That's how I did it in GradSchool. I took over the web page another student started for the grad-level algorithms class I was taking. The student who started it discovered he had volunteered for too many things. I jumped on it when they needed to change because I needed the extra credit.
Armed with a CD copy of the web site, I moved it over to my hosted space. I setup password-access, and setup the syuidy group, and from there on, I frequently put in one-liner paragraphs from the professor, she sometimes managed to get them to me soon enough that I could put them in before class started that day.
And then you find out that the company running the server misconfigured caching, and suddenly half your userbase sees a different version than the other half.
In 2021 I made a post here entitled "Just make the damn blog!", which was directed at myself. I'd hoped I'd finally cracked the website code and found something I'd want to maintain, but I ended up forgetting about it a week later:
This is a nice post. Thanks for sharing it here. The only thing I would like to add to this fine article is that it is perfectly fine for a personal website to simply be a loose collection of pages arranged in an arbitrary manner. Not every personal website needs to be a blog.
Very often I see aspiring website authors quickly make life complicated for themselves by deciding they need a blog, which then leads to numerous questions about tools and processes that can easily draw anyone into busywork. That time could otherwise have been spent on actually writing posts, articles, games, demos, etc. for their website that one can look back with joy months or years later.
Website busywork is probably fine for people who genuinely want to spend their time thinking about tools and processes. But if you just want to put your thoughts out there, it can be more fruitful to simply publish HTML, written directly or converted from your favourite text format such Markdown, AsciiDoc, etc.
This is a topic I care about quite a bit and my complete thoughts about this would be too long for an HN comment, so I will just share a link to a post I wrote about this recently, in case someone finds value in it: https://susam.net/writing-first-tooling-second.html
I would genuinely like to see more personal websites, because they make the Web more diverse and more interesting.
I love websites, something about stumbling across someone’s random content put together with old school hand typed code just stirs a warm and fuzzy feeling, especially if the do something “weird” that doesn’t follow any kind of modern trend or convention.
Another technique (or consideration?) that deserves attention is how to get output from notebook engines (e.g. Quarto) to play well with your existing plain text website... while Quarto does a decent job of plain text websites, it does the best job if it takes over the whole website.
I have seen at least one blog where the author updated his RSS feed manually, but it's one of the first pieces of busywork that you want to automate away, after applying the page template and entering <p> tags at every double-newline. Jekyll is useful for that; it builds automatically in GitHub Pages, which also conveniently serves as a free web host.
┍━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┑
│ how-to-make-a-damn-website.html │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ <title>How to Make a Damn Website</title> │
│ <h1>How to Make a Damn Website</h1> │
│ │
│ │
│ <p>A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start │
│ or they get stuck.</p> │
┕━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┙
HTML is very forgiving! You can start really simple and work your way up to more complexity when you need it.
The blog that I started ~13 years ago started as 3 .html files. Everything else followed as needed (styling, rss, comments, etc.). If you can get past building it, the next question becomes "What should I write about?" [0]
My answer is usually that you can write whatever you want on your websites. It's yours after all. None of the limitations that exist on third-party platforms exist. You can make all the pages read upside down if you want to.
It’s not clear to me who this is useful for. If you have a server already, yes, it’s trivial to put up an HTML page. But most people with servers, I would guess, already know that. Most people _don’t_have servers, though, and it seems to me that thats what the “easier” ways of getting started (hosted wordpress, Cloudflare pages, github pages, etc.) are for. I agree, though, that it’s good to start with plain HTML. I’d probably recommend that new people go with a serverless setup like Cloudflare pages rather than get into administrating a VM, though.
Probably not too useful for many in this audience, but I wrote a web book for *absolute beginners* learning HTML. It's very much in the same spirit as the OP's post.
This isn't how to make a damn website, this is how to make a page for a damn website. Missing is all the stuff about actually setting up a website, like hosting, domains, blah blah.
Give me simple instructions about that stuff prior to creating the contents and id be happy.
This information (excluding domain which is not 100% a requirement) used to be given by your ISP. Everybody used to have a small web space available, 100MB at the very least, which is plenty to write stuff about yourself or your favorite hobby.
https://www.yourhtmlsource.com is my favorite resource from the early 2000s on how to make a website and I'm so happy it's still around. It could be modernized to teach things like viewport and whatever but I found it super simple to understand as a teenager.
I never thought that the writing HTML is the hard part. Instead where my Sister struggled was to get a domain, get a server, deal with DNS pointing to that server. That shit is also omitted on posts like that one because it's done differently for each domain registrar and you need quite some knowledge in network stuff to be able to understand what you need to do.
Yup. Though I recently learned you can manually upload a local folder (with an index.html etc) to cloudflare pages. They will of course sell you a domain too.
I did not expect how bad this was handled in the article:
> It’s easy to forget how simple a website can be.
> ...
> If you don’t have a domain or hosting yet, now’s the time to buckle down and do that. Unfortunately, I don’t have good advice for you here. Just know that it’s going to be stupid and tedious and bad and unfun. That’s just the way this is.
Yup, it blatantly left out the hard part, and at the same time contradicted the initial claim almost literally.
Kinda reminds me of reading a dozen articles that went, "Learning how to typeset a document with LaTeX. This article assumes that you have LaTeX installed already." ages ago.
Kinda makes me wonder: If the point isn't to show how to make a website, or typeset a LaTeX document.... what IS the point?
I found it odd they specifically said not to make a git repo for the page, GitHub is one of the easiest ways I know to publish a website. It just can't be commercial etc
> If you don’t have a domain or hosting yet, now’s the time to buckle down and do that. Unfortunately, I don’t have good advice for you here. Just know that it’s going to be stupid and tedious and bad and unfun. That’s just the way this is.
I cannot remember if it was here or elsewhere but there was an amazing blogpost making fun of beginner and intermediate "coding" tutorials (coding as a catch-all for programming, markdown, etc.) where the author assumes the reader has deep familiarity with the subject at hand and all of its jargon. This has the exact same vibe.
The Mozilla docs also lay a great foundation for learning web development. They include a general overview of how the web works before teaching the basics.
40 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 67.4 ms ] threadArmed with a CD copy of the web site, I moved it over to my hosted space. I setup password-access, and setup the syuidy group, and from there on, I frequently put in one-liner paragraphs from the professor, she sometimes managed to get them to me soon enough that I could put them in before class started that day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey#Composer
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27026864
https://web.archive.org/web/20210503161408/http://rendello.c...
Very often I see aspiring website authors quickly make life complicated for themselves by deciding they need a blog, which then leads to numerous questions about tools and processes that can easily draw anyone into busywork. That time could otherwise have been spent on actually writing posts, articles, games, demos, etc. for their website that one can look back with joy months or years later.
Website busywork is probably fine for people who genuinely want to spend their time thinking about tools and processes. But if you just want to put your thoughts out there, it can be more fruitful to simply publish HTML, written directly or converted from your favourite text format such Markdown, AsciiDoc, etc.
This is a topic I care about quite a bit and my complete thoughts about this would be too long for an HN comment, so I will just share a link to a post I wrote about this recently, in case someone finds value in it: https://susam.net/writing-first-tooling-second.html
I would genuinely like to see more personal websites, because they make the Web more diverse and more interesting.
http://pho.tiyuti.com
Just lists of title, pic, blurb, url
No, you need less than that! :-)
HTML is very forgiving! You can start really simple and work your way up to more complexity when you need it.My answer is usually that you can write whatever you want on your websites. It's yours after all. None of the limitations that exist on third-party platforms exist. You can make all the pages read upside down if you want to.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-should-i-write-about
Doesn't take much.
https://1mb.club/
https://htmlforpeople.com/
Give me simple instructions about that stuff prior to creating the contents and id be happy.
> It’s easy to forget how simple a website can be. > ... > If you don’t have a domain or hosting yet, now’s the time to buckle down and do that. Unfortunately, I don’t have good advice for you here. Just know that it’s going to be stupid and tedious and bad and unfun. That’s just the way this is.
Yup, it blatantly left out the hard part, and at the same time contradicted the initial claim almost literally.
Kinda reminds me of reading a dozen articles that went, "Learning how to typeset a document with LaTeX. This article assumes that you have LaTeX installed already." ages ago.
Kinda makes me wonder: If the point isn't to show how to make a website, or typeset a LaTeX document.... what IS the point?
I literally laughed out loud. This is so on point, and so is the rest of the article.
I cannot remember if it was here or elsewhere but there was an amazing blogpost making fun of beginner and intermediate "coding" tutorials (coding as a catch-all for programming, markdown, etc.) where the author assumes the reader has deep familiarity with the subject at hand and all of its jargon. This has the exact same vibe.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...