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My website is ugly because I made it

goodinternetmagazine.com

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Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#101

Post by WhyIsItAlwaysHN »

p4bl0 wrote: post #89
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 m…

I love the idea of the colored links for navigation in your summary. Thanks for the inspiration!

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#104

Post by parpfish »

delfinom wrote: post #99
parpfish wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

but a model could write blog posts that describe changes to the website as a blog-style changelog (e.g., 'today i spent an hour playing with CSS to change padding' or 'i refactored the backend to do more async calls')

a self-documenting blog about the blog.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#105

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

sli wrote: post #52
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 spent far more time writing my own generator with Babashka than I have putting actual content on the site. I was almost disappointed when I finished it. It doesn't support compiling stuff like TS or Elm, but the only JS on my site is a console.log that says there's no other JS on the entire site.

Years ago I had a JS banner nagging readers to disable JS

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#106

Post by topaz0 »

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

\lipsum has been perfectly good at that for decades

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#107

Post by einpoklum »

Well, if your website content is not very static, your website will almost without fail not be "made by you", but made by some kind of site generator. And while _that_ could be made by you (which seems to be the case for Taylor Town), I would suspect that, these days, it's possible to factor out enough "made by me" aspects of a site, and use a generic/non-bespoke static site generation mechanism.

Anyway, some people write their own HTML+CSS, some people build their own table, other people build their own car. I usually can't decide which kind of DIY I like best :-\

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#108

Post by izietto »

p4bl0 wrote: post #89
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 m…

Thing is, it looks better than many corporate websites out there. Kudos

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#110

Post by hinkley »

I lived in a garden neighborhood for a time. I did a lot of work on our place and my partner and friends would praise me but all I could see was the weeds or the poor pruning job done by the previous owners.

There was a retired lady three blocks away who had by far the best garden in a half mile radius. It was amazing.

I lived there almost four years before I started noticing her weeds, her mistakes.

In a lot of things we can see other people’s flaws but miss our own. But when we make something, that situation seems to be reversed. What we make isn’t that special, and everyone else’s creations are so much better.

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