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There's never been a better time to build websites

simeongriggs.dev

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Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#2
> Remix.run gives us the best of both worlds. Still writing your site predominately with JavaScript. [...]

This point is stated as if it's a widely accepted truth. Is that really the case?

I still labour under the misapprehension that one should aim to use as little javascript as possible.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#3
I have a feeling that this is the next religious war in dev.

I read this article and shudder in horror at, well, all of it. I like static sites (that wouldn't take minutes to build if they were written in a decent language). Adding lots and lots of JS dependencies and frameworks gives me the screaming ab-dabs - it's just adding complexity and dependency. I like writing code, not plumbing together bits of other people's code with bizarre config files. I object to CodePilot for all sorts of reasons, but fundamentally because I enjoy writing good code.

But I know experienced devs who have exactly the reverse opinions. Like OP, they see all this as going in the right direction and making their lives easier.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#4
post #2

> Remix.run gives us the best of both worlds. Still writing your site predominately with JavaScript. [...] This point is stated as if it's a widely accepted truth. Is that really the case? I still labour under the misapprehension that one should aim to use as little javascript as possible.

Also, TFA praises Tailwind CSS as "solving CSS", and as great as it may be, I guess that statement lacks a bit of nuance.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#5

I have a feeling that this is the next religious war in dev. I read this article and shudder in horror at, well, all of it. I like static sites (that wouldn't take minutes to build if they were written in a decent language). Adding lots and lots of JS dependencies and frameworks gives me the screaming ab-dabs - it's just adding complexity and dependency. I like writing code, not plumbing together bits of other people…

I feel the same way as the author but I work with php. Recently it's all been TDD, statically typed, and JavaScript gets web packed into one or two files so instead of juggling 15 script tags I only have one or two and a style tag for css. With CI this all happens in the background on every commit.

What you pay for when you hire a dev like me with 17 years of experience in the field is the ability to know which libraries are the best to use and which techniques are worth using in the process.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#6
No it's not, because your website will not get traction unless you SEO the hell out of it, pay google ads, pay for FB ads, pay some blogger to write about it etc. It's impossible for a website to be found when the top spots in every search are capped by a few known players. It's easy to make a private web page, but that's not a website.

In fact the best time was about 2005, when most current day's media sites started, because it was still possible to be found.

The tech you use does not matter. The web is backwards compatible

> The first time you see your website instantly update because you made an change in your CMS, it'll shatter your whole Static Site Generated world view.

Jesus, we 've had that thing since 1995. What happened?

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#7
post #2

> Remix.run gives us the best of both worlds. Still writing your site predominately with JavaScript. [...] This point is stated as if it's a widely accepted truth. Is that really the case? I still labour under the misapprehension that one should aim to use as little javascript as possible.

>I still labour under the misapprehension that one should aim to use as little javascript as possible.

Well, this is so 2005.

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#8
From reading this I get the sense the problems are lower level and there is no impetus to fix them.

I'm embarrassed to say, having programmed for over a decade, and running Linux for half of that, I still have no idea how to setup my computer to serve a webpage (or even a file)

I probably need to `apt-get install apache` and then deal with some magic config files and incantations and hope I don't mess something up and expose my whole computer to the open web. Then there is the whole mess of NAT (wasn't IPv6 supposed to kill off NATs?).

I need to then figure out the endless (and impenetrable) configurations in my OpenWRT/LuCI router to open a port and have it forwarded to my computer. Or maybe that needs to be done "upstream" in my landlords internet cabinet..? I'd have no idea how to even figure that one out b/c my router doesn't make it obvious in any way.

Then I need to find some DDNS service and figure out how to get that to route traffic from a URL to my IP (and then it's somehow supposed to reconfigure when my IP dynamically changes? Is that some cron job I need to write?)

Hosting webpages from home is still complicated and no progress has been made. And if you do it wrong someone will hack you and steal all your files :) The incumbents are probably happy it's so painful and you still need to do technical gymnastics to punch through NATs and whatnot. This text further confirms it by just telling people to host int he cloud. And understandably.. you'd have to be a total nut to serve a file from your home instead of dropping it on Google Drive.

When I was studying this stuff in college I just figured tech is in an awkward teenage phase and this will all get worked out and streamlined - but I think it's not going anywhere This isn't the tech future of 80s scifi

I don't mean to be wholly negative, I'd actually appreciate if someone pointed me to a good step by step to set everything up. At the moment I'm a sellout :) and I just use Github Pages and git push HTML/CSS files there. Ideally it really should be just as easy to git pushing to your own home computer but till then I guess I'll do that..

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#9
sanity.io sounds and looks awesome! I didn't know about it until now.

I'm wondering if Sanity would be a good fit for creating static websites for other non-technical people but still give those people the power to update the content themselves.

I've been trying to acomplish that with Airtable but I quickly ran into annoying limitations.

For example, I'd like to create a gallery website for my artist brother (something similar to this: https://brooksburgan.com) and give him the possibility to re-arrange, add and remove images without going into HTML or JS.

Can anyone who used Sanity let me know if this is a valid use case?

Re: There's never been a better time to build websites

#10
post #2

> Remix.run gives us the best of both worlds. Still writing your site predominately with JavaScript. [...] This point is stated as if it's a widely accepted truth. Is that really the case? I still labour under the misapprehension that one should aim to use as little javascript as possible.

Also, TFA praises Tailwind CSS as "solving CSS", and as great as it may be, I guess that statement lacks a bit of nuance.

I hear so many people recommend Tailwind but every time I look at examples it reminds me of an entry for the 17th Annual Esoteric Programming Language Competition.

Maybe you get used to it but hell it looks hard to parse visually.

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