links is updated [1] and one for when the blog page is updated [2] [1] veryla.io/feed [2] veryla.io/stories/feed
  - robocat 4y ago
    I didn’t look into why, but a long press on a link should open a menu on an iDevice (e.g. to be open a menu in the background). [About] works correctly. [Dingbat Apartments] does’t work. Your “veryLA” heading could perhaps do with a trigger warning for fontheads: the kerning looks erratic even to mine engineer type eyes;
    - polalavik 4y ago
      thanks for the heads up. fixed that :)
    - perardi 4y ago
      As I said upthread, love this design, but I sure did see that, and sure did get mildly triggered. It would be more cohesive to have it in a monospace font to match the rest of the website. And probably not on an arc, as that's going to be relatively difficult to manually kern using CSS transforms. Maybe a little bit of a perspective distort instead, give it an almost isometric style.
  - adventured 4y ago
    I like what you've done, nice job. Without making the page too cluttered, you've got room to expand the design in terms of width and I think the entries could benefit from a timestamp of some manner (Thursday 5/12). Basically let people know that it's fresh, beyond the slogan at the top. Then snapshot the page weekly (pick a date to do an end of week snapshot), and provide archives for browsing / searching. That could either be all historical weeks, or merely recent (a month or three deep).
  - amelius 4y ago
    Real estate -- perhaps show also a bunch of average houses sold?
  - john-tells-all 4y ago
    amazing, thanks! Having a website load so fast is really refreshing. When you get a minute, would you put an RSS feed for your blog? I want to read your articles.
    - polalavik 4y ago
      thanks for the feedback - put some endpoints for rss - one for an alert when the homepage of links is updated [1] and one for when the blog page is updated [2] [1] veryla.io/feed [2] veryla.io/stories/feed
perardi 4y ago
I don't know how consciously you did so, but this high contrast, all-caps monospaced typeface aesthetic ends up being fairly similar to a lot of design trends I see in the EDM shows and events I go to. Which, purposeful or not…good job. This kinda Brutalist kinda punk vibe ends up feeling totally appropriate for a very local-focused website. My immediate thought was “hey it’s listings for upcoming shows at Smartbar”.
soared 4y ago
I share the same idea! I pretty much always use this template for my blogs because its obviously not wordpress/etc, just a blog with the content you want and nothing else. Content writing is the same thing, I just toss a word doc in a folder and its now a blog post. No nonsense, no thoughts to ux/etc. https://preview-of-blog-on-david.blot.im/ https://preview-of-blog-on-david.blot.im/
- nicbou 4y ago
  It's very nice on mobile. Just... perfectly readable text on a page. That's better than half of websites out there. I think the UX is fantastic.
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  I really like it! Just a heads up, on my iPhone, the image below this text appears to be making the page horizontally scrollable by accident: > While I was in the mood for XML I added a file so Google can index your posts easily. Here is while I was in the mood for XML I added to each blog and file so Google can index your posts easily.
_tom_ 4y ago
Would you care to talk about how you build it? I assume static, but do you use something like Hugo?
- polalavik 4y ago
  I might get laughed at for this (because it's extreme overkill), but I use Vue. I'm not a web developer at all by day. One time I dabbled in some react and some vue and I wish I had chosen react for this tbh. However, I had previously built something in Vue that sort of looked like this so I ran with that template and now there is no looking back. While a huge framework is overkill, it will let me expand in the future if I want to do that. It will also allow me to build more dynamic minimal things - for example I'd love to have a web version of [1] for our local sports teams, but I'm still trying to figure out how to get free sports data. [1] https://github.com/paaatrick/playball https://github.com/paaatrick/playball
oliv__ 4y ago
Looks really cool. Wish you had one in NYC
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
r3856283 4y ago
> I went super minimal with it > sometimes you just want them to solve the problem for you as fast and efficient as possible. Your site displays a blank page without running javascript. You are a long way off from efficient or super minimal. For all the hand wringing about google amp, one good thing they did was try to require that there be some main content which displays without any javascript.
- OJFord 4y ago
  > For all the hand wringing about google amp, one good thing they did was try to require that there be some main content which displays without any javascript. That's absolutely not my experience? It needs googleusercontent.com scripts or something? I get blank pages from amp stuff, and 'de-amp' it for it to load.
- Kaze404 4y ago
  > Your site displays a blank page without running javascript. You are a long way off from efficient or super minimal. This seems like a non sequitur to me. What does javascript have to do with efficiency or minimalism?
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    Not running JS is both more efficient and more minimal than running JS, and so like the parent is saying, doing all that just to display a blank page without JS is kind of ironic.
    - Kaze404 4y ago
      Not running CSS and HTML is even more efficient. How can you call your website efficient if it isn’t just plain text served over TCP?
      - cercatrova 4y ago
        Yes, plain text would be even better. It's not a gotcha if I agree with your sarcastic comment unironically.
godmode2019 4y ago
I own a four letter domain called near.com.<country_code> "Near me" is a popular search I has this same idea for my county. I couldn't think of a decent revenue model except promoting listings which requires a sales force, or ads which is just tacky IMO. I was also thinking about selling leads, ie someone wants a new pool installed
uneekname 4y ago
Yo, I love your site. Put it on the list of upcoming additions to my linkroll. > the project got my excited about building “quiet” websites I could not agree more. Complex backends have their place in this world, but I believe that most sites should start static, and build in dynamic elements slowly and thoughtfully.
culi 4y ago
you should publish it to gossips web https://gossipsweb.net/ https://gossipsweb.net/

canyon289 4y ago

Can you share the website? This sounds very interesting to me as someone from LA, especially as most other sites are ad filled and annoying

polalavik 4y ago
sure! its veryla.io - would love to hear your feedback
- thestepafter 4y ago
  Very well done! This was a breath of fresh air compared to most sites these days. How often do the links change and how much time do you typically spend each week curating?
  - polalavik 4y ago
    Thanks! I typically do a complete refresh on Sunday night / Monday morning and will pepper in a couple links throughout the week (not always though). I have a bunch of stuff I’ve saved through the years so that helps, but sometimes curating can take 4-8 hours a week.
    - mwint 4y ago
      What does that curating process look like?
- metadat 4y ago
  Clickable: https://veryla.io https://veryla.io Nice design, I find it refreshing :)
- groffee 4y ago
  Love the link about hidden oil wells, had no idea!
- Tade0 4y ago
  The fact that it loads essentially immediately is a major selling point.
  - _tom_ 4y ago
    I ran a quick test, averaged 268 milliseconds. Yep, that's "essentially immediately. We forget how fast the web can be, because of all the bloated sites out there.
  - genewitch 4y ago
    to go with sibling, i ran a few tests, and 73% of the site is jscript, which contributes to half the load time. The tracker uses 40% of the load time. Remember when sites used to serve requests based on the browser identifier rather than trying to contemporaneously display and format text with jscript? This site is "fast" - it fully loads in 1 second, sure. one of my own purely nodejs + jscript site also finishes rendering content in 750ms, with 480ms of that spent decrypting into the drag-resize container. Meanwhile, Dan Luu's site completes rendering an entire blog post in 300ms, first byte to fully rendered. this doesn't mean anything, really - i just expected it to waterfall differently based on "how fast it felt".
    - Tade0 4y ago
      > Remember when sites used to serve requests based on the browser identifier rather than trying to contemporaneously display and format text with jscript? I remember when my window to the world was a 56k modem, which took its sweet time to load the page I wanted.
      - genewitch 4y ago
        i've had to use 56k in the last ten years for a primary connection. I used pfsense to cache and compress as much as possible, but more interestingly to me, i use 3K with PACTOR radio modems way more often. A "you have no new mail" handshake and chatter takes minutes[1]. This all ignores that spoken word over a mediocre connection (anything except actual copper landlines, in my - get off my lawn - opinion) is way lower bandwidth than even early modems in the 300-2400 baud range. Realistically, my favorite method of communication is to actually have a spoken word conversation with people, in person. This is untenable for my friends that have moved away from me, and me from other friends. That in mind, the matrix people have worked on and have published extensions to the matrix ecosystem that allow sub-kilobyte messages to pass on the network, fully encrypted and fully fledged messages. They are targeting sub 4000 baud connections (in general, i think their actual goal is much slower transmission than that). I don't have the time or inclination to try and run a matrix "node" on ham bands, but i do know it is technically possible. And that's almost good enough for me. For your edification though, the last time i used only a 56k connection was back in the very late 90s, and i spent a lot of time on IRC rather than "the world wide web" [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA6JRB560eM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA6JRB560eM A youtube video shot handheld of a radio and a modem checking email wireless-like. The modem, i've heard, is around $800. I got it for free to participate in emergency communications and teach other people how to use it.
- wdr1 4y ago
  Do you have an RSS feed?
  - polalavik 4y ago
    just made one! one for an alert when the homepage of links is updated [1] and one for when the blog page is updated [2] [1] veryla.io/feed [2] veryla.io/stories/feed
- robocat 4y ago
  I didn’t look into why, but a long press on a link should open a menu on an iDevice (e.g. to be open a menu in the background). [About] works correctly. [Dingbat Apartments] does’t work. Your “veryLA” heading could perhaps do with a trigger warning for fontheads: the kerning looks erratic even to mine engineer type eyes;
  - polalavik 4y ago
    thanks for the heads up. fixed that :)
  - perardi 4y ago
    As I said upthread, love this design, but I sure did see that, and sure did get mildly triggered. It would be more cohesive to have it in a monospace font to match the rest of the website. And probably not on an arc, as that's going to be relatively difficult to manually kern using CSS transforms. Maybe a little bit of a perspective distort instead, give it an almost isometric style.
- adventured 4y ago
  I like what you've done, nice job. Without making the page too cluttered, you've got room to expand the design in terms of width and I think the entries could benefit from a timestamp of some manner (Thursday 5/12). Basically let people know that it's fresh, beyond the slogan at the top. Then snapshot the page weekly (pick a date to do an end of week snapshot), and provide archives for browsing / searching. That could either be all historical weeks, or merely recent (a month or three deep).
- amelius 4y ago
  Real estate -- perhaps show also a bunch of average houses sold?
- john-tells-all 4y ago
  amazing, thanks! Having a website load so fast is really refreshing. When you get a minute, would you put an RSS feed for your blog? I want to read your articles.
  - polalavik 4y ago
    thanks for the feedback - put some endpoints for rss - one for an alert when the homepage of links is updated [1] and one for when the blog page is updated [2] [1] veryla.io/feed [2] veryla.io/stories/feed

perardi 4y ago

I don't know how consciously you did so, but this high contrast, all-caps monospaced typeface aesthetic ends up being fairly similar to a lot of design trends I see in the EDM shows and events I go to. Which, purposeful or not…good job. This kinda Brutalist kinda punk vibe ends up feeling totally appropriate for a very local-focused website. My immediate thought was “hey it’s listings for upcoming shows at Smartbar”.

soared 4y ago

I share the same idea! I pretty much always use this template for my blogs because its obviously not wordpress/etc, just a blog with the content you want and nothing else. Content writing is the same thing, I just toss a word doc in a folder and its now a blog post. No nonsense, no thoughts to ux/etc. https://preview-of-blog-on-david.blot.im/ https://preview-of-blog-on-david.blot.im/

nicbou 4y ago
It's very nice on mobile. Just... perfectly readable text on a page. That's better than half of websites out there. I think the UX is fantastic.
jimkleiber 4y ago
I really like it! Just a heads up, on my iPhone, the image below this text appears to be making the page horizontally scrollable by accident: > While I was in the mood for XML I added a file so Google can index your posts easily. Here is while I was in the mood for XML I added to each blog and file so Google can index your posts easily.

_tom_ 4y ago

Would you care to talk about how you build it? I assume static, but do you use something like Hugo?

polalavik 4y ago
I might get laughed at for this (because it's extreme overkill), but I use Vue. I'm not a web developer at all by day. One time I dabbled in some react and some vue and I wish I had chosen react for this tbh. However, I had previously built something in Vue that sort of looked like this so I ran with that template and now there is no looking back. While a huge framework is overkill, it will let me expand in the future if I want to do that. It will also allow me to build more dynamic minimal things - for example I'd love to have a web version of [1] for our local sports teams, but I'm still trying to figure out how to get free sports data. [1] https://github.com/paaatrick/playball https://github.com/paaatrick/playball

oliv__ 4y ago

Looks really cool. Wish you had one in NYC

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

r3856283 4y ago

> I went super minimal with it > sometimes you just want them to solve the problem for you as fast and efficient as possible. Your site displays a blank page without running javascript. You are a long way off from efficient or super minimal. For all the hand wringing about google amp, one good thing they did was try to require that there be some main content which displays without any javascript.

OJFord 4y ago
> For all the hand wringing about google amp, one good thing they did was try to require that there be some main content which displays without any javascript. That's absolutely not my experience? It needs googleusercontent.com scripts or something? I get blank pages from amp stuff, and 'de-amp' it for it to load.
Kaze404 4y ago
> Your site displays a blank page without running javascript. You are a long way off from efficient or super minimal. This seems like a non sequitur to me. What does javascript have to do with efficiency or minimalism?
- cercatrova 4y ago
  Not running JS is both more efficient and more minimal than running JS, and so like the parent is saying, doing all that just to display a blank page without JS is kind of ironic.
  - Kaze404 4y ago
    Not running CSS and HTML is even more efficient. How can you call your website efficient if it isn’t just plain text served over TCP?
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      Yes, plain text would be even better. It's not a gotcha if I agree with your sarcastic comment unironically.

godmode2019 4y ago

I own a four letter domain called near.com.<country_code> "Near me" is a popular search I has this same idea for my county. I couldn't think of a decent revenue model except promoting listings which requires a sales force, or ads which is just tacky IMO. I was also thinking about selling leads, ie someone wants a new pool installed

uneekname 4y ago

Yo, I love your site. Put it on the list of upcoming additions to my linkroll. > the project got my excited about building “quiet” websites I could not agree more. Complex backends have their place in this world, but I believe that most sites should start static, and build in dynamic elements slowly and thoughtfully.

culi 4y ago

you should publish it to gossips web https://gossipsweb.net/ https://gossipsweb.net/