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How to build a website without frameworks and tons of libraries

kodingkitty.com

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Re: How to build a website without frameworks and tons of libraries

#41

Post by kaesve »

noobdev9000 wrote: post #22

Why? Most companies require skills in frameworks and libraries. The fact you can glue them together shows a different skill, that you'll most likely use in job daily. This feels so forced. Make a joke CV, strip it of any mentions of these "bad" things, try applying. Good luck.

There's a ton of value in building stuff without tools. It's somewhat similar to learning two frameworks; seeing React's philosophy makes me a better Vue programmer. In a similar vain, building stuff without tools teaches me a lot about what those tools actually offer me. What stuff is really hard? What stuff is really easy to abstract out? How do Vue/React/Whatever do these things?

It also teaches you more about your platform. In the end, all these web tools and frameworks are running in that same browser. I find especially with newer web developers, it's hard to solve something in React/Vue/.. because they don't know how to break up the problem. If you'd roughly know how to solve the problem without those frameworks, it becomes much easier to figure out how to solve it with them too.

Finally, I also just get toolchain fatigue. If I want to build a simple landing page, I don't want to learn new stuff, I don't want to read what changed in the latest versions, what the correct way of the day is to set up a project. Honestly, I don't even want to have a build pipeline and module swapping dev server, that inevitably needs to be configured. Just some static html/css/js is often good enough. And as I said, you also learn which problems frameworks solve well, so you'll know when some static files isn't the right choice.

Re: How to build a website without frameworks and tons of libraries

#42

Post by jamiedumont »

I've landed on the same approach for my photography portfolio. Benefit of jumping ship from development to photography is that I don't have to rely on Squarespace like most other photographers!

After trying a few server-based options like Ghost, Statamic and self-built ones with Phoenix or Vapor (I've covered some ground as a dev) and the usual SSG options I ended up just writing everything as straight HTML without any templates and upload to a Hetzner server using rsync.

The lack of templating for shared UI like navigation is a touch irritating, but with some RegEx magic I haven't found a change I want to make that takes more than a few minutes. I got caught out early on with some greedy RegEx that nuked some content, but git to the rescue.

Image generation with all the sizes and format variants is laborious, but it prompts me to try new layouts rather than relying on cookie-cutter ones like Ghost. Plus I've noticed a slight improvement in image quality generating my web variants out of my RAW editor (Capture One) vs using the libraries and CLI tools used in most SSGs.

It's slower, but my thinking is that it's more akin to putting together a photo book. It take more effort up front, but once it's done, it's done for good, and won't need mangling in and out of various CMS over the next 20 years!

Re: How to build a website without frameworks and tons of libraries

#43

Post by djbusby »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #16

Fancy that! HTML and CSS? To make a Website? They must be mad! All joking aside, I use the same stack save for the templating. Unless you are a web developer I don't see the point of a CSS framework, it's much easier to roll your own. Nor of a site generator, I tried Hugo it saved no time at all. Nor of JavaScript, a few months ago I tried replicating the websites of a few companies to improve my css skills, HTML and…

I find it very hard to design. And then design consistently. So, I love some CSS that has that pre-defined. Otherwise my looks like heck.

Re: How to build a website without frameworks and tons of libraries

#44

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

fimdomeio wrote: post #31

I believe the most minimalistic and productive way is to just use php. The language was specifically just created for that. If it's a simple site then you don't need composer you don't need router logic. just create separate files for header footer navigation and include them on each page.

You can build a router and layout in about 100 lines with no libs. If the router just checks the existence of the file and the layout just includes header.php, pagename.php and footer.php. I do that for simple sites. Very easy and fast.

Re: How to build a website without frameworks and tons of libraries

#45

Post by SoftTalker »

asddubs wrote: post #35
fimdomeio wrote: post #31

I believe the most minimalistic and productive way is to just use php. The language was specifically just created for that. If it's a simple site then you don't need composer you don't need router logic. just create separate files for header footer navigation and include them on each page.

if you want simple, you can't beat PHP + HTML. I wouldn't actually go that simple for anything that's more than a single purpose script, usually I would at least have a separate templating library, but it's really nice that you can do it.

Yeah the advantage of PHP is that it is its own templating language. You don't need anything else.

Re: How to build a website without frameworks and tons of libraries

#46

Post by lelanthran »

zh3 wrote: post #2

It may not have a zillion libraries, but surprised that a site trying to be zippy uses low-contrast text (obviously, I am not a fan of the "increases engagement time" school of thought).

There might be something wrong with your display setup.

He is using, as far as I can tell, the solarised theme colours.

They are very readable.

Re: How to build a website without frameworks and tons of libraries

#47

Post by Animats »

I'm still using Dreamweaver 8. I have to run it under Wine on Linux, but I have a permanent license, and it works fine. That does most of the drudge work. Sometimes I'll hand code some Javascript.

I wish there was a modern version of Dreamweaver that didn't phone home, didn't use "cloud", and didn't require endless payments.

Re: How to build a website without frameworks and tons of libraries

#48

Post by wonger_ »

INTPenis wrote: post #12

For information, static sites are unchallenged imho. Even for a certain level of collaboration, I think one could get away with using static sites. I haven't tried this in practice but imagine having a git-based CI/CD flow for a static site, where non-technical end users could use the web-based Markdown editors of github.com or gitlab.com to make small changes, save and push via a pull request. Each merge is of cours…

I've thought of something similar! A git-based flow for a friend's static portfolio site, where he can make text edits and upload images, and the site builds that content with HTML templates.

Not sure how the GitHub markdown editor would feel for the user. It might be really great, even for uploading images.

I was imagining a static admin page, WYSIWYG, that makes git pushes on submit. These were the headless CMSs that seem to be able to accomplish that:

https://www.siteleaf.com/

https://decapcms.org/

And not git based, but similar idea of static content editing: https://editable.website/

And this is what the admin edit page usually looks like: https://quick-edit-demo.vercel.app/admin/index.html#/collect...

But it was taking a bit of work to configure.

Re: How to build a website without frameworks and tons of libraries

#49

Post by viraptor »

mgbmtl wrote: post #33
pknerd wrote: post #21

Slightly off-topic: His single "index.php" with jQuery is helping him to earn thousands per month. https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1675829733668319233/phot...

Are there ways to view tweets without an account? Kind of like archive.is? For now, I could enter it in Google and view cache, but I assume that will go away soon. And if I understand correctly, it's not the index.php, but the actual service behind it, that earns thousands per month. Looks nice :)

Nitter.net was that thing, but the rate limits killed it for now. We'll see if it gets back online.
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