6 ms·

My website is ugly because I made it

562 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

donatj 1y ago
Hah, yes! Whereas most of my developer friends have long ago moved to off-the-shelf Hugo or Jekyll templates for their personal sites, I stubbornly maintain my blog with entirely bespoke css and a backend only a parent could love. For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? It's like maintaining a classic car. You can buy a reliable decent looking car, but that's not fun. If your goal is just to get somewhere, sure, but my goal is to have fun. I work on websites all day where I get less and less say in the design and functionality. Why would I not want total control over my own?
- yoz-y 1y ago
  My argument to moving to a SSR is that I just spent all the time tweaking the backend. Now I can spend more time writing and tweaking just the theme.
  - donatj 1y ago
    But did you enjoy tweaking the backend?
    - yoz-y 1y ago
      I did yes. But I realized also that I could enjoy tinkering with something more generally useful and permanent instead.
- ebiester 1y ago
  I think the difference is that I spent so much time tweaking the website that I wasn't writing. Moving back to Jekyll was entirely a move because I wanted to spend more of that time writing. At the same time, I know that it limits me in other ways (for example, I'd love to have a way to post to my blog in one section and federate to bluesky and mastodon, and I know it's possible, but I would have to build it. So I'll eventually move from Jekyll.)
  - parpfish 1y ago
    An actual LLM use case! A model that generates AI slop blog posts so you don’t need to write content and can just focus on the fun parts of making the website
    - indigodaddy 1y ago
      I’d imagine almost any old model could do this?
    - delfinom 1y ago
      Why even waste money on an LLM. Just lorum ipsum the content since nobody is going to read it anyway
      - parpfish 1y ago
        but a model could write blog posts that describe changes to the website as a blog-style changelog (e.g., 'today i spent an hour playing with CSS to change padding' or 'i refactored the backend to do more async calls') a self-documenting blog about the blog.
    - topaz0 1y ago
      \lipsum has been perfectly good at that for decades
- oxalorg 1y ago
  Exactly this. My entire website is handcrafted, and not once but over the last decade almost ~10 times. It's fun and I almost end up revamping something every year. Everything handcrafted: - the matrix js code on home page. https://oxal.org https://oxal.org click on the matrix for a surprise! - it's built using my own Static Site Generator: https://github.com/oxalorg/genox https://github.com/oxalorg/genox - my website uses a css theme, again handcrafted: https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura/ https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura/ - if you go to https://oxal.org/blog/ https://oxal.org/blog/ you will see a small cyborg following you (started with a base image generated by chatgpt and then edited and added animations manually in Piskel sprite editor) - it's deployed on a VPS manually, just run `make` (I've experimented with serving it via a handwritten C http server, but I haven't finished this toy project yet) - i have several shell scripts which uploads things to my websites in private locations (think gists, quick share videos, screenshots etc.). - the favicon is also pixel art, made when I was still in college! https://oxal.org/favicon-32x32.png https://oxal.org/favicon-32x32.png - I even tried designing my own funky font but gave up and used a Naruto inspired font - and as a bonus, try to `view-page-source` on the home page I see my website and feel extremely proud of my journey as a software engineer, and I cherish this simple thing oh so dearly!
  - miloignis 1y ago
    I quite like the matrix w/ the surprise!
  - runamuck 1y ago
    The floating robot makes me smile. Reminds me of 90s silliness. I love it!
  - navanchauhan 1y ago
    It’s good to see you here! For a long time I was just using your project Sakura CSS file to mane everything look pretty. Even though I have moved on to using a mix of LaTeX.css and a two column theme, I still love using Sakura whenever I’m crafting a hand rolled HTML page for something.
  - chrisldgk 1y ago
    That’s hilarious, I was just using Sakura not long ago for a small mvp I made where I couldn’t be arsed to write any css myself. Good stuff
- 90s_dev 1y ago
  > For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Sure, that's a fine purpose. But some websites just want to get a specific job done and be done with it. Like https://tellconanobrienyourfavoritepizzatoppings.com/ https://tellconanobrienyourfavoritepizzatoppings.com/
- natnatenathan 1y ago
  I feel this exactly. However, I find more fun to create and modify the site vs actually writing articles, so my deployments are probably 5x my actual blog posts. I got into computers because I love to code. I will still be here, writing dumb things for my own fun long after AI is the primary creator of professional coders.
- sli 1y ago
  I spent far more time writing my own generator with Babashka than I have putting actual content on the site. I was almost disappointed when I finished it. It doesn't support compiling stuff like TS or Elm, but the only JS on my site is a console.log that says there's no other JS on the entire site.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
    Years ago I had a JS banner nagging readers to disable JS
- henrebotha 1y ago
  I'm spending more time than I'd like to admit thinking about how to achieve various ends using AsciiDoc(tor). I could just carry on with Jekyll, but why?
- AndrewStephens 1y ago
  > For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? I have a server to serve my website and a website to have something for my server to do.
- deleted 1y ago
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- donatj 1y ago
  Hah, this comment took off! My colophon if anyone is interested https://donatstudios.com/colophon https://donatstudios.com/colophon
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  I like your website a lot! Curious as to the stack, and/or do you have a blog post about the setup?
- justusthane 1y ago
  Here's mine: https://www.justus.ws/ https://www.justus.ws/ It's built with the excellent Eleventy SSG, but all HTML and CSS is done by hand (as you can probably tell :)
- reaperducer 1y ago
  For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? Part of the joy for my personal web sites is building in the Easter eggs. Connect via Lynx, and it's a different experience. Hover over something at a certain time of day, and something happens.
- deleted 1y ago
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- bradly 1y ago
  > For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? This is Journey Before Destination, the first ideal spoken by the Knights Radiant and a common trope across mythologies as seen with Job's suffering and Hercules' 12 steps to recovery. Turns out they turned Hercules into a god to stop all the cool stuff he doing as a human :/ Don't let them take away your pain, don't let them take away your humanness. And if they do, just listen to some bird music instead. https://birdymusic.com https://birdymusic.com Either the best looking or worst looking site you'll see today.
- unsungNovelty 1y ago
  > For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? To each their own. I wanted something functional. A stable platform which is organised. I also wanted to write more. Which I still haven't gotten to do. It's more of a functional project than an art project. That doesn't mean the OP's website is bad. But that is not why I created my website. But I have thought about Writing HTML in HTML after being inspired from Writing HTML in HTML by John Ankarstrom [1]. But it will be a forever art project and not my real estate on the internet. It's OK to want different things from the indieweb. That's what makes it diverse. 1- http://john.ankarstrom.se/html/ http://john.ankarstrom.se/html/
- p4bl0 1y ago
  > For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? This is exactly it! My personal website https://pablo.rauzy.name/ https://pablo.rauzy.name/ is also entirely handcrafted, I use a few custom Bash scripts and a Makefile to build it (it is entirely static, no server side rendering, and not a single line of JS), and I have a lot of fun playing with CSS for example to make it responsive, have a mobile menu, etc. I probably (re)invented a few techniques in doing so but that's what's fun!
  - WhyIsItAlwaysHN 1y ago
    I love the idea of the colored links for navigation in your summary. Thanks for the inspiration!
  - izietto 1y ago
    Thing is, it looks better than many corporate websites out there. Kudos
  - p4bl0 1y ago
    I'll add one thing: since April 2009 my website files are tracked using Git, which means I can go back to what it looked like at any point in time whenever I want (`git rev-list --count HEAD` gives me 2184 commits). It's been fun to show my students what my own website looked like when I was their age!
- bitwize 1y ago
  I used to maintain a web site with a cobbled together script written in Guile. I still totally would do the same today. > For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? Indeed. One of these days my company is going to pull my Claude usage logs and mark me down in my performance review for not using AI enough. But until that time comes I'm writing every line of code myself.
- oooyay 1y ago
  Most of the tech blogs I run across are static sites. I understand the choice; to prioritize writing reads as pragmatic and I did that for a long time. At some point I got intrigued by being able to tailor my own editing experience and built my blog. It took months but now I use MarkdownIt and custom components in Vue to render the markdown in my posts. I built a commenting and moderation system. I started all of this before LLMs but once I started using them it sped up my delivery substantially, especially with agents. It also informed how I use coding agents at work, which I think I've been able to adopt with relative ease and a higher success rate than most. https://ooo-yay.com/blog https://ooo-yay.com/blog if you're curious.
- LoulouMonkey 1y ago
  Exactly the same journey here. I started with Hugo and ended up building my own static site generator (https://github.com/julien-blanchard/Loulou https://github.com/julien-blanchard/Loulou). It's been nothing but fun all along. And as you said, building something yourself really makes a huge difference. https://blanchardjulien.com/ https://blanchardjulien.com/
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kapitanjakc 1y ago
I don't have a personal site yet. But when I do, I plan to make it with HTML+CSS+JS/JQ only Maybe apache or nginx as webservers host it on shared stuff or AWS free tier I just need to figure out how to center a div, and then I'll be in the business.
- deleted 1y ago
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- qznc 1y ago
  Within minutes you could start at https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
- donatj 1y ago
  I've never understood the whole centering a div meme. width: 60%; // define your width as desired margin: 0 auto; Now go start your blog!
  - cuu508 1y ago
    Now center div with unknown height vertically :-) And no cheating by using flexbox!
    - arp242 1y ago
      ^ Comment flagged for sadomasochism.
    - skydhash 1y ago
      how do you center something on an axis with no limits placed to form a segments. That’s mathematically impossible unless you placed the limits first.
      - whatnow37373 1y ago
        Powerful the Force is, young Padawan, as is the strength of your doubts. Release them you must.
smetj 1y ago
Static generation. Tables. End of story.
- reconnecting 1y ago
  We made a static, table-based, zero-CSS website [1] for open-source security platform, and the other day there were complaints on hn that it's broken on mobiles. So be careful. [1] https://www.tirreno.com/ https://www.tirreno.com/
  - smetj 1y ago
    You mean the browser in question is broken? :) No in all seriousness table rendering broken?
    - reconnecting 1y ago
      I believe what they were referring to was that the site is broken on mobile, meaning there's no adaptive version. However, I tested this particular website on the first iPhone, and it works just like it does everywhere else.
inatreecrown2 1y ago
Inspiring for me to see this, I have yet to make my own website.
luckyandroid 1y ago
Even with frameworks, I don't see any joy in making something that just looks and feels the same as any other site. I understand it from a business point of view, but if you're trying to just showcase yourself or your work having flavor makes more sense even if it's not the most optimal thing for SEO or retention. Really hate how modern website building sites moved towards structured, samey sites. I miss the days of Geocities and Freewebs, the unreadable text against cluttered background images, the auto playing music, the trailing cursors, the spinning skeletons in front of crappy looking flames.
- piotrpdev 1y ago
  Haha, I suppose it's a bit risky to put spinning skeletons on your website these days since your potential future employer could see it. People are still making super cool and unique websites on Neocities[1] though. [1]: https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=views&tag= https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=views&tag=
jasir 1y ago
The current one looks quite nice to me, of course that's subjective :D The lighter lines on the home page are a bit harder to read, but if you consider it as a canvas to explore (i.e. click on random things) instead of an toc/index to find a specific page from, it's fun and serves the purpose. I liked the heading fonts on the pages, "Austin News" according to Firefox. But then I looked it up for future use but it starts at 350$, so a bit steep for me :D I used to have https://zaeem.dev/eye/ https://zaeem.dev/eye/ as my homepage for years, no text at all. Until I remade the site this year.
Arisaka1 1y ago
This article reminded of the days when building anything wasn't driven by neither the fear of being judged or the need to impress a future employer, but because I just felt like it. I think there's a lack of kind of approach in general. There's a time and place when you build because the end goal is your client or boss, but it's ultimately the inner itch of experimentation that shapes your skillset and taste.
- susam 1y ago
  > This article reminded of the days when building anything wasn't driven by neither the fear of being judged or the need to impress a future employer, but because I just felt like it. Those days are now! There are still plenty of us who create websites and small projects purely for the fun of it. I still maintain a personal wesite that began as a university dorm room intranet portal, and I do it for myself. I have a blog with a small audience, but I also have quirky, obscure pages that exist purely for my own amusement. If someone else happens to stumble upon them and enjoy them, that's just a bonus! I know there are plenty of others who do the same. I often come across such websites and projects right here on this forum! The mainstream web these days is full of walled gardens and loud and chaotic social media platforms, so this kind of quirky, creative web might seem like a small fraction by comparison. But it's still out there, and it's very much alive.
mcdonje 1y ago
The pic of the ugly site looks like it's full of blog posts, but this post is on a different site for some reason. I would've rather been sent to the ugly site if it doesn't have marketing cookies and a membership popup.
- BlackLotus89 1y ago
  If you look at the screencap you see a mail to hello@taylor.town. My first instinct was the same as yours so hf visiting https://taylor.town/ https://taylor.town/ Edit: after posting this the taylor.town site became much slower - so maybe that's the hn hug of death gripping again
  - neogodless 1y ago
    And the original linked article actually links at the bottom > Taylor Troesh is mayor of taylor.town, author of scrapscript, and connoisseur of crap. And on taylor.town is a link to the magazine article which they contributed. Each of the blog screenshots has a caption like this: > taylor.town in 202x
  - ffsm8 1y ago
    Clicking on the article on that site gets me back to the HN link. I guess that's just a landing page with links to articles he wrote, but doesn't host himself? Strange. And it really is ugly right now with the spotted background and slightly rotated links. Is he aiming for the "I just discovered a new feature and so need to use it" vibe? Like when someone makes a PowerPoint presentation and now uses the completely over the top transitions across slides? But design is subjective, and if you're doing something in your free time, you better enjoy it! So if he has fun making that ugly thing, great ( • ‿ • )
    - nemomarx 1y ago
      the background looks a lot like an old geocities page to me so I have to assume it's a fashion choice
    - deleted 1y ago
AndrewStephens 1y ago
I am so into this philosophy. My web site is an expression of me and no-one else. If someone tells me it looks ugly or non-professional (I have heard both, although my site is not so weird as this one) I can tell them that I like it that way. We need more of this kind of non-conformity on the web - and in general.
badgersnake 1y ago
I have a personal site with a bootstrap and ScalaJS-react frontend and I regret it massively. 'Old fashioned' server side templating (e.g. JSP) would have been a way better choice.
- esafak 1y ago
  How so, less work?
severusdd 1y ago
Every polished template looks the same, but each handrolled site is weird in its own way. I’ll happily take wabi-sabi HTML for personal projects over yet another Tailwind landing page!
xyst 1y ago
Reminds me of a home I was interested in buying. Shades of grey, everywhere. White marble counter tops, of course. Very sterile. Nothing wrong with it. It’s a choice. But does scream "millennial aesthetic". Maybe that’s what caused the vitriol that spurred this blog post
nonethewiser 1y ago
His website circa 2023 was not ugly. It was minamalist. NOW its ugly. Its funny because I initially agreed with him when I thought his website was the same as the 2023 version. Which I didnt find ugly. But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a more negative disposition towards his message.
- inanutshellus 1y ago
  His original design was clean, minimalist and... unremarkable. Now it's an intentionally-jumbled chaos. Ugly or not, it's remarkable. After all... we are busy remarking on it. The new design has impracticalities / downsides, specifically it's hard to visually locate a specific link if you leave and came back, but... that's not something that matters to him. He wants /unsettling/, /dischordant/, /interesting/, and more importantly /MINE/.
  - nonethewiser 1y ago
    This is the argument for post-modern art. Not necessarily beautiful, but evocative. I guess one thing to note here is that MINE doesnt necessarily imply ugly.
    - inanutshellus 1y ago
      Yes, precisely. For myself, I don't find it ugly at all. I find it to be fun and retro. As mentioned elsewhere, it's very "Geocities".
- jjulius 1y ago
  >But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a more negative disposition towards his message. Why? The whole message is about finding joy in creating whatever you want, something that is ostensibly you, in a way in which you find joy in creating it, regardless of what other people think of the final product. The fact that many people here find it ugly and off-putting only makes the site, and the message in this piece, more endearing to me. If you're griping about the appearance, or think that the message is lost because of the ugliness, you've missed the point.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I just use WordPress, with slightly-modified themes. I make sure they load quickly, and work on phones. Web sites aren’t my specialty, or my goals. I just want somewhere to post my ramblings.
jbd0 1y ago
It's ugly because an "accept cookies" pop-up obscures half of the page.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  that's on the blogging site - the actual Taylor.town doesn't have that. I'm not sure why the author hosts their blog posts on this platform and not their own website though
  - bru 1y ago
    Just this one article, as part of the magazine. Most are directly on his website.
- coldpie 1y ago
  Open up your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Notices list. If you're forced to use a shit-tier phone web browser like Chrome or Safari, you can also use the Kill Sticky bookmarklet to clean up most of this crap[1]. If you are a web dev reading this and you've implemented a cookie popup on a website, please do the world a favor and find a different industry to work in. [1] https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web-browser-screen-space-with-kill-sticky/ https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
- whatnow37373 1y ago
  At this point I will intentionally include a cookie banner even if my sites doesn’t need it. It exudes this … je ne sais quoi.
- aendruk 1y ago
  Yeah literally two thirds of this is adversarial. https://0x0.st/83AB.png https://0x0.st/83AB.png I reflexively noped out.
smjburton 1y ago
Great article OP. This is exactly what made the "old web" so great: there were no defined standards so people were compelled to experiment. It was a little more chaotic, but it felt more rewarding when you came across a cool website with a unique design. The modern web on the other hand is very structured and formulaic, served mostly through the same templates and frameworks. Instead of being a place to explore, it's largely become a place to consume content in a predictable fashion.
yeeyang 1y ago
lol,yes
sph 1y ago
It was good and minimal before, now it's all form and no function (no dates, no ordering of posts). Honestly, unremarkable post for an unremarkable idea. Smells like a PR push to publicize the author's website more than anything. Sure it's your website, you can do anything you want, but that is hardly a ground-breaking concept, is it? (The posted website has been created 2 days ago, and already has 5 posts created all on the same day, asking for paid membership, hoping to trend on HN. s/good/dead/internetmagazine.com)
Eleuthero 1y ago
Aesthetic and trends are part of it, I think it looks purely
mehdix 1y ago
> It’s an itch – a feeling that something is really important, and you need to do something about it, and nobody else can possibly do it except you. Might be difficult to believe, but I strongly believe there are things that no one else on this planet would do except one of us.
guywithahat 1y ago
It is a bit of a shame he's changed the website in-between getting the email and this being posted on HN, I would have liked to see the original CSS rotate and non-JS scrolljacking website.
- justusthane 1y ago
  It hasn't changed. The linked page is an article about his website posted on a different site. Here is the site he's talking about: https://taylor.town/ https://taylor.town/
deleted 1y ago
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ayaros 1y ago
Hey, my site is handcrafted too. But ugly? Speak for yourselves, but I've tried to make mine beautiful. Handcrafted doesn't have to mean ugly... But of course, it's at the point where it's grown into something unwieldy. I feel like it's overdue for a redesign/rewrite. Just gotta figure out a clever UI design that works on desktop and mobile. Not only that, but it also needs to work without any JS, because I don't want my site to be nonfunctional without JS...
rchaud 1y ago
There's 'ugly yet interesting' and then there's 'ugly and boring'. This is the latter I'm afraid. At its core, the homepage is still showing the output of a CMS looping through a folder of markdown files (probably) and displaying the title wrapped in a hyperlink. There appears to be zero information architecture - no visually distinct categories, no icons, images or dates, so everything is equally weighted, just in a slightly "wacky" format. Most dev blogs get their traffic from something showing up on organic search, so the site homepage doesn't really matter, unless the dev actively wants to make it interesting, and encourage exploration. Despite the attempt at breaking that mold, this website feels much the same as those ones using a boring default Ghost template.
- jjulius 1y ago
  I feel like you've missed the point of the author's piece.
  - rchaud 1y ago
    I don't think I did. The homepage is the only thing that's unique about the design. Had you arrived on any page besides that, you would think this is a bog-standard developer's blogsite, one skinny column amid a sea of white space. It's possible to have an ugly site that's still easily navigable and visually interesting, even if the author is the only user.
    - jjulius 1y ago
      Respectfully, to the author's point, none of that matters and neither does anything in your previous post. The author likes it, and has fun creating it and enjoys molding and re-shaping it to their own changing desires over the years. That's what they find important to them, not anything that you've mentioned. As the author writes... >Somebody with good taste could’ve made my website, but then it wouldn’t be mine. >To bake bread, many feel compelled to grow wheat, mine salt, culture yeast, etc. Not me. My puerile palate yearns for buckets of Olive Garden breadsticks. >That’s okay. Your “mine” is not my "mine." ... and... >Soon it will become something else entirely. Because it’s my website and I’m perpetually becoming somebody else. >You’ll change too. Your passions and values will pollinate; your ugly thing – whatever it is – will come alive again and again. They've created something that is authentically "them", in a way that is authentically "them". And they love that. Not having images, or icons, or categories, or being easily navigable, or having a blog post section that looks "bog-standard" to you or anybody else are all completely irrelevant. Hell yes, more power to them, I say.
nooooooooo_ 1y ago
Honestly, I don't really understand the reasoning here. While the author's website doesn't look bad to me, creating and maintaining your own site doesn't mean it cannot also look "good". Sure, "good taste" is subjective, but most of us probably use the internet daily and are exposed to countless designs, and eventually develop at least a general sense of what constitutes good UI/UX and what doesn't. CSS can be awfully unintuitive, but if you're capable of building and styling a website, you're certainly capable of making it look nice. Saying "it looks bad to others because I made it myself" sounds like some kind of self-flagellation.
dr-detroit 1y ago
[dead]
susam 1y ago
I made my website [1] totally from scratch too! Using 100% handcrafted HTML and CSS and a little bit of Common Lisp. Hopefully it is not too ugly! Like some of the other comments here, I don't use Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican, etc. either! I know they are solid tools and they serve many people well. But I haven't found them useful for my own needs. I prefer not to subject my website to the constraints of a large and complex framework when I can write my own that is smaller, simpler, and fully under my control. I have a small Common Lisp (CL) program to automate a few things like applying consistent layout to all pages, generating RSS feeds, creating tag list pages, etc. But otherwise, all content on my site, including all of the HTML and CSS, is 100% handcrafted. Perhaps the only exception is KaTeX, because handcrafting a parser and renderer for a subset of LaTeX is not a problem I want to take on in order to maintain my website. I've put together a little colophon page [2] in case anyone wants to read more about it. Some people rightfully worry that maintaining your own program like this might become a major burden, potentially taking more time than actually publishing articles on your website. At least for me, that hasn't been the case. The CL program has become quite stable. Its commit history [1] shows that I don't tinker with it too often these days. I certainly have more lines of published content than I do code in the program. The CL program is about 1000 lines long but I have about 55000 lines of content. [1] https://susam.net/ https://susam.net/ [2] https://susam.net/colophon.html https://susam.net/colophon.html [3] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/commits/main/site.lisp https://github.com/susam/susam.net/commits/main/site.lisp
hackerbeat 1y ago
New website gives me headaches. The one before was much better.
- hackerbeat 1y ago
  PS: Just use Bear Blog everyone.
einpoklum 1y ago
Well, if your website content is not very static, your website will almost without fail not be "made by you", but made by some kind of site generator. And while _that_ could be made by you (which seems to be the case for Taylor Town), I would suspect that, these days, it's possible to factor out enough "made by me" aspects of a site, and use a generic/non-bespoke static site generation mechanism. Anyway, some people write their own HTML+CSS, some people build their own table, other people build their own car. I usually can't decide which kind of DIY I like best :-\
indigodaddy 1y ago
Barry Kauler’s website uses a CMS that’s a static generator using SeaMonkey as the wysiwyg component: https://bkhome.org/shellcms/ https://bkhome.org/shellcms/
hinkley 1y ago
I lived in a garden neighborhood for a time. I did a lot of work on our place and my partner and friends would praise me but all I could see was the weeds or the poor pruning job done by the previous owners. There was a retired lady three blocks away who had by far the best garden in a half mile radius. It was amazing. I lived there almost four years before I started noticing her weeds, her mistakes. In a lot of things we can see other people’s flaws but miss our own. But when we make something, that situation seems to be reversed. What we make isn’t that special, and everyone else’s creations are so much better.
KronisLV 1y ago
Doesn't seem like the thing with the best usability for me (how my eyes scan information, in that regard the old site would be better), but it does seem aesthetically different and kinda cool. Plus, good job on not putting a whole bunch of JS into the site and letting it actually perform well without making my CPU sad. That said, https://taylor.town/android-chrome-512x512.png https://taylor.town/android-chrome-512x512.png is about 225 KB and probably doesn't need to be quite that big. The first optimizer I found online turned it into a 55 KB image. There, this time I'm the nitpicky nerd, bwah. Not to miss the point though: it's cool that people are making things that are different!
naet 1y ago
My website is pretty because I made it. Or at least it is to my tastes, I'm sure someone else would tell me otherwise. The author of this article's site is taylor.town, not the site the article was posted on. For what it's worth taylor town looks nice enough to me. Actually a lot nicer than the goodinternetmagazine site hosting this article...
doubleorseven 1y ago
I remember when 'Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers' by Kendrik Lamar was out on 05/22 and I was thinking to my self, OMG it's only May and the best album of the year is out. The words I just read takes me back to that same feeling. Thank you for that.
nluken 1y ago
Might go against the grain here but I actually quite like the website, as minimal as the new one is. I don't want to oversell it, since it's not really super "out there", but the author put some nice humanist touches there like the hand drawn mouse that lights up when you hover over a link. Could use some color, but it serves its purpose and I don't find it sacrifices readability as much as some others in this thread are claiming.
jurgenaut23 1y ago
That’s also the very reason why it is an absolute madness to give up programming because AI is (supposedly) capable of doing it on your behalf. We invented the car, the motorbike and the jetpack, yet people still hike and ride bikes. It would be dumb to stop doing things that you like just because one can do it better with a machine.
wpollock 1y ago
You don't know ugly. Your site is fine! I wrote my website by hand in Notepad (and vi) in the 1990s. In the late 1990s, I rewrote it to use CSS. I tried to use a dark background (research suggested that was easier on the eyes, and it saved power), I tried to pick properly contrasting colors. This was the result: <https://wpollock.com/ https://wpollock.com/>. I used this site for 30 years, and never once received a compliment on its design. Some of us have no artistic sense, I guess.
- dgellow 1y ago
  For what it’s worth, I find it instantly familiar and comforting! Here is your first compliment :)
dgellow 1y ago
I genuinely find it beautiful
mrinterweb 1y ago
The spirit of this reminds me back to earlier days of the internet. I know a lot of people bemoaned Flash sites for weird navigation, and other issues. Not saying the Flash criticism wasn't warranted, but I did appreciate the creativity some people put into making their site unique. Too much of the internet feel homogeneous now, and with AI generated content, that is only going to get worse. I appreciate the portions of the internet that don't want to conform.
baddash 1y ago
i'm actually fascinated because the website made me slightly nauseous
- gwern 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypophobia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypophobia maybe? Could lean into that as an esthetic - everything is always misaligned carefully by 1 pixel, using trypophobia fonts which overload ligatures to punch tiny holes into each letter...
Aziell 1y ago
That line ugly because I made it really hit me. So many websites today look clean and polished and perfect, but you can't really tell who made them. This one is a bit messy, but it feels personal. Like someone is using CSS to write a diary. Not perfect, but warm and alive. That feeling of making something just for yourself really means something.
maple13_22 1y ago
I feel like we're heading to Japanese style websites in the near future.
g0db1t 1y ago
[dead]

562 points by surprisetalk 1y ago

Hah, yes! Whereas most of my developer friends have long ago moved to off-the-shelf Hugo or Jekyll templates for their personal sites, I stubbornly maintain my blog with entirely bespoke css and a backend only a parent could love. For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? It's like maintaining a classic car. You can buy a reliable decent looking car, but that's not fun. If your goal is just to get somewhere, sure, but my goal is to have fun. I work on websites all day where I get less and less say in the design and functionality. Why would I not want total control over my own?

yoz-y 1y ago
My argument to moving to a SSR is that I just spent all the time tweaking the backend. Now I can spend more time writing and tweaking just the theme.
- donatj 1y ago
  But did you enjoy tweaking the backend?
  - yoz-y 1y ago
    I did yes. But I realized also that I could enjoy tinkering with something more generally useful and permanent instead.
ebiester 1y ago
I think the difference is that I spent so much time tweaking the website that I wasn't writing. Moving back to Jekyll was entirely a move because I wanted to spend more of that time writing. At the same time, I know that it limits me in other ways (for example, I'd love to have a way to post to my blog in one section and federate to bluesky and mastodon, and I know it's possible, but I would have to build it. So I'll eventually move from Jekyll.)
- parpfish 1y ago
  An actual LLM use case! A model that generates AI slop blog posts so you don’t need to write content and can just focus on the fun parts of making the website
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    I’d imagine almost any old model could do this?
  - delfinom 1y ago
    Why even waste money on an LLM. Just lorum ipsum the content since nobody is going to read it anyway
    - parpfish 1y ago
      but a model could write blog posts that describe changes to the website as a blog-style changelog (e.g., 'today i spent an hour playing with CSS to change padding' or 'i refactored the backend to do more async calls') a self-documenting blog about the blog.
  - topaz0 1y ago
    \lipsum has been perfectly good at that for decades
oxalorg 1y ago
Exactly this. My entire website is handcrafted, and not once but over the last decade almost ~10 times. It's fun and I almost end up revamping something every year. Everything handcrafted: - the matrix js code on home page. https://oxal.org https://oxal.org click on the matrix for a surprise! - it's built using my own Static Site Generator: https://github.com/oxalorg/genox https://github.com/oxalorg/genox - my website uses a css theme, again handcrafted: https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura/ https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura/ - if you go to https://oxal.org/blog/ https://oxal.org/blog/ you will see a small cyborg following you (started with a base image generated by chatgpt and then edited and added animations manually in Piskel sprite editor) - it's deployed on a VPS manually, just run `make` (I've experimented with serving it via a handwritten C http server, but I haven't finished this toy project yet) - i have several shell scripts which uploads things to my websites in private locations (think gists, quick share videos, screenshots etc.). - the favicon is also pixel art, made when I was still in college! https://oxal.org/favicon-32x32.png https://oxal.org/favicon-32x32.png - I even tried designing my own funky font but gave up and used a Naruto inspired font - and as a bonus, try to `view-page-source` on the home page I see my website and feel extremely proud of my journey as a software engineer, and I cherish this simple thing oh so dearly!
- miloignis 1y ago
  I quite like the matrix w/ the surprise!
- runamuck 1y ago
  The floating robot makes me smile. Reminds me of 90s silliness. I love it!
- navanchauhan 1y ago
  It’s good to see you here! For a long time I was just using your project Sakura CSS file to mane everything look pretty. Even though I have moved on to using a mix of LaTeX.css and a two column theme, I still love using Sakura whenever I’m crafting a hand rolled HTML page for something.
- chrisldgk 1y ago
  That’s hilarious, I was just using Sakura not long ago for a small mvp I made where I couldn’t be arsed to write any css myself. Good stuff
90s_dev 1y ago
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Sure, that's a fine purpose. But some websites just want to get a specific job done and be done with it. Like https://tellconanobrienyourfavoritepizzatoppings.com/ https://tellconanobrienyourfavoritepizzatoppings.com/
natnatenathan 1y ago
I feel this exactly. However, I find more fun to create and modify the site vs actually writing articles, so my deployments are probably 5x my actual blog posts. I got into computers because I love to code. I will still be here, writing dumb things for my own fun long after AI is the primary creator of professional coders.
sli 1y ago
I spent far more time writing my own generator with Babashka than I have putting actual content on the site. I was almost disappointed when I finished it. It doesn't support compiling stuff like TS or Elm, but the only JS on my site is a console.log that says there's no other JS on the entire site.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  Years ago I had a JS banner nagging readers to disable JS
henrebotha 1y ago
I'm spending more time than I'd like to admit thinking about how to achieve various ends using AsciiDoc(tor). I could just carry on with Jekyll, but why?
AndrewStephens 1y ago
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? I have a server to serve my website and a website to have something for my server to do.
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donatj 1y ago
Hah, this comment took off! My colophon if anyone is interested https://donatstudios.com/colophon https://donatstudios.com/colophon
indigodaddy 1y ago
I like your website a lot! Curious as to the stack, and/or do you have a blog post about the setup?
justusthane 1y ago
Here's mine: https://www.justus.ws/ https://www.justus.ws/ It's built with the excellent Eleventy SSG, but all HTML and CSS is done by hand (as you can probably tell :)
reaperducer 1y ago
For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? Part of the joy for my personal web sites is building in the Easter eggs. Connect via Lynx, and it's a different experience. Hover over something at a certain time of day, and something happens.
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bradly 1y ago
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? This is Journey Before Destination, the first ideal spoken by the Knights Radiant and a common trope across mythologies as seen with Job's suffering and Hercules' 12 steps to recovery. Turns out they turned Hercules into a god to stop all the cool stuff he doing as a human :/ Don't let them take away your pain, don't let them take away your humanness. And if they do, just listen to some bird music instead. https://birdymusic.com https://birdymusic.com Either the best looking or worst looking site you'll see today.
unsungNovelty 1y ago
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? To each their own. I wanted something functional. A stable platform which is organised. I also wanted to write more. Which I still haven't gotten to do. It's more of a functional project than an art project. That doesn't mean the OP's website is bad. But that is not why I created my website. But I have thought about Writing HTML in HTML after being inspired from Writing HTML in HTML by John Ankarstrom [1]. But it will be a forever art project and not my real estate on the internet. It's OK to want different things from the indieweb. That's what makes it diverse. 1- http://john.ankarstrom.se/html/ http://john.ankarstrom.se/html/
p4bl0 1y ago
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? This is exactly it! My personal website https://pablo.rauzy.name/ https://pablo.rauzy.name/ is also entirely handcrafted, I use a few custom Bash scripts and a Makefile to build it (it is entirely static, no server side rendering, and not a single line of JS), and I have a lot of fun playing with CSS for example to make it responsive, have a mobile menu, etc. I probably (re)invented a few techniques in doing so but that's what's fun!
- WhyIsItAlwaysHN 1y ago
  I love the idea of the colored links for navigation in your summary. Thanks for the inspiration!
- izietto 1y ago
  Thing is, it looks better than many corporate websites out there. Kudos
- p4bl0 1y ago
  I'll add one thing: since April 2009 my website files are tracked using Git, which means I can go back to what it looked like at any point in time whenever I want (`git rev-list --count HEAD` gives me 2184 commits). It's been fun to show my students what my own website looked like when I was their age!
bitwize 1y ago
I used to maintain a web site with a cobbled together script written in Guile. I still totally would do the same today. > For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? Indeed. One of these days my company is going to pull my Claude usage logs and mark me down in my performance review for not using AI enough. But until that time comes I'm writing every line of code myself.
oooyay 1y ago
Most of the tech blogs I run across are static sites. I understand the choice; to prioritize writing reads as pragmatic and I did that for a long time. At some point I got intrigued by being able to tailor my own editing experience and built my blog. It took months but now I use MarkdownIt and custom components in Vue to render the markdown in my posts. I built a commenting and moderation system. I started all of this before LLMs but once I started using them it sped up my delivery substantially, especially with agents. It also informed how I use coding agents at work, which I think I've been able to adopt with relative ease and a higher success rate than most. https://ooo-yay.com/blog https://ooo-yay.com/blog if you're curious.
LoulouMonkey 1y ago
Exactly the same journey here. I started with Hugo and ended up building my own static site generator (https://github.com/julien-blanchard/Loulou https://github.com/julien-blanchard/Loulou). It's been nothing but fun all along. And as you said, building something yourself really makes a huge difference. https://blanchardjulien.com/ https://blanchardjulien.com/

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kapitanjakc 1y ago

I don't have a personal site yet. But when I do, I plan to make it with HTML+CSS+JS/JQ only Maybe apache or nginx as webservers host it on shared stuff or AWS free tier I just need to figure out how to center a div, and then I'll be in the business.

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qznc 1y ago
Within minutes you could start at https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
donatj 1y ago
I've never understood the whole centering a div meme. width: 60%; // define your width as desired margin: 0 auto; Now go start your blog!
- cuu508 1y ago
  Now center div with unknown height vertically :-) And no cheating by using flexbox!
  - arp242 1y ago
    ^ Comment flagged for sadomasochism.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    how do you center something on an axis with no limits placed to form a segments. That’s mathematically impossible unless you placed the limits first.
    - whatnow37373 1y ago
      Powerful the Force is, young Padawan, as is the strength of your doubts. Release them you must.

smetj 1y ago

Static generation. Tables. End of story.

reconnecting 1y ago
We made a static, table-based, zero-CSS website [1] for open-source security platform, and the other day there were complaints on hn that it's broken on mobiles. So be careful. [1] https://www.tirreno.com/ https://www.tirreno.com/
- smetj 1y ago
  You mean the browser in question is broken? :) No in all seriousness table rendering broken?
  - reconnecting 1y ago
    I believe what they were referring to was that the site is broken on mobile, meaning there's no adaptive version. However, I tested this particular website on the first iPhone, and it works just like it does everywhere else.

inatreecrown2 1y ago

Inspiring for me to see this, I have yet to make my own website.

luckyandroid 1y ago

Even with frameworks, I don't see any joy in making something that just looks and feels the same as any other site. I understand it from a business point of view, but if you're trying to just showcase yourself or your work having flavor makes more sense even if it's not the most optimal thing for SEO or retention. Really hate how modern website building sites moved towards structured, samey sites. I miss the days of Geocities and Freewebs, the unreadable text against cluttered background images, the auto playing music, the trailing cursors, the spinning skeletons in front of crappy looking flames.

piotrpdev 1y ago
Haha, I suppose it's a bit risky to put spinning skeletons on your website these days since your potential future employer could see it. People are still making super cool and unique websites on Neocities[1] though. [1]: https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=views&tag= https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=views&tag=

jasir 1y ago

The current one looks quite nice to me, of course that's subjective :D The lighter lines on the home page are a bit harder to read, but if you consider it as a canvas to explore (i.e. click on random things) instead of an toc/index to find a specific page from, it's fun and serves the purpose. I liked the heading fonts on the pages, "Austin News" according to Firefox. But then I looked it up for future use but it starts at 350$, so a bit steep for me :D I used to have https://zaeem.dev/eye/ https://zaeem.dev/eye/ as my homepage for years, no text at all. Until I remade the site this year.

Arisaka1 1y ago

This article reminded of the days when building anything wasn't driven by neither the fear of being judged or the need to impress a future employer, but because I just felt like it. I think there's a lack of kind of approach in general. There's a time and place when you build because the end goal is your client or boss, but it's ultimately the inner itch of experimentation that shapes your skillset and taste.

susam 1y ago
> This article reminded of the days when building anything wasn't driven by neither the fear of being judged or the need to impress a future employer, but because I just felt like it. Those days are now! There are still plenty of us who create websites and small projects purely for the fun of it. I still maintain a personal wesite that began as a university dorm room intranet portal, and I do it for myself. I have a blog with a small audience, but I also have quirky, obscure pages that exist purely for my own amusement. If someone else happens to stumble upon them and enjoy them, that's just a bonus! I know there are plenty of others who do the same. I often come across such websites and projects right here on this forum! The mainstream web these days is full of walled gardens and loud and chaotic social media platforms, so this kind of quirky, creative web might seem like a small fraction by comparison. But it's still out there, and it's very much alive.

mcdonje 1y ago

The pic of the ugly site looks like it's full of blog posts, but this post is on a different site for some reason. I would've rather been sent to the ugly site if it doesn't have marketing cookies and a membership popup.

BlackLotus89 1y ago
If you look at the screencap you see a mail to hello@taylor.town. My first instinct was the same as yours so hf visiting https://taylor.town/ https://taylor.town/ Edit: after posting this the taylor.town site became much slower - so maybe that's the hn hug of death gripping again
- neogodless 1y ago
  And the original linked article actually links at the bottom > Taylor Troesh is mayor of taylor.town, author of scrapscript, and connoisseur of crap. And on taylor.town is a link to the magazine article which they contributed. Each of the blog screenshots has a caption like this: > taylor.town in 202x
- ffsm8 1y ago
  Clicking on the article on that site gets me back to the HN link. I guess that's just a landing page with links to articles he wrote, but doesn't host himself? Strange. And it really is ugly right now with the spotted background and slightly rotated links. Is he aiming for the "I just discovered a new feature and so need to use it" vibe? Like when someone makes a PowerPoint presentation and now uses the completely over the top transitions across slides? But design is subjective, and if you're doing something in your free time, you better enjoy it! So if he has fun making that ugly thing, great ( • ‿ • )
  - nemomarx 1y ago
    the background looks a lot like an old geocities page to me so I have to assume it's a fashion choice
  - deleted 1y ago

AndrewStephens 1y ago

I am so into this philosophy. My web site is an expression of me and no-one else. If someone tells me it looks ugly or non-professional (I have heard both, although my site is not so weird as this one) I can tell them that I like it that way. We need more of this kind of non-conformity on the web - and in general.

badgersnake 1y ago

I have a personal site with a bootstrap and ScalaJS-react frontend and I regret it massively. 'Old fashioned' server side templating (e.g. JSP) would have been a way better choice.

esafak 1y ago
How so, less work?

severusdd 1y ago

Every polished template looks the same, but each handrolled site is weird in its own way. I’ll happily take wabi-sabi HTML for personal projects over yet another Tailwind landing page!

xyst 1y ago

Reminds me of a home I was interested in buying. Shades of grey, everywhere. White marble counter tops, of course. Very sterile. Nothing wrong with it. It’s a choice. But does scream "millennial aesthetic". Maybe that’s what caused the vitriol that spurred this blog post

nonethewiser 1y ago

His website circa 2023 was not ugly. It was minamalist. NOW its ugly. Its funny because I initially agreed with him when I thought his website was the same as the 2023 version. Which I didnt find ugly. But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a more negative disposition towards his message.

inanutshellus 1y ago
His original design was clean, minimalist and... unremarkable. Now it's an intentionally-jumbled chaos. Ugly or not, it's remarkable. After all... we are busy remarking on it. The new design has impracticalities / downsides, specifically it's hard to visually locate a specific link if you leave and came back, but... that's not something that matters to him. He wants /unsettling/, /dischordant/, /interesting/, and more importantly /MINE/.
- nonethewiser 1y ago
  This is the argument for post-modern art. Not necessarily beautiful, but evocative. I guess one thing to note here is that MINE doesnt necessarily imply ugly.
  - inanutshellus 1y ago
    Yes, precisely. For myself, I don't find it ugly at all. I find it to be fun and retro. As mentioned elsewhere, it's very "Geocities".
jjulius 1y ago
>But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a more negative disposition towards his message. Why? The whole message is about finding joy in creating whatever you want, something that is ostensibly you, in a way in which you find joy in creating it, regardless of what other people think of the final product. The fact that many people here find it ugly and off-putting only makes the site, and the message in this piece, more endearing to me. If you're griping about the appearance, or think that the message is lost because of the ugliness, you've missed the point.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I just use WordPress, with slightly-modified themes. I make sure they load quickly, and work on phones. Web sites aren’t my specialty, or my goals. I just want somewhere to post my ramblings.

jbd0 1y ago

It's ugly because an "accept cookies" pop-up obscures half of the page.

nemomarx 1y ago
that's on the blogging site - the actual Taylor.town doesn't have that. I'm not sure why the author hosts their blog posts on this platform and not their own website though
- bru 1y ago
  Just this one article, as part of the magazine. Most are directly on his website.
coldpie 1y ago
Open up your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Notices list. If you're forced to use a shit-tier phone web browser like Chrome or Safari, you can also use the Kill Sticky bookmarklet to clean up most of this crap[1]. If you are a web dev reading this and you've implemented a cookie popup on a website, please do the world a favor and find a different industry to work in. [1] https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web-browser-screen-space-with-kill-sticky/ https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
whatnow37373 1y ago
At this point I will intentionally include a cookie banner even if my sites doesn’t need it. It exudes this … je ne sais quoi.
aendruk 1y ago
Yeah literally two thirds of this is adversarial. https://0x0.st/83AB.png https://0x0.st/83AB.png I reflexively noped out.

smjburton 1y ago

Great article OP. This is exactly what made the "old web" so great: there were no defined standards so people were compelled to experiment. It was a little more chaotic, but it felt more rewarding when you came across a cool website with a unique design. The modern web on the other hand is very structured and formulaic, served mostly through the same templates and frameworks. Instead of being a place to explore, it's largely become a place to consume content in a predictable fashion.

yeeyang 1y ago

lol,yes

sph 1y ago

It was good and minimal before, now it's all form and no function (no dates, no ordering of posts). Honestly, unremarkable post for an unremarkable idea. Smells like a PR push to publicize the author's website more than anything. Sure it's your website, you can do anything you want, but that is hardly a ground-breaking concept, is it? (The posted website has been created 2 days ago, and already has 5 posts created all on the same day, asking for paid membership, hoping to trend on HN. s/good/dead/internetmagazine.com)

Eleuthero 1y ago

Aesthetic and trends are part of it, I think it looks purely

mehdix 1y ago

> It’s an itch – a feeling that something is really important, and you need to do something about it, and nobody else can possibly do it except you. Might be difficult to believe, but I strongly believe there are things that no one else on this planet would do except one of us.

guywithahat 1y ago

It is a bit of a shame he's changed the website in-between getting the email and this being posted on HN, I would have liked to see the original CSS rotate and non-JS scrolljacking website.

justusthane 1y ago
It hasn't changed. The linked page is an article about his website posted on a different site. Here is the site he's talking about: https://taylor.town/ https://taylor.town/

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ayaros 1y ago

Hey, my site is handcrafted too. But ugly? Speak for yourselves, but I've tried to make mine beautiful. Handcrafted doesn't have to mean ugly... But of course, it's at the point where it's grown into something unwieldy. I feel like it's overdue for a redesign/rewrite. Just gotta figure out a clever UI design that works on desktop and mobile. Not only that, but it also needs to work without any JS, because I don't want my site to be nonfunctional without JS...

rchaud 1y ago

There's 'ugly yet interesting' and then there's 'ugly and boring'. This is the latter I'm afraid. At its core, the homepage is still showing the output of a CMS looping through a folder of markdown files (probably) and displaying the title wrapped in a hyperlink. There appears to be zero information architecture - no visually distinct categories, no icons, images or dates, so everything is equally weighted, just in a slightly "wacky" format. Most dev blogs get their traffic from something showing up on organic search, so the site homepage doesn't really matter, unless the dev actively wants to make it interesting, and encourage exploration. Despite the attempt at breaking that mold, this website feels much the same as those ones using a boring default Ghost template.

jjulius 1y ago
I feel like you've missed the point of the author's piece.
- rchaud 1y ago
  I don't think I did. The homepage is the only thing that's unique about the design. Had you arrived on any page besides that, you would think this is a bog-standard developer's blogsite, one skinny column amid a sea of white space. It's possible to have an ugly site that's still easily navigable and visually interesting, even if the author is the only user.
  - jjulius 1y ago
    Respectfully, to the author's point, none of that matters and neither does anything in your previous post. The author likes it, and has fun creating it and enjoys molding and re-shaping it to their own changing desires over the years. That's what they find important to them, not anything that you've mentioned. As the author writes... >Somebody with good taste could’ve made my website, but then it wouldn’t be mine. >To bake bread, many feel compelled to grow wheat, mine salt, culture yeast, etc. Not me. My puerile palate yearns for buckets of Olive Garden breadsticks. >That’s okay. Your “mine” is not my "mine." ... and... >Soon it will become something else entirely. Because it’s my website and I’m perpetually becoming somebody else. >You’ll change too. Your passions and values will pollinate; your ugly thing – whatever it is – will come alive again and again. They've created something that is authentically "them", in a way that is authentically "them". And they love that. Not having images, or icons, or categories, or being easily navigable, or having a blog post section that looks "bog-standard" to you or anybody else are all completely irrelevant. Hell yes, more power to them, I say.

nooooooooo_ 1y ago

Honestly, I don't really understand the reasoning here. While the author's website doesn't look bad to me, creating and maintaining your own site doesn't mean it cannot also look "good". Sure, "good taste" is subjective, but most of us probably use the internet daily and are exposed to countless designs, and eventually develop at least a general sense of what constitutes good UI/UX and what doesn't. CSS can be awfully unintuitive, but if you're capable of building and styling a website, you're certainly capable of making it look nice. Saying "it looks bad to others because I made it myself" sounds like some kind of self-flagellation.

dr-detroit 1y ago

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susam 1y ago

I made my website [1] totally from scratch too! Using 100% handcrafted HTML and CSS and a little bit of Common Lisp. Hopefully it is not too ugly! Like some of the other comments here, I don't use Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican, etc. either! I know they are solid tools and they serve many people well. But I haven't found them useful for my own needs. I prefer not to subject my website to the constraints of a large and complex framework when I can write my own that is smaller, simpler, and fully under my control. I have a small Common Lisp (CL) program to automate a few things like applying consistent layout to all pages, generating RSS feeds, creating tag list pages, etc. But otherwise, all content on my site, including all of the HTML and CSS, is 100% handcrafted. Perhaps the only exception is KaTeX, because handcrafting a parser and renderer for a subset of LaTeX is not a problem I want to take on in order to maintain my website. I've put together a little colophon page [2] in case anyone wants to read more about it. Some people rightfully worry that maintaining your own program like this might become a major burden, potentially taking more time than actually publishing articles on your website. At least for me, that hasn't been the case. The CL program has become quite stable. Its commit history [1] shows that I don't tinker with it too often these days. I certainly have more lines of published content than I do code in the program. The CL program is about 1000 lines long but I have about 55000 lines of content. [1] https://susam.net/ https://susam.net/ [2] https://susam.net/colophon.html https://susam.net/colophon.html [3] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/commits/main/site.lisp https://github.com/susam/susam.net/commits/main/site.lisp

hackerbeat 1y ago

New website gives me headaches. The one before was much better.

hackerbeat 1y ago
PS: Just use Bear Blog everyone.

einpoklum 1y ago

Well, if your website content is not very static, your website will almost without fail not be "made by you", but made by some kind of site generator. And while _that_ could be made by you (which seems to be the case for Taylor Town), I would suspect that, these days, it's possible to factor out enough "made by me" aspects of a site, and use a generic/non-bespoke static site generation mechanism. Anyway, some people write their own HTML+CSS, some people build their own table, other people build their own car. I usually can't decide which kind of DIY I like best :-\

indigodaddy 1y ago

Barry Kauler’s website uses a CMS that’s a static generator using SeaMonkey as the wysiwyg component: https://bkhome.org/shellcms/ https://bkhome.org/shellcms/

hinkley 1y ago

I lived in a garden neighborhood for a time. I did a lot of work on our place and my partner and friends would praise me but all I could see was the weeds or the poor pruning job done by the previous owners. There was a retired lady three blocks away who had by far the best garden in a half mile radius. It was amazing. I lived there almost four years before I started noticing her weeds, her mistakes. In a lot of things we can see other people’s flaws but miss our own. But when we make something, that situation seems to be reversed. What we make isn’t that special, and everyone else’s creations are so much better.

KronisLV 1y ago

Doesn't seem like the thing with the best usability for me (how my eyes scan information, in that regard the old site would be better), but it does seem aesthetically different and kinda cool. Plus, good job on not putting a whole bunch of JS into the site and letting it actually perform well without making my CPU sad. That said, https://taylor.town/android-chrome-512x512.png https://taylor.town/android-chrome-512x512.png is about 225 KB and probably doesn't need to be quite that big. The first optimizer I found online turned it into a 55 KB image. There, this time I'm the nitpicky nerd, bwah. Not to miss the point though: it's cool that people are making things that are different!

naet 1y ago

My website is pretty because I made it. Or at least it is to my tastes, I'm sure someone else would tell me otherwise. The author of this article's site is taylor.town, not the site the article was posted on. For what it's worth taylor town looks nice enough to me. Actually a lot nicer than the goodinternetmagazine site hosting this article...

doubleorseven 1y ago

I remember when 'Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers' by Kendrik Lamar was out on 05/22 and I was thinking to my self, OMG it's only May and the best album of the year is out. The words I just read takes me back to that same feeling. Thank you for that.

nluken 1y ago

Might go against the grain here but I actually quite like the website, as minimal as the new one is. I don't want to oversell it, since it's not really super "out there", but the author put some nice humanist touches there like the hand drawn mouse that lights up when you hover over a link. Could use some color, but it serves its purpose and I don't find it sacrifices readability as much as some others in this thread are claiming.

jurgenaut23 1y ago

That’s also the very reason why it is an absolute madness to give up programming because AI is (supposedly) capable of doing it on your behalf. We invented the car, the motorbike and the jetpack, yet people still hike and ride bikes. It would be dumb to stop doing things that you like just because one can do it better with a machine.

wpollock 1y ago

You don't know ugly. Your site is fine! I wrote my website by hand in Notepad (and vi) in the 1990s. In the late 1990s, I rewrote it to use CSS. I tried to use a dark background (research suggested that was easier on the eyes, and it saved power), I tried to pick properly contrasting colors. This was the result: <https://wpollock.com/ https://wpollock.com/>. I used this site for 30 years, and never once received a compliment on its design. Some of us have no artistic sense, I guess.

dgellow 1y ago
For what it’s worth, I find it instantly familiar and comforting! Here is your first compliment :)

dgellow 1y ago

I genuinely find it beautiful

mrinterweb 1y ago

The spirit of this reminds me back to earlier days of the internet. I know a lot of people bemoaned Flash sites for weird navigation, and other issues. Not saying the Flash criticism wasn't warranted, but I did appreciate the creativity some people put into making their site unique. Too much of the internet feel homogeneous now, and with AI generated content, that is only going to get worse. I appreciate the portions of the internet that don't want to conform.

baddash 1y ago

i'm actually fascinated because the website made me slightly nauseous

gwern 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypophobia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypophobia maybe? Could lean into that as an esthetic - everything is always misaligned carefully by 1 pixel, using trypophobia fonts which overload ligatures to punch tiny holes into each letter...

Aziell 1y ago

That line ugly because I made it really hit me. So many websites today look clean and polished and perfect, but you can't really tell who made them. This one is a bit messy, but it feels personal. Like someone is using CSS to write a diary. Not perfect, but warm and alive. That feeling of making something just for yourself really means something.

maple13_22 1y ago

I feel like we're heading to Japanese style websites in the near future.

g0db1t 1y ago

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