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Show HN: I built a minimal website for Los Angeles
I built https://veryla.io https://veryla.io - a minimal website for Los Angeles.
After growing tired of the chaotic, fast paced, attention-economy focused state of the web, I decided to build something simple and quiet. A site with no "real" database (just a json file I update by hand), no email signups, no ads, no pop ups, no data collection (besides google analytics), and no comment section filled with highly polarized politics. A site updated only 1-2 times per week.
It's just unique information in a simple and accessible format. The goal is for people to not check veryLA every day. I don't want people hitting refresh for emotionally charged SEO packed news to react to. My goal is for people to check out veryLA 1-2 per week and then go into the real world and have fun with the information they found.
Hope you enjoy if you live in Los Angeles or are planning to visit!
- embik 4y ago> no data collection (besides google analytics) No offense but this made me chuckle. „No data collection except a hook for the largest data collection machine on earth“
- sshine 4y agoHaha, yes, also made me laugh. If you want to collect data, there are privacy-friendly alternatives.
- louwhopley 4y agoAgreed. I really like CloudFlare’s built-in serverside analytics.
- jtheory 4y agoFathom takes privacy pretty seriously - they're still somewhat early stage in terms of functionality, but a great place to start.
- schleck8 4y agoThere is a ton of projects like this, all open source and free to selfhost: Plausible, Matomo, Offen, Posthog, Goatcounter, Umami. Or the built in analytics of the static site host like vercel/cloudflare
- vkoskiv 4y agogoaccess is also quite nice. It just reads the web server log for nginx or Apache and gives you a nice dashboard from that.
- baobabKoodaa 4y agoI can recommend Plausible.
- tipiirai 4y agoOne interesting option to look for is https://volument.com https://volument.com — which focuses on insights
- numlock86 4y agoWhat's does Google Analytics even bring to the table for projects like this?
- atoav 4y agoEverybody uses it, so there must be a reason it is needed /s
- dividedbyzero 4y agoI've asked that question quite a few times as well, and for most of the people I've had this conversation with, GA simply IS how you get metrics and insights, whether you're interested in anything advanced or just the number of pageviews, GA is how you get that in the same way as a hammer is how you get that nail into the wall. Plus it's well-known and relatively easy to troubleshoot (since there is a youtube video for pretty much any edge case), all the tech people know GA so chances are you won't have to troubleshoot much. There's also the ecosystem of tools and third-party products that tie into GA or GA BigQuery exports, that's also very important for some people as you can build some pretty impressive yet scary rube goldberg machinery out of GA and a bunch of these.
- toto444 4y agoYour comment sounds like an ad. I think what OP meant is 'why would one want to collect user data on a page that is a collection of 10 links?'. Just add a pageview counter if you really want some numbers.
- pc86 4y agoAnd for most people, "add GA" is how you add a pageview counter.
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- titaniumtown 4y ago(This comment was sponsored by Google)
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- t312227 4y ago* "no data collection", but google-analytics facepalm * based on vue.js -> page does not work w/o javascript ... hmmm this is not my understanding of "a minimal website" brv
- ArtWomb 4y ago>>> this is not my understanding of "a minimal website" Agreed. I recommend hack.css instead ;) https://github.com/egoist/hack/wiki/Showcase https://github.com/egoist/hack/wiki/Showcase
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- throwaway378037 4y agoHey, this looks really cool. Nice work
- sodimel 4y agoNice project! You should add it to the 1m.club & 512KB.club lists of small websites! https://1mb.club/ https://1mb.club/ https://512kb.club/ https://512kb.club/
- calltrak 4y ago
- spamboy 4y agoThis is awesome. How are you planning to update this? Any plans to allow user submissions/UGC?
- polalavik 4y agoIt updates weekly :). I accidentally took a line out at the top that said "updated weekly".
- alephnan 4y agoIs there a reason a Markdown file, Notion generated page or Google Docs/Sheets would not have sufficed?
- Doctor_Fegg 4y ago"minimal website" and the behemoth SPA that is "Google Docs/Sheets" are not exactly the same.
- mmmeff 4y agoThe emoji take away from the design of the page. They're visual noise/clutter.
- LandR 4y agoIf you don't have JS enabled it just displays a blank page.
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- kelseyfrog 4y agoFurthermore, once JS is enabled, I'm left wondering, "Why is JS needed at all?" Is there something happening on the page that requires JS that I'm simply unaware of? /gen It sincerely appears that HTML+CSS alone could support everything on the page.
- polalavik 4y agoIt probably would. I'm not a webdev by day, but personally I find including javascript makes it much more simple for me than updating a bunch of <a> tags. All I have to do is build out the json file and it just populates all the info. In the end, the amount of work is probably equivalent (updating html vs json), but html feels a little messier to me and less flexible if I have more dynamic needs in the future. But I appreciate the feedback, I'll definitely think it over.
- webscout 4y ago
- sussmannbaka 4y agoa lot of complex projects aren’t all that useful or exciting. this looks useful (it also looks pretty good).
- pc86 4y agoHonestly it doesn't seem particularly useful. Links to two restaurants. A couple bars. LA is huge, these could be hours away from each other, and if you live in the middle? Oh well. I'm not saying it has to be comprehensive but listing 2 restaurants and 2 bars in a metro area of 19 million people is kind of silly.
- mkw2000 4y agoNot sure if you live here but I have for about 10 years and I highly appreciate this. I looked through the archives and the few things I was familiar with are the type of things that I only really hear about through word of mouth from very cool people, so I appreciate having that type of stuff curated in one place
- egfx 4y agoThis site feels highly curated to me and that is a thousand times more thoughtful than most cookie cutter blogs out there. I’m from Los Angeles and I think the idea is to present a little slice of it a time in a thematic way.
- polalavik 4y agoThanks! thats exactly the goal. Find unique things and share them slowly.
- polalavik 4y agoIt updates weekly :) I forgot to include that info.
- yellow_lead 4y agoAll uppercase is kinda unreadable to me, cool idea though.
- calltrak 4y ago
- dmos62 4y agoThis is awesome, congrats! I'd love for something like this to exist for where I live.
- hoofhearted 4y agoIsn’t the JSON file essentially a database at that point?
- fiveSpeedManual 4y agoYes, you're right. He could have used getpantry.cloud (or similar)
- LarryMade2 4y agoI like it, I think it could use a night mode.
- Dave3of5 4y agoYou've included all of fontawesome 4.7 (font and css) for a single icon. Also there is a lot of JS on what could be a static page with some css. The vertical layout of the categories is weird it would be better if they were at the top like HN. The categories are weird like "Stores/TODO" and "Rent". There is hardly any content here literally 16 links.
- polalavik 4y agoThanks for the feedback I’ll look into fixing some of that! As for “hardly any content” - it updates weekly and I forgot to include that info. It’s not meant to be an endless sea of content. It takes time to find more unique stuff than the average run-of-the-mill city website, which typically find the newest most expensive restaurants and writes 1000 useless words about it.
- Dave3of5 4y agoI see you have an archived list of everything. Surely it would be better to group by week and let user scroll through previous weeks? Also do things like restaurants and stores update weekly in LA ?
- polalavik 4y agoYes, every category is completely refreshed on Sunday sometimes links are "peppered" in throughout the week as I find events and stuff happening in LA. Thanks for the feedback on the archive.
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- mkw2000 4y agoJust speaking on the content here , this is awesome and something I'll check regularly.
- polalavik 4y agothanks! there is a rss feed for the home page https://veryla.io/feed https://veryla.io/feed and one for the blog https://veryla.io/stories/feed https://veryla.io/stories/feed if you use rss to keep track of stuff
- akhmatova 4y ago~$3000/month for a view of picket fence and ... a 10' wide strip of grass next to your driveway. You know I love you, LA, but there were reasons we just couldn't make it work.
- conschy 4y agoYou can also check your site with Web Sustainability tools like: https://globemallow.io/ https://globemallow.io/ or https://ecograder.com// https://ecograder.com//
- DHPersonal 4y agoJust about everything on the home page being in all caps makes for a difficult reading experience.