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 decent looking car, but that's not fun. If your goal is just to get somewhere, sure, but my goal is to have fun.
I work on websites all day where I get less and less say in the design and functionality. Why would I not want total control over my own?
oxalorg · 9h ago
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!
- if you go to https://oxal.org/blog/ you will see a small cyborg following you (started with a base image generated by chatgpt and then edited and added animations manually in Piskel sprite editor)
- it's deployed on a VPS manually, just run `make` (I've experimented with serving it via a handwritten C http server, but I haven't finished this toy project yet)
- i have several shell scripts which uploads things to my websites in private locations (think gists, quick share videos, screenshots etc.).
- I even tried designing my own funky font but gave up and used a Naruto inspired font
- and as a bonus, try to `view-page-source` on the home page
I see my website and feel extremely proud of my journey as a software engineer, and I cherish this simple thing oh so dearly!
LoulouMonkey · 13m ago
I really like your website, it's both very clear / easy to navigate and yet unusual.
Great work!
navanchauhan · 7h ago
It’s good to see you here! For a long time I was just using your project Sakura CSS file to mane everything look pretty.
Even though I have moved on to using a mix of LaTeX.css and a two column theme, I still love using Sakura whenever I’m crafting a hand rolled HTML page for something.
chrisldgk · 2h ago
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
miloignis · 9h ago
I quite like the matrix w/ the surprise!
runamuck · 9h ago
The floating robot makes me smile. Reminds me of 90s silliness. I love it!
> 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 make it responsive, have a mobile menu, etc. I probably (re)invented a few techniques in doing so but that's what's fun!
p4bl0 · 4h ago
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!
WhyIsItAlwaysHN · 6h ago
I love the idea of the colored links for navigation in your summary. Thanks for the inspiration!
izietto · 5h ago
Thing is, it looks better than many corporate websites out there. Kudos
bradly · 7h ago
> 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 Journey Before Destination, the first ideal spoken by the Knights Radiant and a common trope across mythologies as seen with Job's suffering and Hercules' 12 steps to recovery.
Turns out they turned Hercules into a god to stop all the cool stuff he doing as a human :/ Don't let them take away your pain, don't let them take away your humanness. And if they do, just listen to some bird music instead.
Most of the tech blogs I run across are static sites. I understand the choice; to prioritize writing reads as pragmatic and I did that for a long time. At some point I got intrigued by being able to tailor my own editing experience and built my blog. It took months but now I use MarkdownIt and custom components in Vue to render the markdown in my posts. I built a commenting and moderation system.
I started all of this before LLMs but once I started using them it sped up my delivery substantially, especially with agents. It also informed how I use coding agents at work, which I think I've been able to adopt with relative ease and a higher success rate than most.
> 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?
To each their own. I wanted something functional. A stable platform which is organised. I also wanted to write more. Which I still haven't gotten to do. It's more of a functional project than an art project.
That doesn't mean the OP's website is bad. But that is not why I created my website. But I have thought about Writing HTML in HTML after being inspired from Writing HTML in HTML by John Ankarstrom [1]. But it will be a forever art project and not my real estate on the internet. It's OK to want different things from the indieweb. That's what makes it diverse.
I feel this exactly. However, I find more fun to create and modify the site vs actually writing articles, so my deployments are probably 5x my actual blog posts. I got into computers because I love to code. I will still be here, writing dumb things for my own fun long after AI is the primary creator of professional coders.
AndrewStephens · 8h ago
> 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?
I have a server to serve my website and a website to have something for my server to do.
yoz-y · 11h ago
My argument to moving to a SSR is that I just spent all the time tweaking the backend. Now I can spend more time writing and tweaking just the theme.
donatj · 11h ago
But did you enjoy tweaking the backend?
yoz-y · 9h ago
I did yes. But I realized also that I could enjoy tinkering with something more generally useful and permanent instead.
ebiester · 9h ago
I think the difference is that I spent so much time tweaking the website that I wasn't writing. Moving back to Jekyll was entirely a move because I wanted to spend more of that time writing.
At the same time, I know that it limits me in other ways (for example, I'd love to have a way to post to my blog in one section and federate to bluesky and mastodon, and I know it's possible, but I would have to build it. So I'll eventually move from Jekyll.)
parpfish · 9h ago
An actual LLM use case!
A model that generates AI slop blog posts so you don’t need to write content and can just focus on the fun parts of making the website
indigodaddy · 8h ago
I’d imagine almost any old model could do this?
topaz0 · 5h ago
\lipsum has been perfectly good at that for decades
delfinom · 6h ago
Why even waste money on an LLM. Just lorum ipsum the content since nobody is going to read it anyway
parpfish · 5h ago
but a model could write blog posts that describe changes to the website as a blog-style changelog (e.g., 'today i spent an hour playing with CSS to change padding' or 'i refactored the backend to do more async calls')
a self-documenting blog about the blog.
sli · 9h ago
I spent far more time writing my own generator with Babashka than I have putting actual content on the site. I was almost disappointed when I finished it. It doesn't support compiling stuff like TS or Elm, but the only JS on my site is a console.log that says there's no other JS on the entire site.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF · 5h ago
Years ago I had a JS banner nagging readers to disable JS
It's built with the excellent Eleventy SSG, but all HTML and CSS is done by hand (as you can probably tell :)
henrebotha · 8h ago
I'm spending more time than I'd like to admit thinking about how to achieve various ends using AsciiDoc(tor). I could just carry on with Jekyll, but why?
indigodaddy · 8h ago
I like your website a lot! Curious as to the stack, and/or do you have a blog post about the setup?
bitwize · 7h ago
I used to maintain a web site with a cobbled together script written in Guile. I still totally would do the same today.
> 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?
Indeed. One of these days my company is going to pull my Claude usage logs and mark me down in my performance review for not using AI enough. But until that time comes I'm writing every line of code myself.
reaperducer · 8h ago
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?
Part of the joy for my personal web sites is building in the Easter eggs.
Connect via Lynx, and it's a different experience.
Hover over something at a certain time of day, and something happens.
mcdonje · 10h ago
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.
BlackLotus89 · 10h ago
If you look at the screencap you see a mail to hello@taylor.town.
Edit: after posting this the taylor.town site became much slower - so maybe that's the hn hug of death gripping again
ffsm8 · 9h ago
Clicking on the article on that site gets me back to the HN link.
I guess that's just a landing page with links to articles he wrote, but doesn't host himself?
Strange.
And it really is ugly right now with the spotted background and slightly rotated links.
Is he aiming for the "I just discovered a new feature and so need to use it" vibe? Like when someone makes a PowerPoint presentation and now uses the completely over the top transitions across slides?
But design is subjective, and if you're doing something in your free time, you better enjoy it! So if he has fun making that ugly thing, great ( • ‿ • )
nemomarx · 9h ago
the background looks a lot like an old geocities page to me so I have to assume it's a fashion choice
handsclean · 4h ago
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.
neogodless · 10h ago
And the original linked article actually links at the bottom
> Taylor Troesh is mayor of taylor.town, author of scrapscript, and connoisseur of crap.
And on taylor.town is a link to the magazine article which they contributed.
Each of the blog screenshots has a caption like this:
> taylor.town in 202x
lynndotpy · 9h ago
Yeah, I thought this was one of those critiques of the enshittified web.
I think this website is bad, but I also think it is very funny to have:
(1) a banner about print editions
(2) a cookie consent u
(3) a header 'Good Internet' peeking through the now-familiar modern hallmarks of the bad internet, and
(4) the first four words of the headline, which is being eclipsed by the cookie popup
(5) Once you remove the cookie banner, there is now also a persistent cookie settings button, and a persistent "+ Become a Member" button.
taylor.town is a very good internet website by comparison
IshKebab · 9h ago
Yeah presumably because the ugly site has an awful background and poor font/colour choices that make it kind of hard to read. E.g.
I made my website myself too and it isn't ugly. This guy's website is ugly because he decided to make it ugly out of some misguided sense of self-importance.
GingerMidas · 8h ago
Self-important - sure, the author says as much themselves.
But how is it misguided? OP is having fun on their personal site. Where would you guide them instead?
rchaud · 8h ago
There's 'ugly yet interesting' and then there's 'ugly and boring'. This is the latter I'm afraid.
At its core, the homepage is still showing the output of a CMS looping through a folder of markdown files (probably) and displaying the title wrapped in a hyperlink. There appears to be zero information architecture - no visually distinct categories, no icons, images or dates, so everything is equally weighted, just in a slightly "wacky" format.
Most dev blogs get their traffic from something showing up on organic search, so the site homepage doesn't really matter, unless the dev actively wants to make it interesting, and encourage exploration. Despite the attempt at breaking that mold, this website feels much the same as those ones using a boring default Ghost template.
ninininino · 6h ago
No need to be afraid, the point is the author isn't creating it to please an audience. They are creating it to please themself. So your opinion isn't relevant to the author or this linked written piece.
jjulius · 7h ago
I feel like you've missed the point of the author's piece.
rchaud · 7h ago
I don't think I did. The homepage is the only thing that's unique about the design. Had you arrived on any page besides that, you would think this is a bog-standard developer's blogsite, one skinny column amid a sea of white space.
It's possible to have an ugly site that's still easily navigable and visually interesting, even if the author is the only user.
jjulius · 7h ago
Respectfully, to the author's point, none of that matters and neither does anything in your previous post. The author likes it, and has fun creating it and enjoys molding and re-shaping it to their own changing desires over the years. That's what they find important to them, not anything that you've mentioned. As the author writes...
>Somebody with good taste could’ve made my website, but then it wouldn’t be mine.
>To bake bread, many feel compelled to grow wheat, mine salt, culture yeast, etc. Not me. My puerile palate yearns for buckets of Olive Garden breadsticks.
>That’s okay. Your “mine” is not my "mine."
... and...
>Soon it will become something else entirely. Because it’s my website and I’m perpetually becoming somebody else.
>You’ll change too. Your passions and values will pollinate; your ugly thing – whatever it is – will come alive again and again.
They've created something that is authentically "them", in a way that is authentically "them". And they love that. Not having images, or icons, or categories, or being easily navigable, or having a blog post section that looks "bog-standard" to you or anybody else are all completely irrelevant.
Hell yes, more power to them, I say.
xmprt · 13m ago
I guess the question is if I create something that's extremely derivative and standard/boring but I say that it's uniquely myself then is that true? I suppose it could be if I'm calling myself boring.
mrinterweb · 31m ago
The spirit of this reminds me back to earlier days of the internet. I know a lot of people bemoaned Flash sites for weird navigation, and other issues. Not saying the Flash criticism wasn't warranted, but I did appreciate the creativity some people put into making their site unique. Too much of the internet feel homogeneous now, and with AI generated content, that is only going to get worse. I appreciate the portions of the internet that don't want to conform.
luckyandroid · 11h ago
Even with frameworks, I don't see any joy in making something that just looks and feels the same as any other site. I understand it from a business point of view, but if you're trying to just showcase yourself or your work having flavor makes more sense even if it's not the most optimal thing for SEO or retention.
Really hate how modern website building sites moved towards structured, samey sites. I miss the days of Geocities and Freewebs, the unreadable text against cluttered background images, the auto playing music, the trailing cursors, the spinning skeletons in front of crappy looking flames.
AndrewStephens · 10h ago
I am so into this philosophy. My web site is an expression of me and no-one else. If someone tells me it looks ugly or non-professional (I have heard both, although my site is not so weird as this one) I can tell them that I like it that way.
We need more of this kind of non-conformity on the web - and in general.
smjburton · 9h ago
Great article OP. This is exactly what made the "old web" so great: there were no defined standards so people were compelled to experiment. It was a little more chaotic, but it felt more rewarding when you came across a cool website with a unique design. The modern web on the other hand is very structured and formulaic, served mostly through the same templates and frameworks. Instead of being a place to explore, it's largely become a place to consume content in a predictable fashion.
nonethewiser · 10h ago
His website circa 2023 was not ugly. It was minamalist.
NOW its ugly.
Its funny because I initially agreed with him when I thought his website was the same as the 2023 version. Which I didnt find ugly. But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a more negative disposition towards his message.
jjulius · 1h ago
>But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a more negative disposition towards his message.
Why? The whole message is about finding joy in creating whatever you want, something that is ostensibly you, in a way in which you find joy in creating it, regardless of what other people think of the final product.
The fact that many people here find it ugly and off-putting only makes the site, and the message in this piece, more endearing to me. If you're griping about the appearance, or think that the message is lost because of the ugliness, you've missed the point.
inanutshellus · 7h ago
His original design was clean, minimalist and... unremarkable.
Now it's an intentionally-jumbled chaos. Ugly or not, it's remarkable. After all... we are busy remarking on it.
The new design has impracticalities / downsides, specifically it's hard to visually locate a specific link if you leave and came back, but... that's not something that matters to him.
He wants /unsettling/, /dischordant/, /interesting/, and more importantly /MINE/.
kapitanjakc · 11h ago
I don't have a personal site yet. But when I do, I plan to make it with HTML+CSS+JS/JQ only
Maybe apache or nginx as webservers
host it on shared stuff or AWS free tier
I just need to figure out how to center a div, and then I'll be in the business.
neepi · 11h ago
AWS free tier. S3+cloudfront has cost me $0.00 for the last year. This is incidentally the best price.
My (single page) personal site is HTML+CSS (no JS) based on a template generated by ChatGPT because I don't give a crap. Trying to make something that works on a mobile device and desktop is beyond my meagre skills. This worked fine.
bradly · 7h ago
>AWS free tier. S3+cloudfront has cost me $0.00 for the last year. This is incidentally the best price.
I haven't tried this setup, but I'm using Cloudflare to serve my static sites for $0.00 as well. My mini rails apps I've down to $6/month VPS that I'm happy enough with as well for anything a bit spicy.
neepi · 7h ago
I would do that but I dislike Cloudflare because they wanted by DNS as well. I keep my DNS / CDN separate. Too many eggs in one basket otherwise.
I've never understood the whole centering a div meme.
width: 60%; // define your width as desired
margin: 0 auto;
Now go start your blog!
nocman · 8h ago
I'm not sure if you are being serious about not understanding "the whole centering a div meme". Your example handles a trivial case, but does not address the whole of the problem.
As others have pointed out, vertical centering is often the problem being discussed (although difficulties with horizontal centering do happen). Anyone I know that has written any non-trivial web application has run into the situation where they spent way more time than they thought they should have to getting some element in a web application centered on the page the way they wanted it to be.
This article is a good example of the complexity, I think:
The author makes a decision tree, which illustrates the complexity fairly well, and then there's a conversation in the comments between the author and a reader about whether parts of the decision tree are correct.
CSS is extremely complicated. It's easy to get lost in the complexity, and it can be very frustrating when you know how you want something to look, but can't quite figure out how to get it to happen.
That's why the meme is so popular. LOTS of people who deal with CSS can relate.
o_m · 10h ago
That's the old hacky way of doing it. place-content makes it even easier.
cuu508 · 10h ago
Now center div with unknown height vertically :-)
And no cheating by using flexbox!
arp242 · 10h ago
^ Comment flagged for sadomasochism.
skydhash · 10h ago
how do you center something on an axis with no limits placed to form a segments. That’s mathematically impossible unless you placed the limits first.
whatnow37373 · 8h ago
Powerful the Force is, young Padawan, as is the strength of your doubts. Release them you must.
reconnecting · 8h ago
<center>
</center>
It's been working for the second century.
alabastervlog · 7h ago
I'll still bust this out if it's some quick page that's not going to last long (like some kind of "service down for maintenance" page that's only going to be visible for a few minutes, or something)
It's "bad" but you know what? It fucking works, it's concise, and I can remember it no matter how long I go between writing HTML/CSS.
Hell I wouldn't be surprised if the paths it takes through a typical browser engine also makes it burn 5% or fewer as many cycles as CSS centering methods.
- Most of it is CSS, which when removed still produces a pretty functional website.
- Most of the CSS is just one (commented out) background image
- There are about 5 lines of java script, which seem to just exist to obfuscate your email.
dominiwe · 8h ago
Wow, I completely forgot about that image! Thank you for reminding me (it is now gone).
It was an experiment a while back and it was inline in order to keep it all in one file.
Actually that made me realize, my site is dynamic: Because I edit this one html file live on the server to make changes, whoever loads my website repeatedly while I'm doing that is going to see changes live.
edu · 9h ago
What I'm doing for my site is similar, I just sprinkle 11ty on top for the static generation, and then publish on netlify pages.
lo_zamoyski · 10h ago
GitHub has free hosting.
reconnecting · 8h ago
GitHub has poor browsers backward compatibility. Considering it's owned by Microsoft, we should probably start counting the days until it ends up behind a login wall like LinkedIn.
immibis · 7h ago
If your budget isn't literally zero, avoid AWS and get a cheap VPS from Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, OVH, or Hetzner Cloud, IMO.
The problem with AWS is their extortionate egress fees which are about 50-100 times the market price.
severusdd · 10h ago
Every polished template looks the same, but each handrolled site is weird in its own way. I’ll happily take wabi-sabi HTML for personal projects over yet another Tailwind landing page!
hinkley · 4h ago
I lived in a garden neighborhood for a time. I did a lot of work on our place and my partner and friends would praise me but all I could see was the weeds or the poor pruning job done by the previous owners.
There was a retired lady three blocks away who had by far the best garden in a half mile radius. It was amazing.
I lived there almost four years before I started noticing her weeds, her mistakes.
In a lot of things we can see other people’s flaws but miss our own. But when we make something, that situation seems to be reversed. What we make isn’t that special, and everyone else’s creations are so much better.
jbd0 · 9h ago
It's ugly because an "accept cookies" pop-up obscures half of the page.
coldpie · 8h ago
Open up your uBlock Origin settings and enable the Cookie Notices list. If you're forced to use a shit-tier phone web browser like Chrome or Safari, you can also use the Kill Sticky bookmarklet to clean up most of this crap[1].
If you are a web dev reading this and you've implemented a cookie popup on a website, please do the world a favor and find a different industry to work in.
that's on the blogging site - the actual Taylor.town doesn't have that.
I'm not sure why the author hosts their blog posts on this platform and not their own website though
bru · 8h ago
Just this one article, as part of the magazine. Most are directly on his website.
aendruk · 7h ago
Yeah literally two thirds of this is adversarial. https://0x0.st/83AB.png I reflexively noped out.
whatnow37373 · 8h ago
At this point I will intentionally include a cookie banner even if my sites doesn’t need it. It exudes this … je ne sais quoi.
mehdix · 8h ago
> It’s an itch – a feeling that something is really important, and you need to do something about it, and nobody else can possibly do it except you.
Might be difficult to believe, but I strongly believe there are things that no one else on this planet would do except one of us.
wpollock · 2h ago
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.
dgellow · 1h ago
For what it’s worth, I find it instantly familiar and comforting! Here is your first compliment :)
ayaros · 8h ago
Hey, my site is handcrafted too. But ugly? Speak for yourselves, but I've tried to make mine beautiful. Handcrafted doesn't have to mean ugly...
But of course, it's at the point where it's grown into something unwieldy. I feel like it's overdue for a redesign/rewrite. Just gotta figure out a clever UI design that works on desktop and mobile. Not only that, but it also needs to work without any JS, because I don't want my site to be nonfunctional without JS...
jurgenaut23 · 3h ago
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.
susam · 6h ago
I made my website [1] totally from scratch too! Using 100% handcrafted HTML and CSS and a little bit of Common Lisp. Hopefully it is not too ugly!
Like some of the other comments here, I don't use Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican, etc. either! I know they are solid tools and they serve many people well. But I haven't found them useful for my own needs. I prefer not to subject my website to the constraints of a large and complex framework when I can write my own that is smaller, simpler, and fully under my control.
I have a small Common Lisp (CL) program to automate a few things like applying consistent layout to all pages, generating RSS feeds, creating tag list pages, etc. But otherwise, all content on my site, including all of the HTML and CSS, is 100% handcrafted. Perhaps the only exception is KaTeX, because handcrafting a parser and renderer for a subset of LaTeX is not a problem I want to take on in order to maintain my website.
I've put together a little colophon page [2] in case anyone wants to read more about it.
Some people rightfully worry that maintaining your own program like this might become a major burden, potentially taking more time than actually publishing articles on your website. At least for me, that hasn't been the case. The CL program has become quite stable. Its commit history [1] shows that I don't tinker with it too often these days. I certainly have more lines of published content than I do code in the program. The CL program is about 1000 lines long but I have about 55000 lines of content.
The current one looks quite nice to me, of course that's subjective :D The lighter lines on the home page are a bit harder to read, but if you consider it as a canvas to explore (i.e. click on random things) instead of an toc/index to find a specific page from, it's fun and serves the purpose.
I liked the heading fonts on the pages, "Austin News" according to Firefox. But then I looked it up for future use but it starts at 350$, so a bit steep for me :D
I used to have https://zaeem.dev/eye/ as my homepage for years, no text at all. Until I remade the site this year.
naet · 3h ago
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...
doubleorseven · 3h ago
I remember when 'Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers' by Kendrik Lamar was out on 05/22 and I was thinking to my self, OMG it's only May and the best album of the year is out.
The words I just read takes me back to that same feeling.
Thank you for that.
Arisaka1 · 10h ago
This article reminded of the days when building anything wasn't driven by neither the fear of being judged or the need to impress a future employer, but because I just felt like it.
I think there's a lack of kind of approach in general. There's a time and place when you build because the end goal is your client or boss, but it's ultimately the inner itch of experimentation that shapes your skillset and taste.
susam · 9h ago
> This article reminded of the days when building anything wasn't driven by neither the fear of being judged or the need to impress a future employer, but because I just felt like it.
Those days are now! There are still plenty of us who create websites and small projects purely for the fun of it. I still maintain a personal wesite that began as a university dorm room intranet portal, and I do it for myself. I have a blog with a small audience, but I also have quirky, obscure pages that exist purely for my own amusement. If someone else happens to stumble upon them and enjoy them, that's just a bonus!
I know there are plenty of others who do the same. I often come across such websites and projects right here on this forum!
The mainstream web these days is full of walled gardens and loud and chaotic social media platforms, so this kind of quirky, creative web might seem like a small fraction by comparison. But it's still out there, and it's very much alive.
indigodaddy · 5h ago
Barry Kauler’s website uses a CMS that’s a static generator using SeaMonkey as the wysiwyg component:
I just use WordPress, with slightly-modified themes. I make sure they load quickly, and work on phones.
Web sites aren’t my specialty, or my goals. I just want somewhere to post my ramblings.
inatreecrown2 · 11h ago
Inspiring for me to see this, I have yet to make my own website.
dgellow · 2h ago
I genuinely find it beautiful
guywithahat · 8h ago
It is a bit of a shame he's changed the website in-between getting the email and this being posted on HN, I would have liked to see the original CSS rotate and non-JS scrolljacking website.
justusthane · 8h ago
It hasn't changed. The linked page is an article about his website posted on a different site. Here is the site he's talking about: https://taylor.town/
nluken · 3h ago
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.
Eleuthero · 9h ago
Aesthetic and trends are part of it, I think it looks purely
KronisLV · 4h ago
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!
hackerbeat · 6h ago
New website gives me headaches. The one before was much better.
hackerbeat · 6h ago
PS: Just use Bear Blog everyone.
sph · 9h ago
It was good and minimal before, now it's all form and no function (no dates, no ordering of posts).
Honestly, unremarkable post for an unremarkable idea. Smells like a PR push to publicize the author's website more than anything. Sure it's your website, you can do anything you want, but that is hardly a ground-breaking concept, is it?
(The posted website has been created 2 days ago, and already has 5 posts created all on the same day, asking for paid membership, hoping to trend on HN. s/good/dead/internetmagazine.com)
einpoklum · 5h ago
Well, if your website content is not very static, your website will almost without fail not be "made by you", but made by some kind of site generator. And while _that_ could be made by you (which seems to be the case for Taylor Town), I would suspect that, these days, it's possible to factor out enough "made by me" aspects of a site, and use a generic/non-bespoke static site generation mechanism.
Anyway, some people write their own HTML+CSS, some people build their own table, other people build their own car. I usually can't decide which kind of DIY I like best :-\
xyst · 10h ago
Reminds me of a home I was interested in buying. Shades of grey, everywhere. White marble counter tops, of course. Very sterile.
Nothing wrong with it. It’s a choice. But does scream "millennial aesthetic". Maybe that’s what caused the vitriol that spurred this blog post
badgersnake · 10h ago
I have a personal site with a bootstrap and ScalaJS-react frontend and I regret it massively. 'Old fashioned' server side templating (e.g. JSP) would have been a way better choice.
esafak · 10h ago
How so, less work?
smetj · 11h ago
Static generation. Tables. End of story.
reconnecting · 8h ago
We made a static, table-based, zero-CSS website [1] for open-source security platform, and the other day there were complaints on hn that it's broken on mobiles. So be careful.
Honestly, I don't really understand the reasoning here. While the author's website doesn't look bad to me, creating and maintaining your own site doesn't mean it cannot also look "good". Sure, "good taste" is subjective, but most of us probably use the internet daily and are exposed to countless designs, and eventually develop at least a general sense of what constitutes good UI/UX and what doesn't. CSS can be awfully unintuitive, but if you're capable of building and styling a website, you're certainly capable of making it look nice. Saying "it looks bad to others because I made it myself" sounds like some kind of self-flagellation.
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 decent looking car, but that's not fun. If your goal is just to get somewhere, sure, but my goal is to have fun.
I work on websites all day where I get less and less say in the design and functionality. Why would I not want total control over my own?
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://github.com/oxalorg/sakura/
- if you go to https://oxal.org/blog/ you will see a small cyborg following you (started with a base image generated by chatgpt and then edited and added animations manually in Piskel sprite editor)
- it's deployed on a VPS manually, just run `make` (I've experimented with serving it via a handwritten C http server, but I haven't finished this toy project yet)
- i have several shell scripts which uploads things to my websites in private locations (think gists, quick share videos, screenshots etc.).
- the favicon is also pixel art, made when I was still in college! https://oxal.org/favicon-32x32.png
- I even tried designing my own funky font but gave up and used a Naruto inspired font
- and as a bonus, try to `view-page-source` on the home page
I see my website and feel extremely proud of my journey as a software engineer, and I cherish this simple thing oh so dearly!
Great work!
Even though I have moved on to using a mix of LaTeX.css and a two column theme, I still love using Sakura whenever I’m crafting a hand rolled HTML page for something.
I started with Hugo and ended up building my own static site generator (https://github.com/julien-blanchard/Loulou).
It's been nothing but fun all along. And as you said, building something yourself really makes a huge difference.
https://blanchardjulien.com/
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 make it responsive, have a mobile menu, etc. I probably (re)invented a few techniques in doing so but that's what's fun!
This is Journey Before Destination, the first ideal spoken by the Knights Radiant and a common trope across mythologies as seen with Job's suffering and Hercules' 12 steps to recovery.
Turns out they turned Hercules into a god to stop all the cool stuff he doing as a human :/ Don't let them take away your pain, don't let them take away your humanness. And if they do, just listen to some bird music instead.
https://birdymusic.com Either the best looking or worst looking site you'll see today.
Sure, that's a fine purpose.
But some websites just want to get a specific job done and be done with it.
Like https://tellconanobrienyourfavoritepizzatoppings.com/
I started all of this before LLMs but once I started using them it sped up my delivery substantially, especially with agents. It also informed how I use coding agents at work, which I think I've been able to adopt with relative ease and a higher success rate than most.
https://ooo-yay.com/blog if you're curious.
To each their own. I wanted something functional. A stable platform which is organised. I also wanted to write more. Which I still haven't gotten to do. It's more of a functional project than an art project.
That doesn't mean the OP's website is bad. But that is not why I created my website. But I have thought about Writing HTML in HTML after being inspired from Writing HTML in HTML by John Ankarstrom [1]. But it will be a forever art project and not my real estate on the internet. It's OK to want different things from the indieweb. That's what makes it diverse.
1- http://john.ankarstrom.se/html/
I have a server to serve my website and a website to have something for my server to do.
At the same time, I know that it limits me in other ways (for example, I'd love to have a way to post to my blog in one section and federate to bluesky and mastodon, and I know it's possible, but I would have to build it. So I'll eventually move from Jekyll.)
A model that generates AI slop blog posts so you don’t need to write content and can just focus on the fun parts of making the website
a self-documenting blog about the blog.
My colophon if anyone is interested
https://donatstudios.com/colophon
It's built with the excellent Eleventy SSG, but all HTML and CSS is done by hand (as you can probably tell :)
> 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?
Indeed. One of these days my company is going to pull my Claude usage logs and mark me down in my performance review for not using AI enough. But until that time comes I'm writing every line of code myself.
Part of the joy for my personal web sites is building in the Easter eggs.
Connect via Lynx, and it's a different experience.
Hover over something at a certain time of day, and something happens.
I would've rather been sent to the ugly site if it doesn't have marketing cookies and a membership popup.
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
I guess that's just a landing page with links to articles he wrote, but doesn't host himself? Strange.
And it really is ugly right now with the spotted background and slightly rotated links.
Is he aiming for the "I just discovered a new feature and so need to use it" vibe? Like when someone makes a PowerPoint presentation and now uses the completely over the top transitions across slides?
But design is subjective, and if you're doing something in your free time, you better enjoy it! So if he has fun making that ugly thing, great ( • ‿ • )
> Taylor Troesh is mayor of taylor.town, author of scrapscript, and connoisseur of crap.
And on taylor.town is a link to the magazine article which they contributed.
Each of the blog screenshots has a caption like this:
> taylor.town in 202x
I think this website is bad, but I also think it is very funny to have:
(1) a banner about print editions (2) a cookie consent u (3) a header 'Good Internet' peeking through the now-familiar modern hallmarks of the bad internet, and (4) the first four words of the headline, which is being eclipsed by the cookie popup (5) Once you remove the cookie banner, there is now also a persistent cookie settings button, and a persistent "+ Become a Member" button.
taylor.town is a very good internet website by comparison
https://taylor.town/wealth-000
I made my website myself too and it isn't ugly. This guy's website is ugly because he decided to make it ugly out of some misguided sense of self-importance.
But how is it misguided? OP is having fun on their personal site. Where would you guide them instead?
At its core, the homepage is still showing the output of a CMS looping through a folder of markdown files (probably) and displaying the title wrapped in a hyperlink. There appears to be zero information architecture - no visually distinct categories, no icons, images or dates, so everything is equally weighted, just in a slightly "wacky" format.
Most dev blogs get their traffic from something showing up on organic search, so the site homepage doesn't really matter, unless the dev actively wants to make it interesting, and encourage exploration. Despite the attempt at breaking that mold, this website feels much the same as those ones using a boring default Ghost template.
It's possible to have an ugly site that's still easily navigable and visually interesting, even if the author is the only user.
>Somebody with good taste could’ve made my website, but then it wouldn’t be mine.
>To bake bread, many feel compelled to grow wheat, mine salt, culture yeast, etc. Not me. My puerile palate yearns for buckets of Olive Garden breadsticks.
>That’s okay. Your “mine” is not my "mine."
... and...
>Soon it will become something else entirely. Because it’s my website and I’m perpetually becoming somebody else.
>You’ll change too. Your passions and values will pollinate; your ugly thing – whatever it is – will come alive again and again.
They've created something that is authentically "them", in a way that is authentically "them". And they love that. Not having images, or icons, or categories, or being easily navigable, or having a blog post section that looks "bog-standard" to you or anybody else are all completely irrelevant.
Hell yes, more power to them, I say.
Really hate how modern website building sites moved towards structured, samey sites. I miss the days of Geocities and Freewebs, the unreadable text against cluttered background images, the auto playing music, the trailing cursors, the spinning skeletons in front of crappy looking flames.
We need more of this kind of non-conformity on the web - and in general.
NOW its ugly.
Its funny because I initially agreed with him when I thought his website was the same as the 2023 version. Which I didnt find ugly. But now that I see it really is ugly I find myself with a more negative disposition towards his message.
Why? The whole message is about finding joy in creating whatever you want, something that is ostensibly you, in a way in which you find joy in creating it, regardless of what other people think of the final product.
The fact that many people here find it ugly and off-putting only makes the site, and the message in this piece, more endearing to me. If you're griping about the appearance, or think that the message is lost because of the ugliness, you've missed the point.
Now it's an intentionally-jumbled chaos. Ugly or not, it's remarkable. After all... we are busy remarking on it.
The new design has impracticalities / downsides, specifically it's hard to visually locate a specific link if you leave and came back, but... that's not something that matters to him.
He wants /unsettling/, /dischordant/, /interesting/, and more importantly /MINE/.
Maybe apache or nginx as webservers
host it on shared stuff or AWS free tier
I just need to figure out how to center a div, and then I'll be in the business.
My (single page) personal site is HTML+CSS (no JS) based on a template generated by ChatGPT because I don't give a crap. Trying to make something that works on a mobile device and desktop is beyond my meagre skills. This worked fine.
I haven't tried this setup, but I'm using Cloudflare to serve my static sites for $0.00 as well. My mini rails apps I've down to $6/month VPS that I'm happy enough with as well for anything a bit spicy.
As others have pointed out, vertical centering is often the problem being discussed (although difficulties with horizontal centering do happen). Anyone I know that has written any non-trivial web application has run into the situation where they spent way more time than they thought they should have to getting some element in a web application centered on the page the way they wanted it to be.
This article is a good example of the complexity, I think:
https://css-tricks.com/centering-css-complete-guide/
The author makes a decision tree, which illustrates the complexity fairly well, and then there's a conversation in the comments between the author and a reader about whether parts of the decision tree are correct.
CSS is extremely complicated. It's easy to get lost in the complexity, and it can be very frustrating when you know how you want something to look, but can't quite figure out how to get it to happen.
That's why the meme is so popular. LOTS of people who deal with CSS can relate.
And no cheating by using flexbox!
It's been working for the second century.
It's "bad" but you know what? It fucking works, it's concise, and I can remember it no matter how long I go between writing HTML/CSS.
Hell I wouldn't be surprised if the paths it takes through a typical browser engine also makes it burn 5% or fewer as many cycles as CSS centering methods.
And it's also ugly :)
- Most of it is CSS, which when removed still produces a pretty functional website.
- Most of the CSS is just one (commented out) background image
- There are about 5 lines of java script, which seem to just exist to obfuscate your email.
It was an experiment a while back and it was inline in order to keep it all in one file. Actually that made me realize, my site is dynamic: Because I edit this one html file live on the server to make changes, whoever loads my website repeatedly while I'm doing that is going to see changes live.
The problem with AWS is their extortionate egress fees which are about 50-100 times the market price.
There was a retired lady three blocks away who had by far the best garden in a half mile radius. It was amazing.
I lived there almost four years before I started noticing her weeds, her mistakes.
In a lot of things we can see other people’s flaws but miss our own. But when we make something, that situation seems to be reversed. What we make isn’t that special, and everyone else’s creations are so much better.
If you are a web dev reading this and you've implemented a cookie popup on a website, please do the world a favor and find a different industry to work in.
[1] https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
I'm not sure why the author hosts their blog posts on this platform and not their own website though
Might be difficult to believe, but I strongly believe there are things that no one else on this planet would do except one of us.
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.
But of course, it's at the point where it's grown into something unwieldy. I feel like it's overdue for a redesign/rewrite. Just gotta figure out a clever UI design that works on desktop and mobile. Not only that, but it also needs to work without any JS, because I don't want my site to be nonfunctional without JS...
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.
Like some of the other comments here, I don't use Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican, etc. either! I know they are solid tools and they serve many people well. But I haven't found them useful for my own needs. I prefer not to subject my website to the constraints of a large and complex framework when I can write my own that is smaller, simpler, and fully under my control.
I have a small Common Lisp (CL) program to automate a few things like applying consistent layout to all pages, generating RSS feeds, creating tag list pages, etc. But otherwise, all content on my site, including all of the HTML and CSS, is 100% handcrafted. Perhaps the only exception is KaTeX, because handcrafting a parser and renderer for a subset of LaTeX is not a problem I want to take on in order to maintain my website.
I've put together a little colophon page [2] in case anyone wants to read more about it.
Some people rightfully worry that maintaining your own program like this might become a major burden, potentially taking more time than actually publishing articles on your website. At least for me, that hasn't been the case. The CL program has become quite stable. Its commit history [1] shows that I don't tinker with it too often these days. I certainly have more lines of published content than I do code in the program. The CL program is about 1000 lines long but I have about 55000 lines of content.
[1] https://susam.net/
[2] https://susam.net/colophon.html
[3] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/commits/main/site.lisp
I liked the heading fonts on the pages, "Austin News" according to Firefox. But then I looked it up for future use but it starts at 350$, so a bit steep for me :D
I used to have https://zaeem.dev/eye/ as my homepage for years, no text at all. Until I remade the site this year.
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...
The words I just read takes me back to that same feeling. Thank you for that.
I think there's a lack of kind of approach in general. There's a time and place when you build because the end goal is your client or boss, but it's ultimately the inner itch of experimentation that shapes your skillset and taste.
Those days are now! There are still plenty of us who create websites and small projects purely for the fun of it. I still maintain a personal wesite that began as a university dorm room intranet portal, and I do it for myself. I have a blog with a small audience, but I also have quirky, obscure pages that exist purely for my own amusement. If someone else happens to stumble upon them and enjoy them, that's just a bonus!
I know there are plenty of others who do the same. I often come across such websites and projects right here on this forum!
The mainstream web these days is full of walled gardens and loud and chaotic social media platforms, so this kind of quirky, creative web might seem like a small fraction by comparison. But it's still out there, and it's very much alive.
https://bkhome.org/shellcms/
Web sites aren’t my specialty, or my goals. I just want somewhere to post my ramblings.
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.
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!
Honestly, unremarkable post for an unremarkable idea. Smells like a PR push to publicize the author's website more than anything. Sure it's your website, you can do anything you want, but that is hardly a ground-breaking concept, is it?
(The posted website has been created 2 days ago, and already has 5 posts created all on the same day, asking for paid membership, hoping to trend on HN. s/good/dead/internetmagazine.com)
Anyway, some people write their own HTML+CSS, some people build their own table, other people build their own car. I usually can't decide which kind of DIY I like best :-\
Nothing wrong with it. It’s a choice. But does scream "millennial aesthetic". Maybe that’s what caused the vitriol that spurred this blog post
[1] https://www.tirreno.com/