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Let's make the web personal again

blog.nymhq.com

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Re: Let's make the web personal again

#11

Post by wintermutestwin »

nunez wrote: post #7
Affric wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good comment. And the old web is still there but for almost 30 years it’s not been where the growth is. 99% of people don’t want computers, they want computers to do the work of life for them so they can get on with what really interest them.

thanks! agreed. browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 (though they largely don't want to, for good reasons) and HTML still works! i loved (LOVED) the old Internet, but time has moved on. that said, Hugo is amazing and I absolutely love it! sidebar now that I'm on this soapbox. i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge. The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their w…

> The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their work on their phones and tablets, they would.

Count me out of this brave new world of tiny screens and crappy UI/UX.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#12

Post by julianlam »

zote wrote: post #3
julianlam wrote: post #2

The HN zeitgeist (at least as of 2021) was to use a static site generator like Hugo or Jekyll. Why would we want to use Nym — speaking as someone who doesn't use either, that is. When the itch to "small b blog" (love the term, by the way) came around, I built my own blogging frontend utilising GitHub Gists as the data store[1]. It's been working great so far, and uses basically no resources. [1] https://devnull.land/…

Wouldn't adding Frontmatter to your markdown be a possible alternative to multiple files per gist to store metadata

Hey, thanks for reading! That is possibly a solution I could take. At the time I was focused mainly on getting something shipped asap.

It's been working well so far, although I did run into that issue of having more than 30 posts, so the oldest ones have already fallen off. Oops!

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#13

Post by superkuh »

nunez wrote: post #7
Affric wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good comment. And the old web is still there but for almost 30 years it’s not been where the growth is. 99% of people don’t want computers, they want computers to do the work of life for them so they can get on with what really interest them.

thanks! agreed. browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 (though they largely don't want to, for good reasons) and HTML still works! i loved (LOVED) the old Internet, but time has moved on. that said, Hugo is amazing and I absolutely love it! sidebar now that I'm on this soapbox. i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge. The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their w…

>browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0

For now. It won't be too many years before the mega-corp browsers not only drop early HTTP support but they drop HTTP/1.1 too. They'll do this in the name of "security". And then all that Chrome based browsers will support will be their very own invented and open-washed QUIC in the form of HTTP/3 and hosting a personal website visitable by a random person will not be possible without continued permission from an incorporated entity. HTTP/3 implementations by Google so far have made it so that Chrome CANNOT establish a connection without a proper certificate authority based TLS certificate. I give this change about 3 years.

You can argue that you can always get a CA TLS cert from another entity if, say, the incredible centralization of all the personal web into LetsEncrypt somehow goes bad. True enough, but if the pressure group can pressure LE it can probably pressure $otherCA too. And frankly, having to get the continued approval of any incorporated entity to host a website is just not acceptable. LE is currently a benign overlord for good on the web. So was dot Org for many years. But if it's made valuable enough the pressure and corruption will come.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#15

Post by nickthegreek »

Anyone know how a way to run a personal site for around $50 USD or under a year that can be pointed to a custom domain? My wife does some rug making and wants a portfolio available to show off her art, but we would prefer not to pay $10-20/month for such a site.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#16

Post by thesuitonym »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #11
nunez wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks! agreed. browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 (though they largely don't want to, for good reasons) and HTML still works! i loved (LOVED) the old Internet, but time has moved on. that said, Hugo is amazing and I absolutely love it! sidebar now that I'm on this soapbox. i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge. The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their w…

> The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their work on their phones and tablets, they would. Count me out of this brave new world of tiny screens and crappy UI/UX.

Using tablets or phones doesn't necessarily mean tiny screens--although for the life of me, I can't understand why so few companies have put effort into making a phone with a UI that scales for regular screens. (I know they exist, don't sent me examples, thee point is that there are so few of them."

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#17

Post by terminal_d »

nickthegreek wrote: post #15

Anyone know how a way to run a personal site for around $50 USD or under a year that can be pointed to a custom domain? My wife does some rug making and wants a portfolio available to show off her art, but we would prefer not to pay $10-20/month for such a site.

If all you need is a static website, you can do it for under $10/year if you use AWS S3. Alternatively, Cloudflare pages is free.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#18

Post by javajosh »

Great idea! But the problem, now, is on the client side. Readers need RSS. This lets authors publish at their own pace (which we can assume is relatively slowly) and doesn't burden the user with checking for new content manually. Of course, Twitter is a de facto RSS feed for some, and several other services (HN included) serve that role to some extent. But for the personal web, for those readers (and writers) of the web, you need RSS.

The other problem is that a lot of writing is just not very good. Perhaps contraversially, I think that too is a tool problem: I've noticed that good authors take more time with their posts, get more feedback from more people, and even go to the trouble of thanking them in the post - which for very popular authors, like pg for example, is quite effective motivation and reward. But most authoring tools don't particularly encourage this behavior, preferring instead to give the author the least resistance possible to publishing.

So, with either the return of Google Reader or equivalent, or the addition of a great RSS reader in Chrome, plus authoring tools that promote collaboration and revision, the personal web can flourish. Until then we'll have to make do with Twitter, etc for RSS and cobble together our own ad hoc editor networks via awkward emails and/or shared google docs.

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#19

Post by poszlem »

It's not going to be an original take if I say that I absolutely adored the early internet with the personal websites everywhere.

Comparing it with the internet of today it makes me think of the difference between a high street in a small city, full of different shops and cafes vs. a shopping mall, where everything looks the same, is loud, smelly, and obnoxious. (Of course the early internet had a lot of loud, smell, and obnoxious places, but those were much easier to avoid).

I also like the idea of people hosting their own sites. It was IMO much easier to talk about the free speech if you were hosting your own website and didn't have a "connection broker" (Twitter, Facebook) between you and your readers. The whole argument of "it's a private bussines, therefore it can just kick you out" goes out the window (unless you want to go and moles the ISP, but it's easier to argue that they are just an utility provider).

Re: Let's make the web personal again

#20

Post by mateomorris »

nickthegreek wrote: post #15

Anyone know how a way to run a personal site for around $50 USD or under a year that can be pointed to a custom domain? My wife does some rug making and wants a portfolio available to show off her art, but we would prefer not to pay $10-20/month for such a site.

primo.so (FOSS)
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