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Run Your Own Website

zacs.site

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Re: Run Your Own Website

#111
post #36
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI your font-size is uncomfortably huge, I can see maybe 25 lines of text on my desktop screen. It feels like I should step backward a meter or two.

Enormous fonts is a trend in modern web design for some reason. I browse most sites at about 66% zoom. Get used to the Ctrl+- shortcut.

This is due to design as in what designers do. Usually website designs are fairly static with a mobile and a desktop reference design that frontend developers then have to implement.

Most designers do not work intimately with the content, so text is more shapes on the page than the main course. I do not mean this disparagingly, I have just seen a lot of designs in my time where the text is placeholder stuff in designs.

In reality text needs to be of a certain line length. If it gets too long then it can be hard to follow. Wall of text is a problem too.

The best way to do text is to make it proportional to the width of the browser window. If the lower font size is the 16px recommended by Google for accessibility then the maximum size can be what you might call enormous - on a 4K monitor. Everything can be just right in between.

If you do have a 4K monitor and you are using it for just one browser window then enormous is what you want - it will look good in the meeting room on a huge screen that everyone can see.

Some fettling of margins can go on too, so a small screen can have narrow margins, so 1rem on a phone and a lot more on bigger screens.

With these methods it is possible to make design a lot easier with everything proportionate to screen size. But if your designers are only thinking in terms of fixed with fonts and they produce the mobile and the desktop views with baked in font sizes that get signed off by the client then you are stuck with it.

It really is up to the design community to get with font scaling and to not be insistent on a couple of fixed font options.

This should be simple but in a multi-disciplinary team where most web design is then sausage-factoried with old layout hacks (so no CSS Grid or CSS variables) then progress is difficult if not impossible.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#112

I totally agree with this. While running and maintaining your own website isn't trivial enough yet that _anybody_ can just up and do it, it's definitely something most anyone willing to spend a weekend can pick up and learn, with maybe a bit of help. Been considering moving towards a static site generator setup myself, and is currently looking at Gatsby. I'm curious though --- barring preference for language, which g…

It comes down to how much time and effort you want to invest into learning a new system, which should depend on how many of the advanced features those systems enable that you will use. For me, that answer was as little as possible and zero. I just need a good static site generator. There are a bunch to choose from these days, but fewer back when I was faced with this decision in the early 2000s, so I wrote my own. If you don't need anything flashy, use something like my engine (First Crack: https://zacs.site/projects.html#firstCrack) to build the site and GitHub Pages to serve it. If there's a certain feature you want that a combo like that does not allow for, find the simplest engine that meets your needs, learn to use it, then go from there. Most of the big names are pretty good these days, so you can't really go wrong no matter which you choose.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#113

At least own your domain name and be able to easily move your website content to whereever you want. I think for most people it's cheaper and more convenient to use a hosting service, and that's fine... as long as you can change hosting services. I've had my personal site ( https://dwheeler.com ) since 1999. As noted in https://dwheeler.com/aboutsite.html my site has been hosted on 4 different systems, and I'm sure t…

> At least own your domain name Serious question: How? Aside from .onion[0], all TLDs I know of only allow you to rent a domain name, and will take it away if you don't keep paying their protection racket year-on-year. I would be happy to pay >1000$ to purchase a (human-readable, second-level, etc) domain, if I could actually find where to do so. 0: which is less "own" and more "conjure out of the platonic ether some…

It's like paying property tax to the government. Even if you own it, you have to pay to keep up the infrastructure, I guess.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#114

"your website as a record" resonates with me. I recently redesigned my website (which is online since 2001) and one new feature I added is a random button. Clicking it will open a random page which is often a blog post I wrote many years ago. It's easily the most fun feature for me personally as it makes me remember things of my life... I don't know how much other visitors use or like it. If you want, give it a try a…

A very nice website. It is rare to have websites of such character these days. Potentially everyone should be able to have a website that offers up some of their personality, yours has that, anyone can tell some effort has gone into it.

The only thing though is that in the contact details there is the 'I get so many emails that I will probably ignore yours' message. This I don't think is necessary. It sends out the wrong message. You could have a template or two to handle enquiries that you don't have time to reply to so you don't discourage that one person who does want to reach out to you but does value your time more than their own. Those that don't care about your time will ignore your 'don't bother emailing me coz I am too busy' message anyway.

It is crazy how we have all of these methods of communication but we have all put up barriers. There was a time when everyone had their name, phone number and address in the phone book. We used to actually use the phone in those days too.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#115
post #35

Yup. People tend to assume running your own site is difficult but running a static webserver is dead simple. As long as you don't involve all the unneeded dynamic language and database it's secure and doesn't really need updating all the time either. 90% of people can run a static web server on their home connection and it would fulfill their every requirement (as well as solving almost all 'problems' that exist on t…

Mm, nah. Running a DNS server, choosing an HTTP server and keeping all the related software up to date is a lot to ask even of a techie. And that's not even getting into dynamic IP issues.

It's easy enough to setup and host a static site on s3 or netlify or whatever if you want to go that route. It's not that hard that a tutorial can't walk you through the steps.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#116
post #12

Any opinions on what are the best software choices for a single person to use in 2019 to build a website from scratch? I’d be willing to learn something new if I knew in 2 years, I’d be extremely productive.

The question is, what do you know now? If you're starting from scratch, you should learn HTML and CSS. As for tools, again it depends on what you already know. If you know a given programming language, you can usually find a static site generator that you can build from.

There are lots of templates free, or for purchase you can use, cut up and deploy. It really all depends.

Many just dip into wordpress, which for good or bad is pretty much the king of CMS. Others Drupal or similar.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#117

I can see why this article with a very basic premise is so popular. * It's short, so the average reader here has enough attention span for it. * It's obvious, so that leaves plenty of room for patting oneself on the back. * It's simple, so one can reference their own writings about a similar topic or related to it in some way. * It's about a topic that lets the commenter here show off their own website and bloviate a…

This post reads of "Why are people liking what I don't like?".

This article might be stating the obvious to you. However sometimes people have to be reminded that things can be done simply without the nonsense of cloud hosting, CDNs, automated deployments and all the guff that comes with it.

This sort of article is pertinent in the days of many of the large tech sites being censorious (there was a discussion with 100s of comments about youtube censoring infosec channels), sites with megabytes of JavaScript and even many CSS libraries / frameworks requiring a build tools for styling.

Reminding people that it doesn't have to be this way is important and it doesn't need your approval.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#118
Every creator who relies on internet for income should have their website separately, there is no excuse, its cheap to get lots of storage , and most hosting providers are not hellishly censorious like social media. What we need is a wordpress-like system that allows uploading and tagging everything in a consisten format with itemproperties. Then, e.g. youtube could autoimport a videos from the feed when asked to. I dont know if such a system exist, but it seems pretty obvious that everyone who sells their content through social media should have an online fallback/backup.

Re: Run Your Own Website

#119

I can see why this article with a very basic premise is so popular. * It's short, so the average reader here has enough attention span for it. * It's obvious, so that leaves plenty of room for patting oneself on the back. * It's simple, so one can reference their own writings about a similar topic or related to it in some way. * It's about a topic that lets the commenter here show off their own website and bloviate a…

* it s timely, because a lot of things are censored lately

* it’s something that a lot of people agree on, but it is NOT happening, so it s not obvious

Re: Run Your Own Website

#120

For my personal websites, I only ever tried wordpress around 10 years ago before I built my own from scratch. https://idiallo.com What I find interesting is that a swat of new developers thinks that the only options are: 1. free hosting with lock-in platforms (medium, blogger, ...) 2. Clever hacks (github, netlify, cloudflare...) 3. Expensive hosting ($40/m+) The alternative is to use shared hosting for simple conten…

A dedicated i7 server (with ssd) is $25/month in some hosts like hetzner
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