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

My website is ugly because I made it

goodinternetmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 140 posts

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#81

Post by bradly »

neepi wrote: post #12
kapitanjakc wrote: post #4

I 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.

AWS free tier. S3+cloudfront has cost me $0.00 for the last year. This is incidentally the best price. My (single page) personal site is HTML+CSS (no JS) based on a template generated by ChatGPT because I don't give a crap. Trying to make something that works on a mobile device and desktop is beyond my meagre skills. This worked fine.

>AWS free tier. S3+cloudfront has cost me $0.00 for the last year. This is incidentally the best price.

I haven't tried this setup, but I'm using Cloudflare to serve my static sites for $0.00 as well. My mini rails apps I've down to $6/month VPS that I'm happy enough with as well for anything a bit spicy.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#82

Post by nooooooooo_ »

Honestly, I don't really understand the reasoning here. While the author's website doesn't look bad to me, creating and maintaining your own site doesn't mean it cannot also look "good". Sure, "good taste" is subjective, but most of us probably use the internet daily and are exposed to countless designs, and eventually develop at least a general sense of what constitutes good UI/UX and what doesn't. CSS can be awfully unintuitive, but if you're capable of building and styling a website, you're certainly capable of making it look nice. Saying "it looks bad to others because I made it myself" sounds like some kind of self-flagellation.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#84

Post by bradly »

donatj wrote: post #2

Hah, 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?

This is Journey Before Destination, the first ideal spoken by the Knights Radiant and a common trope across mythologies as seen with Job's suffering and Hercules' 12 steps to recovery.

Turns out they turned Hercules into a god to stop all the cool stuff he doing as a human :/ Don't let them take away your pain, don't let them take away your humanness. And if they do, just listen to some bird music instead.

https://birdymusic.com Either the best looking or worst looking site you'll see today.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#85

Post by jjulius »

rchaud wrote: post #76

There'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…

I feel like you've missed the point of the author's piece.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#86

Post by unsungNovelty »

donatj wrote: post #2

Hah, 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?

To each their own. I wanted something functional. A stable platform which is organised. I also wanted to write more. Which I still haven't gotten to do. It's more of a functional project than an art project.

That doesn't mean the OP's website is bad. But that is not why I created my website. But I have thought about Writing HTML in HTML after being inspired from Writing HTML in HTML by John Ankarstrom [1]. But it will be a forever art project and not my real estate on the internet. It's OK to want different things from the indieweb. That's what makes it diverse.

1- http://john.ankarstrom.se/html/

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#88

Post by neepi »

bradly wrote: post #81
neepi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS free tier. S3+cloudfront has cost me $0.00 for the last year. This is incidentally the best price. My (single page) personal site is HTML+CSS (no JS) based on a template generated by ChatGPT because I don't give a crap. Trying to make something that works on a mobile device and desktop is beyond my meagre skills. This worked fine.

>AWS free tier. S3+cloudfront has cost me $0.00 for the last year. This is incidentally the best price. I haven't tried this setup, but I'm using Cloudflare to serve my static sites for $0.00 as well. My mini rails apps I've down to $6/month VPS that I'm happy enough with as well for anything a bit spicy.

I would do that but I dislike Cloudflare because they wanted by DNS as well. I keep my DNS / CDN separate. Too many eggs in one basket otherwise.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#89

Post by p4bl0 »

donatj wrote: post #2

Hah, 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?

This is exactly it!

My personal website https://pablo.rauzy.name/ is also entirely handcrafted, I use a few custom Bash scripts and a Makefile to build it (it is entirely static, no server side rendering, and not a single line of JS), and I have a lot of fun playing with CSS for example to make it responsive, have a mobile menu, etc. I probably (re)invented a few techniques in doing so but that's what's fun!

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#90

Post by bitwize »

donatj wrote: post #2

Hah, 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…

I used to maintain a web site with a cobbled together script written in Guile. I still totally would do the same today.

> 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?

Indeed. One of these days my company is going to pull my Claude usage logs and mark me down in my performance review for not using AI enough. But until that time comes I'm writing every line of code myself.

Post reply on HN