Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tiny websites are great

tinyprojects.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 227 posts

Re: Tiny websites are great

#81

Post by recursive »

hagy wrote: post #56
recursive wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 r…

Some people care about any of that stuff, but it's perfectly reasonable to make a site/page/app that just does something without trying to grow a community or engage or anything.

Re: Tiny websites are great

#82

Post by cwmartin »

stavros wrote: post #16

I love this initiative in principle, but the instructions left a rather sour taste in my mouth. Create a Firebase app, download and install Node and run some arcane cli commands? For what? To upload a 10-byte HTML file somewhere? Please, do yourself and us a favour and sign up for a free account on https://neocities.org , and make a quirky website by hand for all of us to enjoy. I half want to write a post like this…

https://glitch.com is also excellent. I’ve been using it to teach a website development workshop to 10-15 year olds and it’s the most intuitive interface I’ve found so far for those with no prior experience with HTML/CSS/JS.

Re: Tiny websites are great

#83

Post by bhargav »

Tiny websites are indeed great. They load fast, and minimize the steps involved in publishing content. I think my sentiment however, practically (i.e: in a business, startup, big company) conflicts with two things/requirements:

1. People who usually write content are not developers 2. People tend to trust sites that are minimal like the one OP posted.

Content writers traditionally come from background where they are trained and use tools like wordpress. We are now asking them to write HTML. I believe Jekyll here is a good compromise. We can generate static sites using Jekyll while still allowing simpler tools pre-publishing.

Regarding my point #2. Not a week ago, there was a thread to discuss how cool Stripe's animations are. There were multiple conversations in said thread that attest to this fact. Many people look for a sense of branding on product or service based businesses and relate those to their legitimacy.

I think my sentiment for small/simpler sites is a pretty common one on HN, but I think it all boils down to who your users are and what they prefer.

Re: Tiny websites are great

#84

Post by unityByFreedom »

hagy wrote: post #41
unityByFreedom wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Squarespace and Wix both have a monthly fee.

It should be possible to do something like neocities/Gitlab/Netlify with a one-time fee to cover the domain.

Re: Tiny websites are great

#85

Post by matthewhartmans »

stavros wrote: post #16

I love this initiative in principle, but the instructions left a rather sour taste in my mouth. Create a Firebase app, download and install Node and run some arcane cli commands? For what? To upload a 10-byte HTML file somewhere? Please, do yourself and us a favour and sign up for a free account on https://neocities.org , and make a quirky website by hand for all of us to enjoy. I half want to write a post like this…

Agreed.

Or just commit directly to Github, enable pages, job done :)

Re: Tiny websites are great

#86

Post by unityByFreedom »

oefrha wrote: post #74
saagarjha wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

If you think Slack is bad, try https://github.community/ .

> You ranked up to Ground Controller Lvl 1

I hate those undisableable social media accomplishments that come up as notifications, is Github.community based on Discourse or did it just copy their bad ideas?

edit: wow you can disable them in this one, amazing. I still hate it.

Re: Tiny websites are great

#87

Post by saityi »

saagarjha wrote: post #51
saityi wrote: post #43

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.

Now complete -- thanks again for the suggestion! I never liked having to include that bit of JS.

Re: Tiny websites are great

#88

Post by kyawzazaw »

stavros wrote: post #16

I love this initiative in principle, but the instructions left a rather sour taste in my mouth. Create a Firebase app, download and install Node and run some arcane cli commands? For what? To upload a 10-byte HTML file somewhere? Please, do yourself and us a favour and sign up for a free account on https://neocities.org , and make a quirky website by hand for all of us to enjoy. I half want to write a post like this…

this is actually how I have my personal website. fairly easy in my opinion.

Re: Tiny websites are great

#89

Post by saagarjha »

saityi wrote: post #87
saagarjha wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now complete -- thanks again for the suggestion! I never liked having to include that bit of JS.

It looks great!

Re: Tiny websites are great

#90

Post by Evidlo »

every wrote: post #55

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]... [1] https://every.sdf.org/ [2] https://sdf.org/ [3] https://sdf.org/?tutorials/metaarray

I was considering joining SDF, but I'm confused about the membership levels. What's the minimum level needed for static html hosting with a domain I already own?
Post reply on HN