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My website is ugly because I made it

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Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#91

Post by rchaud »

jjulius wrote: post #85
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.

I don't think I did. The homepage is the only thing that's unique about the design. Had you arrived on any page besides that, you would think this is a bog-standard developer's blogsite, one skinny column amid a sea of white space.

It's possible to have an ugly site that's still easily navigable and visually interesting, even if the author is the only user.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#92

Post by navanchauhan »

oxalorg wrote: post #38
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…

Exactly this. My entire website is handcrafted, and not once but over the last decade almost ~10 times. It's fun and I almost end up revamping something every year. Everything handcrafted: - the matrix js code on home page. https://oxal.org click on the matrix for a surprise! - it's built using my own Static Site Generator: https://github.com/oxalorg/genox - my website uses a css theme, again handcrafted: https://git…

It’s good to see you here! For a long time I was just using your project Sakura CSS file to mane everything look pretty.

Even though I have moved on to using a mix of LaTeX.css and a two column theme, I still love using Sakura whenever I’m crafting a hand rolled HTML page for something.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#93

Post by immibis »

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.

If your budget isn't literally zero, avoid AWS and get a cheap VPS from Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, OVH, or Hetzner Cloud, IMO.

The problem with AWS is their extortionate egress fees which are about 50-100 times the market price.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#94

Post by jjulius »

rchaud wrote: post #91
jjulius wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think I did. The homepage is the only thing that's unique about the design. Had you arrived on any page besides that, you would think this is a bog-standard developer's blogsite, one skinny column amid a sea of white space. It's possible to have an ugly site that's still easily navigable and visually interesting, even if the author is the only user.

Respectfully, to the author's point, none of that matters and neither does anything in your previous post. The author likes it, and has fun creating it and enjoys molding and re-shaping it to their own changing desires over the years. That's what they find important to them, not anything that you've mentioned. As the author writes...

>Somebody with good taste could’ve made my website, but then it wouldn’t be mine.

>To bake bread, many feel compelled to grow wheat, mine salt, culture yeast, etc. Not me. My puerile palate yearns for buckets of Olive Garden breadsticks.

>That’s okay. Your “mine” is not my "mine."

... and...

>Soon it will become something else entirely. Because it’s my website and I’m perpetually becoming somebody else.

>You’ll change too. Your passions and values will pollinate; your ugly thing – whatever it is – will come alive again and again.

They've created something that is authentically "them", in a way that is authentically "them". And they love that. Not having images, or icons, or categories, or being easily navigable, or having a blog post section that looks "bog-standard" to you or anybody else are all completely irrelevant.

Hell yes, more power to them, I say.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#95

Post by inanutshellus »

nonethewiser wrote: post #29

His website circa 2023 was not ugly. It was minamalist. NOW its ugly. Its funny because I initially agreed with him when I thought his website was the same as the 2023 version. Which I didnt find ugly. But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a more negative disposition towards his message.

His original design was clean, minimalist and... unremarkable.

Now it's an intentionally-jumbled chaos. Ugly or not, it's remarkable. After all... we are busy remarking on it.

The new design has impracticalities / downsides, specifically it's hard to visually locate a specific link if you leave and came back, but... that's not something that matters to him.

He wants /unsettling/, /dischordant/, /interesting/, and more importantly /MINE/.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#96

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#97

Post by oooyay »

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…

Most of the tech blogs I run across are static sites. I understand the choice; to prioritize writing reads as pragmatic and I did that for a long time. At some point I got intrigued by being able to tailor my own editing experience and built my blog. It took months but now I use MarkdownIt and custom components in Vue to render the markdown in my posts. I built a commenting and moderation system.

I started all of this before LLMs but once I started using them it sped up my delivery substantially, especially with agents. It also informed how I use coding agents at work, which I think I've been able to adopt with relative ease and a higher success rate than most.

https://ooo-yay.com/blog if you're curious.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#98

Post by ninininino »

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…

No need to be afraid, the point is the author isn't creating it to please an audience. They are creating it to please themself. So your opinion isn't relevant to the author or this linked written piece.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#99

Post by delfinom »

parpfish wrote: post #42
ebiester wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference is that I spent so much time tweaking the website that I wasn't writing. Moving back to Jekyll was entirely a move because I wanted to spend more of that time writing. At the same time, I know that it limits me in other ways (for example, I'd love to have a way to post to my blog in one section and federate to bluesky and mastodon, and I know it's possible, but I would have to build it. So I'll…

An actual LLM use case! A model that generates AI slop blog posts so you don’t need to write content and can just focus on the fun parts of making the website

Why even waste money on an LLM. Just lorum ipsum the content since nobody is going to read it anyway

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#100

Post by susam »

I made my website [1] totally from scratch too! Using 100% handcrafted HTML and CSS and a little bit of Common Lisp. Hopefully it is not too ugly!

Like some of the other comments here, I don't use Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican, etc. either! I know they are solid tools and they serve many people well. But I haven't found them useful for my own needs. I prefer not to subject my website to the constraints of a large and complex framework when I can write my own that is smaller, simpler, and fully under my control.

I have a small Common Lisp (CL) program to automate a few things like applying consistent layout to all pages, generating RSS feeds, creating tag list pages, etc. But otherwise, all content on my site, including all of the HTML and CSS, is 100% handcrafted. Perhaps the only exception is KaTeX, because handcrafting a parser and renderer for a subset of LaTeX is not a problem I want to take on in order to maintain my website.

I've put together a little colophon page [2] in case anyone wants to read more about it.

Some people rightfully worry that maintaining your own program like this might become a major burden, potentially taking more time than actually publishing articles on your website. At least for me, that hasn't been the case. The CL program has become quite stable. Its commit history [1] shows that I don't tinker with it too often these days. I certainly have more lines of published content than I do code in the program. The CL program is about 1000 lines long but I have about 55000 lines of content.

[1] https://susam.net/

[2] https://susam.net/colophon.html

[3] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/commits/main/site.lisp

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