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Ask HN: What are some examples of well-designed personal sites?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of well-designed personal sites?

#56

Post by gtf21 »

I really like https://gwern.net.

When I built my own site (https://www.gtf.io), I tried to make it as "minimalist" as possible -- fast rendering (v little CSS, no JS, completely static). I wanted it to have no distractions whatsoever, I just wanted it to be readable.

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of well-designed personal sites?

#57

Post by adiabatty »

huehehue wrote: post #55

I've seen a few that are just plain left-aligned HTML with basically no styling, and I think they're beautiful. Does anyone know of any like that? I can't remember any offhand.

Off the top of my head:

http://www.stroustrup.com/

http://danluu.com/

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of well-designed personal sites?

#58

Post by nefitty »

danmostudco wrote: post #42

I've been a big fan of Lee Robinson's website, which is built with Next.js: https://leerob.io/ * Stylistic enough to have some heart, but simple enough to not have the design get in the way * Great content, his blog posts are a good mixture of technical and general thoughts * I like his timeline on the about me page which provides some flavor to his experience. As I was working on my personal site I was peeking into…

On this timeline I immediately tried to click the "Today" entry because it was blue. It didn't do anything.

Re: Ask HN: What are some examples of well-designed personal sites?

#59

Post by Klonoar »

rudedogg wrote: post #49
Klonoar wrote: post #34

I’m fairly proud of mine: https://rymc.io The mobile reading is especially smooth, a point of pride

Looks beautiful, and loads quickly. This is my favorite so far. Are you using a static site generator?

Yup! It's a customized version of Zola (https://www.getzola.org) that I hacked to add support for line numbers in code blocks (e.g, in any of the technical articles). I also committed support for the Dracula theme to the project.

The social stuff is a separate script that runs before site generation, which I open sourced (https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/activity-scraper). All runs on a "every 5 minutes" cron job that just fetches activity and rebuilds the site. It also rebuilds if I push to the server.

For the font support, the top logo is optimized to just include those four characters (RYMC), and then Aleo is stripped slightly. It's all base64 encoded into the CSS, and the CSS is all inlined into the page.

Before anybody says "but HTTP/2", yes, I know multiple requests on the page is fine with HTTP/2, and that's good for much bigger projects. I still notice a big time to paint difference for something like this where the total amount of data on the page is ~150kb. Icons are all SVGs, inlined into the page and just repeated via group/use tags - the only external request it makes is the header image, and I suppose Cloudflare injects an email decoder JS lib that's less than 1kb.

I think part of me also wanted to do it like this purely to ensure that there's tech articles out there that load fast, don't need AMP, and don't overload you with subscribe/follow/etc actions. It's old school, the web I grew up with - doesn't work for everything today and I wouldn't build most projects like it, but it's fun for my personal site. shrug

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