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

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

postcard.page

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 94 posts

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

#41

Post by jaredcwhite »

philip1209 wrote: post #39
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 polish…

Awesome to hear that, and again I don't wish to sound like I'm criticizing Postcard specifically, more just generically shouting into the interwebs. I look forward to seeing more themes down the road!

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

#42

Post by suprjami »

Idea for improvement: show the webpage creation interface without needing signup. I want to see what it's like to use without making an account. I won't bother with sites which immediately ask for login. This doesn't have to be an interactive demo, just screenshots are fine.

I suspect I'm not the target audience anyway. I'd rather write a custom Jekyll theme and use git to publish with the GitHub Pages push hook. This sounds like it's much simpler, maybe something like the Blogger interface.

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

#43

Post by rambambram »

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…

I personally like the sites/blogs with a crappy monospace font, as long as they have something interesting to share with the world, preferably by RSS feed.

But I do agree that websites with an artistic touch in the interface are more than welcome. For my own website project it was a constant battle choosing between some artistic freedom and expression on one hand, and making it useful and easy on the other.

In the past, I made what I call the Quick Design module (https://try.hellowebsite.online/quickdesign/) where users could easily click together a goodlooking website design. They layout is always the same, but a preselected or random combination of colors and other settings gives some very nice results. I definitely would love to explore this even more in the future.

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

#44

Post by philip1209 »

suprjami wrote: post #42

Idea for improvement: show the webpage creation interface without needing signup. I want to see what it's like to use without making an account. I won't bother with sites which immediately ask for login. This doesn't have to be an interactive demo, just screenshots are fine. I suspect I'm not the target audience anyway. I'd rather write a custom Jekyll theme and use git to publish with the GitHub Pages push hook. Thi…

Yes, that's fair feedback! A better site editor is on my queue. Thanks for the suggestion.

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

#45

Post by philip1209 »

tshaddox wrote: post #34
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.

Totally fair! I also haven't spent much time polishing the marketing page - as you start to use the app, you'll see that a lot of the dashboard components are more custom.

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

#46

Post by shahahmed »

philip1209 wrote: post #31
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 Che…

oh wow thank you!

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

#47

Post by suprjami »

philip1209 wrote: post #44
suprjami wrote: post #42

Idea for improvement: show the webpage creation interface without needing signup. I want to see what it's like to use without making an account. I won't bother with sites which immediately ask for login. This doesn't have to be an interactive demo, just screenshots are fine. I suspect I'm not the target audience anyway. I'd rather write a custom Jekyll theme and use git to publish with the GitHub Pages push hook. Thi…

Yes, that's fair feedback! A better site editor is on my queue. Thanks for the suggestion.

Good luck! Congrats on getting a product to market. This must feel pretty huge and exciting for you :)

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

#48

Post by last_responder »

Just signed up. I like the simplicity. I currently use Cloudflare pages for my personal site and I like the idea of using this in stead since I can fire up anything I have a make a quick post. Price is in a good spot for my taste. Quick question -

- Do you have any plans for sub-pages? I like to keep my resume / CV handy on my personal site and don't really see a way to do this cleanly.

- I don't see a way to edit or delete a post.

- Posts with images see to show the raw filename like [[img111.jpg]] . Will there ever be thumbnail previews?

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

#49

Post by philip1209 »

last_responder wrote: post #48

Just signed up. I like the simplicity. I currently use Cloudflare pages for my personal site and I like the idea of using this in stead since I can fire up anything I have a make a quick post. Price is in a good spot for my taste. Quick question - - Do you have any plans for sub-pages? I like to keep my resume / CV handy on my personal site and don't really see a way to do this cleanly. - I don't see a way to edit or…

That's great!

Sub-pages are something I'm considering. Some users have linked out to a Notion. Also, the site supports embedded files - so you could even embed a PDF on the homepage.

Would you mind emailing me the formatting of the page you expect? Resumes formatting can get complex, so I want to make sure I support what you're envisioning.

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

#50

Post by philip1209 »

recuter wrote: post #13
philip1209 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! Yeah, some site builders don't require you to create an account to try the product. I take a different approach so that the site is mostly pre-filled by the time you see it. I try to address this by linking to a bunch of Postcard example sites on the homepage. For why to use Postcard - I'm setting out to build "dependable tech tools" [1]. I think we need more unitasker applications that just do a good job, and j…

> I try to address this by linking to a bunch of Postcard example sites on the homepage. I think I've developed a sort of blindness to the social proof thing with so it took me a bit to realize those are clickable examples of actual user websites and not just endorsements. Makes sense. > but, that no big VC-backed startup will ever focus on because it's a small market. A ton have come and gone like: https://en.wikipe…

Thanks! Postcard already supports embedded posts, a newsletter, and even full-text RSS. Check it out in action on my personal site: https://www.philipithomas.com
Post reply on HN