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Kiki – a tiny homepage construction kit with a small footprint
- brettermeier 4mo ago[flagged]
- shlewis 4mo ago1. There is a link to a demo website, which is in fact in similar style. 2. I don't think the website is _nearly unreadable_. 3. Pretty rude remark.
- KomoD 4mo ago> 2. I don't think the website is _nearly unreadable_. For me personally, the color scheme is uncomfortable to read. Dark text on a dark background
- varun_ch 4mo agotry the demo. it’s an entirely different style, which shows how versatile the tool is
- 9dev 4mo agoIt still doesn't reflect the design philosophy at all, though. A wacky approximation of early MacOS that offers nonfunctional UI affordances doesn't fit my bill of No obscurantist programming languages and styles, or simple, maintainable software akin to machines that need to work under all circumstances in the far north. I was also a little disappointed with the philosophy's goals in general, which seem to be mostly the personal preferences of a lone-wolf style open source developer, not a universal approach to software design.
- mcphage 4mo ago> I was also a little disappointed with the philosophy's goals in general, which seem to be mostly the personal preferences of a lone-wolf style open source developer, not a universal approach to software design. How would a universal approach to software design be in any way appropriate for this?
- 9dev 4mo agoI like the general concept of software that treats its users as responsible adults, in the sense of not restricting them in how they can use the software; the analogy to machines that must work in remote areas with an extreme climate and no connection to the outside world is an apt one. Rejecting complexity in favour of maintainability, allowing to reach into and modify if necessary, those things I feel could be sharpened into proper, and universal guiding principles.
- vga256 4mo agoWhen you describe my programming and design philosophy as "the personal preferences of a lone-wolf style open source developer, not a universal approach to software design", I consider that the absolute best compliment I could have ever hoped for! A "universal" approach to software design is the problem I am addressing, not the solution. Coming up with your own philosophy of design and implementation that works for you, and hopefully works for others, is how we get better software.
- 9dev 4mo agoI'm not arguing with that, I think; I agree with your general sentiment and apparently read many of the same books you read as well. Yet I still believe there's value in a shared understanding of what quality software is, and what ideals to strive for in its conception.
- JdeBP 4mo agoIt's the decades-old problem of blue on black, which has led to interminable discussions of which exact tint of blue should be ECMA-45 blue on a terminal. Pick one, it has poor contrast with a black background. Pick another, it has poor contrast with a white background. * https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#dont_like_blue https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#dont_like_...
- Hugsbox 4mo agoIdk man, I think it's pretty charming even if it's not exactly the design choice I'd have gone with.
- tquinn35 4mo agoIt is for sure readable, why so dramatic?
- nkrisc 4mo agoMy vision isn’t great and I do find it more difficult to read comfortably than most sites. I haven’t checked the actual contrast ratio, but for this particular font and size the text color feels like it’s lacking strong contrast against the background. The tabs at the top are even more difficult to read comfortably than. But I understand that sites that look this way are not made for maximum legibility, but as an in-group signifier.
- brettermeier 4mo agoThe text flows over the whole width is one point, the paddings and margins is another one. Sure, you can read this if you really want, but it's painful.
- neoromantique 4mo agoI would like to introduce a wild concept -- browser window is resizable.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- brettermeier 4mo agoDo you think I will resize my browser window just because you fucked up your layout? No, I will leave.
- neoromantique 4mo agosure, but I prefer this layout to majority of big tech today. Gives me flexibility and choice and does not punish me with 600px wide content box because majority of users have trouble grasping the concept of window management.
- Gualdrapo 4mo agoidk, the demo thingy looks great. https://tomotama.com/kikidemo/ https://tomotama.com/kikidemo/
- projektfu 4mo agoObviously we have different monitors, but on mine the geneva-9 font doesn't render properly in the subpixels causing alternate green and purple, the underlines don't line up to the beginning of the words, and the whole thing stretches across the window the same way.
- mock-possum 4mo agoCould use some more attention to responsive layout though - too nav links aligned left flow into and overlap with top nav links aligned right. I’m on my phone right now so I can check but flex or plain old float could’ve solved that.
- elicash 4mo agoHN Guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. [...] Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative. [...] Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
- micromacrofoot 4mo agoif you move your mouse to the edge of your browser window it turns into a little bidiretional arrow, if you click then drag you can make your window more narrow until it suits your desired reading preference
- voidUpdate 4mo agoI prefer text over the whole width compared to websites that put all their content in the left 80 columns of the screen, taking up about a quarter of my screen width
- handfuloflight 4mo agoWhy does my eye need to move more than it needs to?
- voidUpdate 4mo agoWhy does my screen need to be used less than it needs to? If you're only going to use 1/4 of my screen for your content, you could at least put a cute cat picture in the rest of it or something
- handfuloflight 4mo agoWhitespace is for breathing.
- voidUpdate 4mo agoThat's a hell of a lot of breathing. I don't have that much lung capacity
- kjs3 4mo agoTroll trots out the old "You should only be allowed the web site aesthetic I approve of and anyone who doesn't agree with me is stupid!" and is shocked that not everyone on HN appreciates their insightful genius.
- brettermeier 4mo agoSome things are a standard, and thats a good thing... Line lenghts discussed here for example: https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
- kjs3 4mo agoSorry...I'm too busy laughing at the idea of "there is one canonical 'standard' for anything in web UX that everyone agrees with" to google up one (or a dozen) websites that disagree with the undoubtedly fine folks at the Baymard Institute.
- moffers 4mo agoI wish we could get back to a “mom and pop” software market. Itch.io feels like it’s doing a lot of work for indie software that used to just be everywhere and easy to stumble onto.
- sph 4mo agoIf selling software for money wasn’t such a pain in the arse I would put stuff on my website rather than itch.io It took me two weeks, plus sending IDs, incorporating an ltd, to get a license to sell software with Paddle. With itch I just need a paypal/stripe account.
- Lord_Zero 4mo agoI am going through this right now! I am provisionally approved and still waiting. Even worse I am going through SMS phone number verification with SMTP2GO. Apparently if you wanna send automated texts in America, you need a real phone number. And to not get immediately blocked, you need to fill out a form that goes to the major carriers for approval (like AT&T). And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.
- rpdillon 4mo agoYep, it's called 10DLC. My teams work on telephony integrations, and for the devs to even test that outbound SMS is working, we need to go through this process with every provider we integrate. Massive pain, indeed.
- abnercoimbre 4mo ago> And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain. In defense of Paddle (I use them for my own livelihood), they're on the hook for remitting sales taxes to ALL the governments where your customers might reside. They also manage customer disputes, chargebacks, refunds etc. I always redirect support emails to Paddle.net [0] which does the trick 99% of the time. Stripe or PayPal are nothing like that. They're just payment platforms. Since Paddle takes on so much liability, it seems reasonable to ask for a lot of initial paperwork from its sellers. [0] https://paddle.net https://paddle.net
- unkeptbarista 4mo agoKiki's themes can be edited to suit one's personal tastes. The theme .css files are about 120 lines long.
- theragra 4mo agoReminds me of a time when my homepage (before lj blog) was using cmsimple. BTW, c still exists. Not sure if it is still "simple" tho. https://www.cmsimple.org/en/ https://www.cmsimple.org/en/
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago> c still exists C and Go are two languages I feel like if you learn them, you can come back years later and if your memory is still good, you could get back up to speed pretty darn quickly. Every few years I go back to Go and try to build web apps using only the standard libraries, and I always find myself very quickly picking up all the concepts.
- nxobject 4mo agoFor some reason, Java has the same feeling. Professionally I do both embedded and statistical computing, and Java's been nearly anathema to this. But every 5 years I patch a hobby project I did once in college, and it comes right back (and with JVM hot reloading too.) It gives me the engineering warm and fuzzies.
- smusamashah 4mo agoShould have been written with bouba philosophy.
- binary0010 4mo ago"It's built so that if something looks wrong, you can change it yourself without spending hours reading tutorials and watching coding videos" Does anyone do this? Every none coder I know just has llms build everything for them - can't imagine why they'd be looking up coding tutorials for a homepage.
- mapontosevenths 4mo agoSometimes we build things for the way it should be, rather than the way it is.
- sneak 4mo agoThe design philosophy says you should be able to repair your own tools, but this is closed source proprietary software. Cute page, but does not walk the walk.
- nosrepa 4mo agoIt's not closed source.
- klibertp 4mo agoI'm not going to blame you _too_ much, since I had similar suspicion, but you could have (as I did) just downloaded the .zip file and examined the contents. In the shareware version, some things are probably missing (I think not all themes are there), but otherwise it's just a bunch of PHP files, no obfuscation or anything. The markup language is configured in a text file, and the parser for that file is just next to it. The configuration is used for configuring the markup parser, which is also present. And so on. It's not open-source only if your definition of OSS is "has to have a Github page".
- sneak 4mo agoJust because you can see the source code does not make it open source. Shareware software is proprietary software. Open source means free software, which is a license that allows unrestricted use of the source code. Shareware isn’t free (as in speech OR as in beer) software. The definition of OSS is well defined, and isn’t my definition. This is why there is a term called “OSI-approved license”.
- hypersoar 4mo agoThis is a tangent to this post, but... I happen to have a cat named Kiki who looks rather like the mascot for this project. Her health is failing, now. I just spent the night on my living room floor next to her. I'll, likely have to put her down, today. I might use this project to make a memorial page for her. https://ibb.co/7dRCnWrp https://ibb.co/7dRCnWrp https://ibb.co/1GWwDKLY https://ibb.co/1GWwDKLY
- blanched 4mo agoI’m sorry you’re going through this. She’s very cute. Dedicating a project to her sounds like a great idea. If you use Reddit, I can also highly recommend the r/petloss subreddit for a bit of “group therapy”. It was very helpful for me a couple years ago.
- cyanureworld 4mo agoI'm so sorry. Sending you and Kiki love today.
- vga256 4mo agoOh geez -- we went recently through this with our tuxedo, who sadly passed a few years ago. I am glad you'll be able to give her the peace she needs. The kiki this software is named after, is an extremely rambunctious rotten kitten whom we adopted after our tuxedo passed away. https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/115742268356907140 https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/115742268356907140 :)
- chalupa-supreme 4mo agoWishing you peace during this time — and thank you for cherishing Kiki as much as you have. A memorial page is a nice way to honor her.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- sphars 4mo agoI'm sorry you're dealing with this. I had an orange tabby also named Kiki for most of my childhood through early adulthood, 16 years. He suffered from kidney failure and it was a sad day when we had to put him down. May you have peace during this time.
- lioeters 4mo ago> kiki was built around the idea that the web took a wrong turn a couple of decades ago. HTML was supposed to be simple and straightforward Hear, hear. We need more of this kind of courage to start over from first principles.
- dspillett 4mo ago> kiki is shareware. Now that is a blast from the past. Is much else distributed that way these days?
- vga256 4mo agoWould love to know myself. I haven't seen the term used in 20+ years.
- JdeBP 4mo agoNot enough reading of Hacker News, young grasshopper! (-: Used several times within the last month alone. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375691
- vga256 4mo agoI meant more as an active use-term for software licensing that kiki uses (and in the sense of the OP's question), not in its historical sense that it is used by writers now.
- NuclearPM 4mo agoCommander Keen! Duke Nukem! Leisure Suit Larry! Scorched Earth! Lemmings! Happy times
- ofalkaed 4mo agoA fair amount of software follows the model but does not use the term, everytime I go on the play store to look for an app I encounter many that offer a free version with limited features.
- InsideOutSanta 4mo agoThe term doesn't make much sense anymore because we don't share software, we just download it from the source. The business model makes more sense than ever, though.
- dallen33 4mo agoPHP was and still is the best.
- Sohcahtoa82 4mo agoI dunno, PHP seems to have a lot of foot-guns. include $_GET[...], register_globals, magic quotes, extract($_REQUEST), weak comparisons, loose typing, eval, risky file upload defaults/patterns, preg_replace /e, dangerous deserialization gadget chains, path traversal into includes, and the whole "URLs can be file paths" abstraction... PHP is basically "RCE-as-a-Service" as far as I'm concerned. Allowing a URL in any function that wanted a file path was an absolutely bone-headed design choice. They made `curl | php` a language feature.
- mapontosevenths 4mo agoLike everything it depends on your goals. As a novice developer PHP is wonderful. Everything you see as an obvious security failing is exactly what made it great to a new dev back when most of that was still allowed by default.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4mo agoThat must be the first time in a very long time that I've seen something claim to support PHP 4.
- xydac 4mo agoOh ! i cannot see myself doing php again, loved the language and have some good memories too but that me was 10 years ago
- aleksandre_dev 4mo agoThe best part of the no-build, small-footprint approach is longevity: no dependency rot, nothing to maintain, and it'll still open and run in ten years. We've half-forgotten that "view source and hack it" is how a lot of us learned the web in the first place. Good to see tools that lean back into that.
- hdjrudni 4mo agoMaybe I'm not reading this right, but it has its own markup language called "Bug". This is the opposite of no-rot. If it's using technologies you've never heard of before, who is going to be around to maintain them in 10 years?
- aleksandre_dev 4mo ago[flagged]
- zuzululu 4mo agothat font color is impossible to read on the black background I'm guessing this is made for a specific audience who dig this type of UI
- markandrewj 4mo agoHello, neat project. I am also from Edmonton area. I wonder if we have talked previously, in the the late 90s I ran a local BBS system with my colleague.
- vga256 4mo agoI very possibly would have dialed into your BBS in the late 90s :) 403 had some great local boards, of both the public domain and piratey kind!