21–30 of 108 posts
https://www.alexkras.com/eznews/
If I am actually interested in the story I don’t mind waiting a bit for it to load.
I wrote a simple RSS feed viewer for myself for the same reason. A lot of times I just want to read the headlines from top news sites. https://www.alexkras.com/eznews/ If I am actually interested in the story I don’t mind waiting a bit for it to load.
Edit: Never mind, found it linked from your blog!
For anyone else looking: https://github.com/akras14/eznews/blob/master/index.php
Nice work!
Drudge is a pretty good case study in minimalistic design. By most metrics it's ugly and even baroque but it's brilliant because it is easy to parse and gets to the meat of the narrative that Matt is trying to sell to his audience.
It's quick, easy to maintain, and has been completely mobile optimized since the flip-phone days.
It is built around showing you information, instead of information being an excuse to show you ads. Matt understands what he is providing and that insemination of information is more valuable than any extreme monetization strategies.
It doesn't have a confusing landscape of sections, icon fonts, ad videos and promotional content that prevent newcomers from understanding the flow. It takes but a few clicks before you are intimate with the interface.
It is the quintessential "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
I just wish there were more publications of this style that weren't hyper-conservative and biased.
For another example of a beautifully designed site that puts information first, look at Cryptome.
there is a huge problem with browsers right now -- they are very complicated and big and therefore their development is monopolized by three large organizations, leading to browsers that dont adhere to the best interests of the users. and yet, as this article demonstrates, much of the internet does not require any of the complicated machinery in modern browsers. we have seen our culture, the worlds culture, adopt com…
I see a lot of websites now which, in an attempt to reject all the nonsense, end up rejecting even basic CSS, and you are subjected to browser width text in Times New Roman with ugly blue underlined links (danluu.com is a good example. Such great content that I love to read but, to be honest, ugly). Surely there is a middle ground?
Something as simple as the following can make your website look neat and readable:
body {
font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
max-width: 800px;
margin: 0 auto;
}
a {
text-decoration: none;
}
These are fine technical reasons. I'll add some human ones: - vanilla html webpages had way more actual content [1] - they don't burden you with updates, social sharing [1] nowadays very often you run into a site with header, menu, flashing area, related articles, footer, cookie warning, etc etc. In the middle of all this you can barely see the first paragraph. And when you scroll down you realize there's only two of…
I made my first website with it when I was 11 (still have it on a cd rom)...it was so simple to use. In fact, a lot of stuff in the late 90s to the early 2000s were very approachable as a curious noob. I started tinkering with QBASIC during 1997 on an old 286 with a monochrome monitor (still have it), and when I got a Windows computer and I tried to make a Warez site on Geocities lol....manually searching altavista for 50mb rar parts compressing Playstation ISO images on a 56k modem, hosted on myspace.com (when it used to be a file storage)...it took all summer to compile but again everything was easier because people didn't give a shit what the site looked like, they just cared about what they could get for free.
Now it seems impossible to get away without some trendy UI framework or experts reminding us how we are doing it wrong...which ironically increased the webpage filesize to 196kbps mp3 files that works on modern devices.
These are fine technical reasons. I'll add some human ones: - vanilla html webpages had way more actual content [1] - they don't burden you with updates, social sharing [1] nowadays very often you run into a site with header, menu, flashing area, related articles, footer, cookie warning, etc etc. In the middle of all this you can barely see the first paragraph. And when you scroll down you realize there's only two of…
I miss the 90s web I used to browse with Netscape Navigator. I really liked static navigation menus where I didn't have to stop and infer the functionalities from an icon or hidden expendable/scrolling menus. I made my first website with it when I was 11 (still have it on a cd rom)...it was so simple to use. In fact, a lot of stuff in the late 90s to the early 2000s were very approachable as a curious noob. I started…
Reminds me I have to prototype some low bandwidth mesh network to see how fast it could go with simple html4 era websites.
ps: note that .. I was very eager to have full js websites when the web 2.0 thing started. failed experiment IMO
I wrote a simple RSS feed viewer for myself for the same reason. A lot of times I just want to read the headlines from top news sites. https://www.alexkras.com/eznews/ If I am actually interested in the story I don’t mind waiting a bit for it to load.
This is great! Any chance you have the source code for this handy somewhere? Edit: Never mind, found it linked from your blog! For anyone else looking: https://github.com/akras14/eznews/blob/master/index.php Nice work!
Here is the blog post to go with it: Simple RSS Reader in 85 Lines of PHP - https://www.alexkras.com/simple-rss-reader-in-85-lines-of-ph...
Minorly ironic the rest of the article about accessible text only content is hidden behind a non-functional (for me, currently) 'Read More' button.
Non-functional for me as well. :(