I honestly donāt understand why the author wants to move to a static site.
The reasons stated are basically
To me, these donāt sound like unsurmountable problems. One can run WP on a BSD. Iām sure thereās a plugin for WP that can handle org-mode files, and one of the main complaints Iāve read about Hugo and Jekyll is the maintenance problems they bring.
The downsides seem to be
Iāve recently moved from WP to Jekyll, but for different reasons than the OP. Ultimately itās their decision what platform they use.
I can understand the maintenance argument, not with regards to WP, but WRT the stack WP sits on top of. However, the only thing theyāre removing by switching to Hugo is MySQL and PHP. Two less software packages to manage, I suppose.
If maintenance is a problem, and they want to focus on writing, why self host at all? Why not go with something like Netlify or AWS Amplify?
Itās fun to tinker though. š
Looks nice. Iām curious what does complying with the GPL3 license of SimpleCSS looks like for a site using it? I imagine if you just drop it in, it doesnāt effect your project but if you use a bundler to ācompileā a final website artefacts perhaps it applies to the whole project?
I actually just changed the license to MIT. Iām not a licensing expert (far from it!) and didnāt realise that the GPL doesnāt allow for closed source redistribution. MIT seems more permissive in that regard.
Calling it framework wonāt be fair enough, a CSS Library is fine, Frameworks are vast and provide everything.
Calling it framework wonāt be fair enough, a CSS Library is fine, Frameworks are vast and provide everything.
I was saying that Frameworks attempt to provide everything, not that this specific thing is a framework or does attempt to provide everything.
The definition of a framework according to the Cambridge dictionary is:
a supporting structure around which something can be built
I think this project satisfies that definition. Yes, software frameworks like Bootstrap are goliath, but that doesnāt mean something small like Simple.css canāt be a framework.
The linked page doesnāt actually describe Simple.css as a framework, it describes it as a āclassless CSS template.ā Iāve made a suggestion to change the title of the link here to reflect that.
I use Minifluxās hosted service - https://miniflux.app/hosting.html
Maybe because the dark mode is not that great for our eyes?
Absolutely (and thanks for posting a link to my blog! :)) itās not great for your eyes, but itās about giving users the choice.
I donāt use dark mode 90% of the time, but from time to time itās nice to have the ability to switch if you want to.
Plus, some people prefer it. :)
With all due respect, some random guy saying itās bad for me, wonāt change my personal experience of how much better it feels when the color-scheme is right.
Iām curious about the transition. How did you migrate all the WordPress blogs and pages? Iām interested in moving my WordPress monster and had thought about Jekyll in the past.. very interested in your experience there.
I used a script to export every post and all images to markdown. Then it was just a case of adding frontmatter to the posts. Pages I just did manually.
Not the author, but there are plugins for exporting from WP to Jekyll, like this one.
I feel like you spend an excessive amount of time on your website and the things that surround it. Not faulting you for itājust making an observation. Also Ā£30 p/m for a website? Thatās a lot of money.
I like the increase in personality and being a bit more open about yourself. Truly reminds me of the 90s web.
300kb is a lot in 90s terms though ;) I challenge you to dramatically reduce your website and will accept a challenge from you in return (mine is already quite slim. Less than 5kn iirc).
Challenge accepted š - https://gtmetrix.com/reports/kevq.uk/FxTCQvc3/
Nice job! Looking forward to a write up of how you did it.Ƥ and waiting for a counter challenge;-)
Haha youāre absolutely right, but itās not an authentic 90s site (did emojis even exist then?) itās just a nod to the 90s. Considering weāre in the days of the multi megabyte webpages, I think 300kb is pretty good. š
Although, I do like a challengeā¦
Emoji were standardized in unicode in 2010. Windows 7 added support for them in 2012. So no, they didnāt exist in the 90s, not even in the 00s (as we know them today).
I think for any webpage these days, 300KB is ok. Itās way lower than what it was with the old theme.
Ah, come on. Accept my challenge and return the favor! Iād be curious what I ought to improve :)
Google is pretty good at making cool things, arenāt they? Google Search, Material Design, Google plus (nah), and now this.
In case you didnāt catch it, the about page says that it was made by Jigsaw, which is a google subsidiary.
If the site is about no JS, then whatās the point in having a bar that shows the page size? Is the size of the page somehow relevant to sites not running JS?
I get that this is a direct copy of sites like 1mb, 512kb and 200kb club, but I donāt get the focus on page size for this application. Surely thereās a better measure to add on the page?
Sure. Thatās The criteria for being added to the list the page size is an objective measure to stack rank them. It could have been alphabetical but size is a bit more substantial.
A minimal or lightweight site could have more data per page in principle, if it has more content. But in practice heavier pages have more cosmetic BS, not more content, which I think is what you were hoping to get at.
Thatās kinda my pointā¦thereās no way to measure a negative, so it seems counterintuitive to measure something completely unrelated just for the sake of having āa measurementā.
How about full site loading time with a browser? I think considering that people usually dislike JS in that it makes sites feel slow, this would be a more useful measure.
I also agree with the other comments here arguing that there are ways to judiciously use JS⦠however, JS usage is definitely overall ridiculous and out of hand and so I canāt resist pointing out that a particularly ironic metric to look at here would be Time to First Meaningful Paint, which AFAIK basically only exists because of dumb JS tomfoolery ābootingā pages and filling in all the content client-side.
Maybe you could even have a second version of the page that would add (with red bars for ābadā or something) a few JS heavy sites to demonstrate just how dramatically improved TTFMP is on the no-JS sites?
On one hand, I get that itās nice to have a centralized place for comments, and not have to worry about spam (for the most part), but part of me wonders if thereās a better way to meet people in multiple places for comments.
Once I redo my blog, I want the comments section to be links to places like twitter, mastodon, maybe here or HN, where thereās an easy way to dialog for people who donāt want to be forced to make a GitHub account. Just a thought for people looking to have a third-party host their comments.
Iāve had that in the past, where ācommentsā are pulled from multiple sources, like Mastodon and Twitter via Webmention. But I didnāt want all the noise on my blog posts, and I didnāt want to have to manage them (they come through as WP comments). This way, thereās a platform for people to discuss the post, without the extra headache for me of managing comments.
HN or here would be great alternatives to GitHub Issues, but I think it would have to be HN rather than here, as the topics are VERY focused here (thatās a good thing), so a general life update, for example, wouldnāt be appropriate to post here. So there would effectively be no comments on that post.
Once I redo my blog, I want the comments section to be links to places like twitter, mastodon, maybe here or HN, where thereās an easy way to dialog
That doesnāt sound like it follows. If someone on Twitter comments on your blog will that be reflected to Mastodon? Will someone who then replies on Mastodon be able to reply? I suppose itās true in the strict definition of dialog (i.e. two participants) for communication between you and one other person at a time but it sounds as if youāll end up with a load of distinct views on different subsets of the comments that people interact with.
looks similar to utterances
A few people have told me about Utterances since I published this post. It looks really cool. I deliberately wanted the comments to be a separate thing from the blog though, so I wouldnāt want to use a tool like this to pull them in.
Also Gitalk
GitHub does commenting reasonably well indeed, but Iām worried about adding even more dependencies on the centralized, commercial service belonging to Microsoft.
I get what youāre saying, but I wouldnāt call it a ādependencyā personally. Itās a nice to have thing that I offer to people who want to use it. If it goes away (doubtful) itās no big deal.
Itās a ādependencyā in that itās
Something like a mailing list wouldnāt have this issue. Since many people donāt like the concept of āmailing listsā, simply including a mailto:
link at the bottom of the article and a link to the online list archives without including the words āmailing listā on your website should do the trick.
Most commenting platforms require users to create an account with their email; if you require an email, you might as well use it.
What was painful with the comments? Just on the previous post, you link to a comment that was supposedly helpful but not here any more.
Managing them - replying to them, filtering spam, moderation etc. I want people to be able to provide feedback though, so by having a guestbook and not a comment form on every page, hopefully itās a nice balance.
Iāll edit that post to include the comment. Thanks!
Similar to this: https://hacdias.com/ by @hacdias
My site is at brautaset.org.
It serves a light or dark mode depending on what your browser requests. I try to make it easy to read, on desktops and on phone, and I like big fonts.
A bit surprising how many sites have the same thing: duplicated information between āHomeā and āAboutā. I would merge āHomeā with either āAboutā or āPublicationsā. In Publications - first two are 404.
Thank you for the feedback! I merged Publications into the index, and fixed the two dead links. (WayBackMachine had one, and I found my old slides to use in place of the missing video.)
The links in the menu are almost impossible to read. For me (iOS on dark theme) shows 2 very similar shades of orange. The general orange colour is also difficult to read with the dark background.
Thank you for the feedback! Iāve tried to fix this, by changing the colours around. (And not using an orange background behind the menu.) I donāt use the dark mode much myself, but it was a fun expriment to make the auto-switching style. Iām thinking about removing the dark mode, as I am find it difficult to maintain/extend the light/dark colour scheme and maintain readability. (And I have only so much time to tweak the colour scheme on my blog.) As a dark-mode user, would you prefer a second-citizen dark mode, or forced to use a first-citizen light mode?
Iām not a dark mode user actually, it just so happened that my iPad was still in dark mode for, testing my own site. :)
To answer your question though - itās your site, do whatever you want. If youāre struggling to maintain both colour variants, just stick to the one and make that right, people can always use reader mode if they want a dark experience.
Is linking random web games allowed now? šÆ
Itās a game and a cool display of development. I thought this would be perfect for Lobste.rs.
Clearly not though judging by the downvoted. :(