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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

#111

Post by handsclean »

BlackLotus89 wrote: post #19
mcdonje wrote: post #18

The pic of the ugly site looks like it's full of blog posts, but this post is on a different site for some reason. I would've rather been sent to the ugly site if it doesn't have marketing cookies and a membership popup.

If you look at the screencap you see a mail to hello@taylor.town. My first instinct was the same as yours so hf visiting https://taylor.town/ Edit: after posting this the taylor.town site became much slower - so maybe that's the hn hug of death gripping again

The fact that people can’t see beauty in a thing like this feels to me like people looking at a field of flowers and calling it ugly for all the ways it doesn’t look like Disney Land.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#112

Post by p4bl0 »

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'll add one thing: since April 2009 my website files are tracked using Git, which means I can go back to what it looked like at any point in time whenever I want (`git rev-list --count HEAD` gives me 2184 commits). It's been fun to show my students what my own website looked like when I was their age!

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#113

Post by KronisLV »

Doesn't seem like the thing with the best usability for me (how my eyes scan information, in that regard the old site would be better), but it does seem aesthetically different and kinda cool. Plus, good job on not putting a whole bunch of JS into the site and letting it actually perform well without making my CPU sad.

That said, https://taylor.town/android-chrome-512x512.png is about 225 KB and probably doesn't need to be quite that big. The first optimizer I found online turned it into a 55 KB image. There, this time I'm the nitpicky nerd, bwah.

Not to miss the point though: it's cool that people are making things that are different!

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#114

Post by naet »

My website is pretty because I made it. Or at least it is to my tastes, I'm sure someone else would tell me otherwise.

The author of this article's site is taylor.town, not the site the article was posted on. For what it's worth taylor town looks nice enough to me. Actually a lot nicer than the goodinternetmagazine site hosting this article...

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#116

Post by nluken »

Might go against the grain here but I actually quite like the website, as minimal as the new one is. I don't want to oversell it, since it's not really super "out there", but the author put some nice humanist touches there like the hand drawn mouse that lights up when you hover over a link.

Could use some color, but it serves its purpose and I don't find it sacrifices readability as much as some others in this thread are claiming.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#117

Post by jurgenaut23 »

That’s also the very reason why it is an absolute madness to give up programming because AI is (supposedly) capable of doing it on your behalf.

We invented the car, the motorbike and the jetpack, yet people still hike and ride bikes. It would be dumb to stop doing things that you like just because one can do it better with a machine.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#118

Post by wpollock »

You don't know ugly. Your site is fine!

I wrote my website by hand in Notepad (and vi) in the 1990s. In the late 1990s, I rewrote it to use CSS. I tried to use a dark background (research suggested that was easier on the eyes, and it saved power), I tried to pick properly contrasting colors. This was the result: https://wpollock.com/>.

I used this site for 30 years, and never once received a compliment on its design. Some of us have no artistic sense, I guess.

Re: My website is ugly because I made it

#119

Post by chrisldgk »

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…

That’s hilarious, I was just using Sakura not long ago for a small mvp I made where I couldn’t be arsed to write any css myself. Good stuff
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