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Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website

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Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website

#31

Post by philip1209 »

shahahmed wrote: post #30

this is cool! i've always struggled supporting custom domains. what dns wizardry does one need to do to support custom domains?

I'm using Render.com's custom domain features, which issues TLS certificates and manages them using LetsEncrypt!

Two other things that have been nifty are:

I also use a couple fun technologies for custom domains:

- Entri [1] a new product that's like Plaid for domains. So, you can normally get the domain set up without copying records into the registrar.

- If you don't have a domain - I use Google Domains Express Checkout API [2], which lets you directly purchase a new domain and automatically connect it to Postcard, also without copying records into the registrar.

[1] https://entri.com

[2] https://developers.google.com/domains/express

Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website

#32

Post by philip1209 »

turtlebits wrote: post #11

The problem I have with these "easy"/low code/push button type of services is that they're extremely bloated and generally slow. The few I clicked on are all over 1 mb. I remember seeing some others that built static sites off Notion and were even larger.

Hmm, sites shouldn't be slow! Most Postcard pages can get a score of 100 on Google's pagespeed test. I do this through a mix of caching and image optimizations.

What are you seeing that's slow? I'd love to dig into it!

Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website

#34

Post by tshaddox »

cercatrova wrote: post #25

Interesting that I can immediately tell it's a Tailwind website, with the colors, Inter font, dot grid background etc. Regarding the content itself, looks good. Looks like it's following the classic $8/m model for hooking up a custom domain, like every other site builder.

I mean it's a lot more Tailwind than the colors, font, and background. Some of the site is almost byte-for-byte HTML straight from Tailwind UI components such as:

https://tailwindui.com/components/marketing/sections/feature...

Which is the whole point of Tailwind UI, of course! It's a great product, but like Twitter Bootstrap before it is at risk of becoming a victim of its own ubiquity.

Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website

#36

Post by katsura »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #22

Personal websites should be personalized tho. It's like Facebook vs Myspace. Myspace allowed you to easily personalize your page, and there were tons of really cool unique pages. Facebook killed personal expression; you get to pick a cover photo, a personal photo, make posts, and that's it. Then they dominated the world, and an entire generation grew up never knowing that the internet used to be fun.

I think mmm.page [0] is supposed to take care of the fun and customization loving niche. It's been on HN before [1], and you can even try it without sign up.

[0] https://mmm.page/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424

Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website

#37

Post by philip1209 »

vehemenz wrote: post #35

- I can tell immediately what the product is and how much it costs. - The profile photo as the favicon is a nice touch. - Price point looks about right. How about a dark mode?

Absolutely - dark mode is high on my list! If you subscribe to https://updates.postcard.page, I'll post there when it's ready.

Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website

#38

Post by jaredcwhite »

Far be it for me to criticize solo startup products—any achievement in this space is immense!

But in general…something that routinely irks me is the lack of truly outstanding design/typography in a lot of "start a website/blog/whatever in 5 minutes" stuff I see pop up. At least this isn't using some crappy monospaced font (that trend is so cringe), but…just a basic Tailwind theme isn't all that appealing IMHO. I think any indie project to help folks get a website online should offer something truly exciting/quirky/artistic on the design side so it's not just a clone of bland corporate media.

All that aside, congrats on the launch and I hope it's the start of good things to come!

Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website

#39

Post by philip1209 »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #38

Far be it for me to criticize solo startup products—any achievement in this space is immense! But in general…something that routinely irks me is the lack of truly outstanding design/typography in a lot of "start a website/blog/whatever in 5 minutes" stuff I see pop up. At least this isn't using some crappy monospaced font (that trend is so cringe), but…just a basic Tailwind theme isn't all that appealing IMHO. I thin…

Thanks for the feedback! I plan to offer some alternative themes. I chose to spend my time making custom color support robust. For instance, there's dynamic code that determines which label colors have highest contrast on buttons depending on the theme color. So, there's some abstracted complexity there.

While the Postcard marketing page looks a little tailwind-y, I hope that the individual homepages look more polished and distinct. I've been working with a designer to tune everything, and I'll continue to make improvements.

Re: Show HN: Postcard – Easy way to make a personal website

#40

Post by 101008 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #22

Personal websites should be personalized tho. It's like Facebook vs Myspace. Myspace allowed you to easily personalize your page, and there were tons of really cool unique pages. Facebook killed personal expression; you get to pick a cover photo, a personal photo, make posts, and that's it. Then they dominated the world, and an entire generation grew up never knowing that the internet used to be fun.

I'd love something in between MySpace and Twitter. Which would be like MySpace but with only text updated and without that much personalization.
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