My personal website, https://g5t.de uses a custom directory-listing kind of framework I wrote - so it doesn't tick all of the requirements. It's not much, but it does its job kinda well (still lacking notable, deep and interesting content, sorry).
Tiny websites are great
111–120 of 227 posts
Re: Tiny websites are great
#112If only there were a search engine for tiny websites.
That sounds like an excellent idea for a tiny project! :)
Re: Tiny websites are great
#113The funny thing about this website is the page finishes loading before my phone OS finishes the animation to switch to the browser.
Re: Tiny websites are great
#114They are great but they are very bad for seo, so they are vastly underutilized.
I can't think of any reason why they would be. SEO things to do on your own site are all about content, markup - nothing about a tiny site is a problem here. In fact, speed of website is (was?) a important SEO factor - so by definition tiny websites start with a massive plus.
Re: Tiny websites are great
#115Managing a website and writing for it are two different activities to me. I prefer to do the latter in a WYSISYG editor. I don't want to fire up a terminal to deploy content changes.
With proper caching, the output of a CMS can be indistinguishable from a static site, but it can also include RSS, pagination, categories, tagging, responsive images, tables of contents, etc.
Take https://allaboutberlin.com. In my browser, most of its pages load faster than the tiny website above. It has a big header image, custom fonts and other features. You can achieve great things with HTTP2 server push, static caching and gzip.
You should definitely consider making simple, fast websites because they're great for visitors, but how you produce the HTML doesn't matter.
Re: Tiny websites are great
#116>It's your little corner of the internet to do as you please with.
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>Follow me on social media:
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>Twitter Instagram
Really makes you think huh?
Re: Tiny websites are great
#117Earlier 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…
Things like session duration and bounce rate, broken down by page, can tell what content people enjoy and what contents needs some work.
All those things can be gathered from the initial request if you can set a cookie on the user's machine using a cookie header. If you're Firebase then you'd need a request for firebase-analytics.js to set the cookie, but the file itself could be empty.
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.
Once the cookie is set you can get all this from the server side logs.
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.
Referers, if they're available at all, come in an HTTP header so once again server side logs would give you this data.
There is no reason to serve any JS for logging unless you want browser fingerprinting data like the user's window size. If your analytics script is more than 0kb then you're tracking people.
Re: Tiny websites are great
#118>“ Things have really changed since I began learning, and rightly so. Instead of coding in plain HTML, CSS and JS, I'm now using endless frameworks, modules and libraries to build increasingly more complex web and mobile applications. It's great, if I didn't use these tools my code would be an unmaintainable mess.”
How sad that this has become the widely accepted narrative. There’s a lot of value right now in NOT building things that way. Last week I had to deal with fixing another dev’s mess on a stuck project. Big company website, but nothing fancy at all. Purely a marketing window. The amount of complexity he put into it by using Vue.js was insane for the scope of the project. INSANE. To do something as easy as changing the pages tag we had to write an unjustified amount of lines of code. Framework-itis really is a bad disease, it not only affects your work, but it definitely clouds the simplest form of judgement, it appears. Then we have exactly this: someone who got a hammer and spent years treating everything like a nail comes to a reckoning, usually framed as a longing for the good old days when things used to be simple. Well, you know, things can still be simple, if you don’t offload to unjustifiably complex frameworks the duty of understanding what’s going on in your project. To be clear, I’m not at all against frameworks. I love and use some of them, but they’re like a closet. If you are a tidy and organized person, your closet will be full of neatly folded clothes; if you’re a messy person, it will still be a repository for heaps of displaced garments, ready to fall out as soon as you open the door.
Re: Tiny websites are great
#119I 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…
oh, wow, just read that complicated cli/firebase stuff. yeah, even easier (or maybe more minimalistic) would be: goto 192.168.0.1 (or .1.1) and figure out how to port forward '80' to your machine. install apache goto a dynamic dns service, get some sub-subdomain, and setup a curl script to set it to your IP. put an html file in your apache server. voila, you have your own website* *if your ISP allows traffic on port…
I think for non-techie users these things are equivalently difficult.
For me, I hate installing stuff, last time I installed Apache must have been before 2004, and I would like to not have to go back.
Re: Tiny websites are great
#120Earlier 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
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.
When you say WYSIWYG editors are universally bad, do you mean the idea of it is just bad, or the implementations we've had so far are bad?