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Tiny websites are great

tinyprojects.dev

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Re: Tiny websites are great

#41

Post by hagy »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #34
StavrosK wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they let you drag and drop a zip file to create a site, but is geared more towards companies/professionals. Neocities is more geared towards a community of independent creators, though, so I'd rather support/promote them for indie stuff.

That's a cool initiative. The HN in me wants to critique it a bit. Why no markdown or WYSIWYG editor? Is it because that would turn it into wordpress? I feel like there's a place for a service that can, * Host static content like netlify/neocities on a CDN * Allow you to register a domain * Choose a template and enter content with basic markup This should be able to be done in edit: ~~markup~~ markdown/WYSIWYG

I think there are several sites that offer such functionality. Squarespace and Wix immediately come to mind due to all of their advertising. There was some other company I used a while back for a small website for an engineering team, but the name escapes me. These sites are perfect for small business and organizations that just need some web presence without having to think through any of the technical side.

Re: Tiny websites are great

#42

Post by jachee »

three_seagrass wrote: post #27
bArray wrote: post #8

I was nodding reading this and then: > No libraries or frameworks (the exception being analytics) There has got to be a better way of collecting analytics than to inject a bunch of crappy JS from some company (probably Google).

Is there a way to do time-on-page with backend-only analytics?

Answering a question with a question: Is there a better way to more-meaningfully measure "engagement" than time-on-page?

Or, better yet: If it's a tiny site, do you really even have to care about time-on-page?

Re: Tiny websites are great

#43

Post by saityi »

I tried to apply the philosophy of keeping things as simple as possible while writing https://saityi.github.io/sml-tour

Initially, I wanted no JS and for it to look good in a text-based browser like links, too, but I've strayed from that a bit. Syntax highlighting of the code examples was easiest with a javascript include, and the TOC is a mess hidden by CSS, so it looks particularly egregious in text-based browsers.

The website is still functional without JS and text-only, though, and without the favicon and syntax highlighting it comes in at ~4kb to load a page, which I'm happy with; with them it's closer to 40kb, which isn't the worst.

Re: Tiny websites are great

#44

Post by anderspitman »

tonymet wrote: post #13
bArray wrote: post #8

I was nodding reading this and then: > No libraries or frameworks (the exception being analytics) There has got to be a better way of collecting analytics than to inject a bunch of crappy JS from some company (probably Google).

with static sites server-side analytics are doable. You can still cookie the browser, record it to access log and you can get pageviews and uniques easily

Problem is if you're using a CDN it might not give you access to complete logs. Still there's at least one better free option than GOOG analytics IMO[0]

[0]: https://anderspitman.net/20/#get-off-google-analytics

Re: Tiny websites are great

#45

Post by jachee »

lvturner wrote: post #5
thomas wrote: post #3

They are great but they are very bad for seo, so they are vastly underutilized.

Why are they bad for SEO? The author seemed to be talking more about CSS and JS rather than content - does not using bootstrap or ReactJS mark you down on search results?

IMHO, SEO is just shorthand for SnakEOil.

If gaming search engines is your Brad-and-butter, is your idea really that novel?

Re: Tiny websites are great

#46

Post by dang »

MattGaiser wrote: post #38

Make a tiny website, just with Node and Firebase, lol.

Can you please make your substantive points without being a jerk? We're trying for a bit better than that here, and it's all too easy to come across that way, even if you didn't mean to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Re: Tiny websites are great

#47

Post by anderspitman »

trog wrote: post #7

Tiny websites are great! It's interesting to note that the website content itself for this article is 5,045 bytes (HTML + CSS), but the analytics code (firebase-analytics.js) is 26,458 bytes, and firebase-app.js (whatever this is?) is 19,865 bytes. Not a criticism; analytics is important & maybe the app JS is too. Just think it's worth bearing in mind that it's really easy to blow out your website's total delivery im…

GoatCounter's[0] analytics script is 2.21KB.

[0]: https://www.goatcounter.com/

Re: Tiny websites are great

#49

Post by hagy »

julianeon wrote: post #30

Since we're talking about tiny websites, and this seems pretty relevant: If it's only static HTML and CSS, it's just a bucket o' files. You can store things like that on S3 for... I don't even know how little. A tiny amount. You will not find a cheaper hosting option than this. I made this site on S3, using Svelte, which is intentionally the humblest, smallest step up from plain JavaScript HTML & CSS, at the link bel…

I agree that S3, Route 53, Certificate Manager, CloudFront are great for serving small static websites, but as others have mentioned there are plenty of free alternatives. Nonetheless less, I think this approach is the right solution if you're already in the AWS ecosystem since it integrates well with other serveries. E.g, adding LambdaEdge if you need some dynamic components in the future.
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