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.…
Why not do the syntax highlighting beforehand instead of on the fly? For example, I use Rouge to highlight all my code as the site is generated.
>No libraries or frameworks (the exception being analytics) No, analytics are not an exception. Don't put fucking spyware on your pages. I can't believe it's 2020 and people still need to be told this. It's not okay.
Nowadays you can have your cake and eat it too. There are privacy-respecting free alternatives to GA.
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
WYSIWYG editors are universally bad, and so are Markdown ones. The benefit of Markdown is that you just write it in a text editor. You don't need syntax highlighting to use it effectively. Take reddit, as an example, which got millions of people to write perfect Markdown as intuitively as writing English.
Mine[1] is rather tiny and simple. It is actually generated by the tree command in about a second. It's a port from the gopher protocol and is hosted by the venerable sdf.org[2]. I decided to pay an exorbitant $60 a year for an enhanced membership simply to have an https address and some other assorted goodies[3]...
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…
> analytics is important A lot of times they're not. If you don't have a product, and you're not trying to sell anything, consider the possibility that you just don't need it.
Even for small personal projects, analytics can give you a lot of insights into what your viewers like. Things like session duration and bounce rate, broken down by page, can tell what content people enjoy and what contents needs some work. Also useful to know what fraction of your users are recurring versus new users to tell whether people actually return to your site or if they just check it out once. Lastly, the refer stats can help you figure out what other sites and communities are interested in your project so that you can further engage with them.
> 2. As few CSS tweaks as possible > 3. It must be fun to build I personally enjoy messing with CSS, it's incredibly fun to try new things and give an otherwise boring page some life and expression. Obviously there is a fine line between tasteful design and obnoxious/unnecessary clutter but a simple website with some character via design is much more memorable that black text on a white background.
CSS 3 is absurdly powerful and, if you use semantic HTML, progressively degrades really well. Putting just a bit of your touch on the content is a nice feature to take advantage of.
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
WYSIWYG editors are universally bad, and so are Markdown ones. The benefit of Markdown is that you just write it in a text editor. You don't need syntax highlighting to use it effectively. Take reddit, as an example, which got millions of people to write perfect Markdown as intuitively as writing English.
It really depends on the editor. Some editors give you raw access to the underlying code and apply styles to it as you type, kind of like syntax highlighting. Some actually try to be rich text editors with a (usually restricted) Markdown input. You can guess which ones make me want to flip a table. (Hint: Slack, fix your editor!)