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My website is ugly because I made it
71–80 of 140 posts
Re: My website is ugly because I made it
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you look at the screencap you see a mail to hello@taylor.town. My first instinct was the same as yours so hf visiting https://taylor.town/ Edit: after posting this the taylor.town site became much slower - so maybe that's the hn hug of death gripping again
Clicking on the article on that site gets me back to the HN link. I guess that's just a landing page with links to articles he wrote, but doesn't host himself? Strange. And it really is ugly right now with the spotted background and slightly rotated links. Is he aiming for the "I just discovered a new feature and so need to use it" vibe? Like when someone makes a PowerPoint presentation and now uses the completely ov…
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Re: My website is ugly because I made it
#73Hah, yes! Whereas most of my developer friends have long ago moved to off-the-shelf Hugo or Jekyll templates for their personal sites, I stubbornly maintain my blog with entirely bespoke css and a backend only a parent could love. For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? It's like maintaining a classic car. You can buy a reliable dec…
Here's mine: https://www.justus.ws/
It's built with the excellent Eleventy SSG, but all HTML and CSS is done by hand (as you can probably tell :)
Re: My website is ugly because I made it
#74It is a bit of a shame he's changed the website in-between getting the email and this being posted on HN, I would have liked to see the original CSS rotate and non-JS scrolljacking website.
It hasn't changed. The linked page is an article about his website posted on a different site. Here is the site he's talking about: https://taylor.town/
Re: My website is ugly because I made it
#75Hey, my site is handcrafted too. But ugly? Speak for yourselves, but I've tried to make mine beautiful. Handcrafted doesn't have to mean ugly...
But of course, it's at the point where it's grown into something unwieldy. I feel like it's overdue for a redesign/rewrite. Just gotta figure out a clever UI design that works on desktop and mobile. Not only that, but it also needs to work without any JS, because I don't want my site to be nonfunctional without JS...
Re: My website is ugly because I made it
#76There's 'ugly yet interesting' and then there's 'ugly and boring'. This is the latter I'm afraid.
At its core, the homepage is still showing the output of a CMS looping through a folder of markdown files (probably) and displaying the title wrapped in a hyperlink. There appears to be zero information architecture - no visually distinct categories, no icons, images or dates, so everything is equally weighted, just in a slightly "wacky" format.
Most dev blogs get their traffic from something showing up on organic search, so the site homepage doesn't really matter, unless the dev actively wants to make it interesting, and encourage exploration. Despite the attempt at breaking that mold, this website feels much the same as those ones using a boring default Ghost template.
Re: My website is ugly because I made it
#77Hah, yes! Whereas most of my developer friends have long ago moved to off-the-shelf Hugo or Jekyll templates for their personal sites, I stubbornly maintain my blog with entirely bespoke css and a backend only a parent could love. For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? It's like maintaining a classic car. You can buy a reliable dec…
For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
Part of the joy for my personal web sites is building in the Easter eggs.
Connect via Lynx, and it's a different experience.
Hover over something at a certain time of day, and something happens.
Re: My website is ugly because I made it
#78I don't have a personal site yet. But when I do, I plan to make it with HTML+CSS+JS/JQ only Maybe apache or nginx as webservers host it on shared stuff or AWS free tier I just need to figure out how to center a div, and then I'll be in the business.
I've never understood the whole centering a div meme. width: 60%; // define your width as desired margin: 0 auto; Now go start your blog!
I'm not sure if you are being serious about not understanding "the whole centering a div meme". Your example handles a trivial case, but does not address the whole of the problem.
As others have pointed out, vertical centering is often the problem being discussed (although difficulties with horizontal centering do happen). Anyone I know that has written any non-trivial web application has run into the situation where they spent way more time than they thought they should have to getting some element in a web application centered on the page the way they wanted it to be.
This article is a good example of the complexity, I think:
https://css-tricks.com/centering-css-complete-guide/
The author makes a decision tree, which illustrates the complexity fairly well, and then there's a conversation in the comments between the author and a reader about whether parts of the decision tree are correct.
CSS is extremely complicated. It's easy to get lost in the complexity, and it can be very frustrating when you know how you want something to look, but can't quite figure out how to get it to happen.
That's why the meme is so popular. LOTS of people who deal with CSS can relate.
Re: My website is ugly because I made it
#79Hah, yes! Whereas most of my developer friends have long ago moved to off-the-shelf Hugo or Jekyll templates for their personal sites, I stubbornly maintain my blog with entirely bespoke css and a backend only a parent could love. For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part? It's like maintaining a classic car. You can buy a reliable dec…
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Re: My website is ugly because I made it
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never understood the whole centering a div meme. width: 60%; // define your width as desired margin: 0 auto; Now go start your blog!
It's been working for the second century.
I'll still bust this out if it's some quick page that's not going to last long (like some kind of "service down for maintenance" page that's only going to be visible for a few minutes, or something)
It's "bad" but you know what? It fucking works, it's concise, and I can remember it no matter how long I go between writing HTML/CSS.
Hell I wouldn't be surprised if the paths it takes through a typical browser engine also makes it burn 5% or fewer as many cycles as CSS centering methods.