I'm proud of a lot of things about my site, but maybe the domain most of all: https://xavd.id
It's written with Gatsby and hosted on Netlify (which handles the build step without configuration). I picked Gatsby because I wanted to use react/preprocessors, but also wanted to be able to "just write" (and MDX lets me do both of those). It also has a vibrant plugin ecosystem and is JS based (vs Ruby, which my previous site used; I don't write Ruby any longer).
I blog a few times a year, a mix of technical topics and media reviews. The blog is meant to be mostly text, but it being in React means I can drop in rich things, like support for hide-able spoilers and nice code blocks. I've optimized the layout for reading text (good font size, max-width, line-height), so hopefully it works!
Interesting that you also track reading speed. My speed differential between different types of of books always surprises me a bit. Usually it's something like, "Wait, I'm only 20% through this book and I've been reading it for two months?"
That reading speed (in words / day) is mostly a byproduct of wanting to track start/end dates and a word count, so I get speed "for free". I don't actually look at it much, but it's an interesting proxy for "rough interest level".
It is funny how much variation there is between books/genres though! The sentence complexity and variety definitely comes into play here.
It's nice to see what my friends are reading, but it's always trying to recommend me books, sell me things, etc. It makes sense (it's why Amazon bought them) but it I found it mostly got in the way of what I wanted out of it- a spreadsheet with pre-filled information. Also it's dumb, but I wanted to rate books on a 4-point scale, and theirs is out of 5.
I used to use a gSheet for this (with columns for title, author, day start/end, and review), but I wanted a way to source rich info. So I combined Zapier, the google books API, and an npm package I wrote to count the words in an epub (https://github.com/xavdid/epub-wordcount/) and fed all that info into Airtable. It sounds like a lot of work, but I set it up years ago and it's been happily humming along.
Now I have exactly the tracking system I want, and it's not at the whim of decisions on any product roadmaps.
I've thought about it. Honestly the most likely thing is that I'll make a standalone site for media reviews and consolidate everything. That's what I did for this (https://github.com/xavdid/kerfuffle; currently offline) and I was very pleased with the result. ".review" is a TLD, so I spin it up under something there. :)
Nothing too fancy, just a static hugo site on github pages. I'm most happy with the search that I added, which all happens client-side. The index is only about 129 KB so I'll probably never hit a practical download size limit either. And because it's happening in the browser it's very responsive.
I've also written a good amount about chess lately, if anyone is interested in that. Specifically, the intersection of chess and AI, where I've been working on a new type of chess learning tool.
Hey Taylor! Good looking site- The minimal theming feels very clean. 2 suggestions jumped out:
1. The font size on homepage is small, especially for the two columns of dates. I can't really read them from across my desk (even on a big monitor). It's also not clear what the dates represent- maybe created and updated dates for each post?
2. The dates aren't present on the post pages themselves, so someone landing directly on a post won't know how old it is.
Dates on posts is nice because knowing when a post was written (and/or updated) gives a lot of context. For instance, your timeline is super cool. Knowing where a given post fits into that is useful.
I'm pretty torn on having a separation between the notion of "posts" and "projects". I don't keep the project section up to date very often, and probably should remove it. Any thoughts/advice on this HN?
Briefly looking through your posts, I'm not 100% sure what differentiates the project posts from the others. I like the idea of the project page being visually distinct from the lists of posts. One way to sort out the project page is to provide a short blurb describing each post.
Today it’s a NextJS site on Vercel backed by markdown files (older pages) and Notion (newer pages). I’ve also built the same design with a Python SSG which was focused on one HTTP request per page, and before that a POSIX shell script I wrote focused on being as FreeBSD as possible.
I would like to share more knowledge on the site, but it’s in last place behind all my other life goals.
I’m a product designer who’s been blogging since around 2009. For several years I managed an online publication, Signal Tower. Then left it to become the host of the Designer News podcast. Some posts y’all might find interesting:
My personal blog as well as a place to showcase the iOS & macOS apps I’m working on.
It’s statically generated with Hugo and, for the first time, I actually created the theme myself (based on the lightweight CSS framework Bulma).
Being essentially just a bunch of SASS files, Bulma allowed me to easily cherry-pick only what I needed, extend and tweak as required and easily integrate it into the Hugo build pipeline.
Designing and developing the theme was a really cool experience because my background is mostly in C, C++ Objective C and Swift and this was the most serious “web project” I have done to date. I still prefer writing native apps but have definitely enjoyed this excursion into the world of SCSS, HTML and JS :)
Now if only I got around to actually blogging more regularly :D
Inspired by an iPad-style layout, along with some other personal sites I admire. Not too fancy, just a home for my photos and some (not very much) writing.
I also read Jekyll and Hyde in the past few years, but I felt like it didn't grip me because its "big twist" is so well known today; I can imagine it was different at the time.
Also, instead of Project Gutenberg, it may be worth mentioning that the book is available at Standard Ebooks. They're a open source operation that makes high-quality modern ebooks out of public domain works. Here's J&H: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/robert-louis-stevenson/the...
In the early days of covid lockdown I began a weekly page "Five Reads Friday" of recent internet finds for (old) colleagues from my (old) research lab. — and for anyone else who may be interested
Its still going. Todays 5RF (number 134) is at
A humanities take on tech. I'm always nervous how the sidenotes render on other webviews. But my favorite part is the automatically generated historical timeline (https://schmud.de/timeline.html). It is essentially a meaningfully different ordering of the same writing.
I really like your sidenodes! They play nicely on mobile too, which is impressive. I always notice how much empty space there is on the desktop view for mine, but I don't want to clutter the page too much for non-huge monitors.
In my experience, it just isn’t a proper “share your personal site” thread unless I come across yours. The timeline is a very nice take on the traditional blog archive, where posts are organized by the date of the subject matter itself instead of than when it was published. Nice.
I've just started blogging and it has been a great way for me to consolidate new things I've picked up into easily digestable articles. The blog is very simple. It's built with Hugo and a modified instance of Congo[0] and is hosted by Cloudflare Pages for free.
Several HNers have BeeLine-enabled their websites to increase reader engagement, and to improve accessibility. I'm eternally grateful to the HN community, whose support of our massive Show HN [1] led to press coverage that helped get this business started.
If anyone here is interested in adding our widget to their site, please ping me (contact at beelinereader dot com) and I'd be happy to make this happen.
Here are various examples of HNers who have implemented our tech on their sites:
I used to actually blog, but I ended up neglecting my site after I got a full-time job since I wanted to spend my personal time doing other things. But, I do credit my website heavily for getting me where I am and I always highly recommend blogging and having an online portfolio to anyone trying to get into the tech industry.
Fun fact: A long time ago I had a blog post/rant about reCAPTCHA end up on the HN home page, and some time later I had a coworker ask me if I knew I was on Wikipedia. Turns out someone linked my blog post in the Wikipedia article for CAPTCHAs, but it's since been removed.
Anyways, I did literally just switch from Wordpress to Statamic (which is even self-hosted on my homelab!). WP is a pain to manage, and having a flat-file based CMS does provide me some flexibility. I setup (again, using my homelab and N8N!) an automatic Masotdon-to-Statamic cross-poster, which was much easier to integrate than if I had my old WP setup.
It's funny, your name jumped out immediately as someone I've read. Took me a minute to place it, but I'm guessing probably back from your WP7/Win8 days as I was very interested in the space at the time. Definitely recall reading your iOS7 design post too. So, just wanted to say thanks for posting this here as it's fun to see it all again!
I've had this one for a couple years now. I've had more polished-looking sites in the past, but this time I wanted to emphasize having fun with it and not being too precious - this allows me to update it without worrying about everything being perfect.
It's a static site built by Eleventy. I edit/build it locally, and then when I push up to Github it's rebuilt there by a Github action. Details here: https://www.justus.ws/how/
Edit: An interesting tidbit: my avatar in the upper-left corner blinks on a random timer thanks to a very simple bit of JS[0]. However, it exhibits a strange and unexpected behaviour: if you don't interact with the webpage for a while, my avatar "goes to sleep"; e.g. the eyes close until you interact with it again.
I love this, but I don't know why it happens! I get that the browser probably pauses scripts after a time, but why would it always end up with its eyes closed, especially when the eyes are only supposed to close for 150ms at a time?
[0]:
async function blinktimer() {
async function blink() {
var src = $(" .avatar ").attr('src');
console.log("BLINK!");
$(" .avatar ").attr('src','/images/dadi-avatar_blink.png');
await sleep(150);
$(" .avatar ").attr('src',src);
}
while (true) {
var delay = Math.floor((Math.random() * 11000) + 0);
await sleep(delay);
blink();
}
};
I'd guess there's a race condition that causes the eyes to end up closed, because the 'delay' can sometimes be less than 150 and `blink` gets called while it's already executing (so `src` ends up being the blink version). A simple fix would be adding `await` to `blink()` if that's the case!
BTW, I made a vanilla JS version for fun, without jQuery or promises (untested)
function blinktimer() {
var avatar = document.querySelector(" .avatar ");
var srcBlink = '/images/dadi-avatar_blink.png';
var blink = function() {
console.log("BLINK!");
var srcOpen = avatar.src;
avatar.src = srcBlink;
setTimeout(function() {
avatar.src = srcOpen;
var delay = (Math.random() * 11000) | 0;
setTimeout(blink, delay);
}, 150);
}
var delay = (Math.random() * 11000) | 0;
setTimeout(blink, delay);
}
Thanks for the feedback - maybe your browser isn't loading my font? This is what it should look like: https://0x0.st/oR5C.png
I should specify a better fallback font though.
As an aside, for some reason all of your comments are showing up as dead (including a comment you made on another post 29 days ago). I vouched for your two comments here to bring them back. I'm not sure why that is, but you might want to reach out to hn@ycombinator.com
I was happy I could get the domain! Pretty simple hand-rolled server-rendered site using the kit-clj[0] and neat-css[1]. Main backbone of the site is here[2]. I used to use a CLJS SPA but it was overkill and not as nice to use (load times particularly.)
I write posts using Hypertext - my open source HTML Document Editor - and sync to S3 with a simple static blog generator. It's so nice to write essays using rich-text with the same CSS style as my site and not have to look at Markdown line noise and guess what the end result might look like.
I have my portfolio where I write some programming related posts from time to time :)
https://antoniosbarotsis.github.io/ been doing some Rust lately.
I'm still a student so nothing too cool in there but slowly getting better. I mostly find specific ideas that interest me, group a bunch of those together and try to build a project that uses all of them. I usually blog about those although I think in a bit too much detail.
One of my personal goals is to write 1 blog post / week for 2023. Looking to cultivate a community curious about the future of TinyML (machine learning on edge/IoT devices).
I advertised it originally as a financial technology blog, ended up mostly a career advice blog for navigating toxic environments and some hard truths.
Hey Ivan! I like your site. I might swap the homepage picture out for one that's a little less... aggressive though? That picture is pretty stern and it's on every page/post.
https://simonsarris.com - Fairly mundane, but has a city pop up in the background. I've been meaning to remake it more interestingly, but many other projects to do. Most of my writing content is now on Substack, instead.
With my most recent iteration, I have started using my website more as a mental decluttering tool than a show-tell medium. The wesbite is a bunch of markdown files spiced up with Next.js and my first attempt at structured navigation. I keep a similar private one.
I've now been rethinking of reorganizing into a flat heirarchy + what I like to call "theme portals" - essentially big picture entrypoints into details. This avoids a long list of scattered blog posts. The orrganization style of clean overarching themes like tech/math etc. isn't working for me.
The story is that I was going to make my own blogging platform from scratch with vanilla Django for personal use, but then I thought about making it available to anyone for use, but then I noticed that there are already plenty of those, so I made one with a twist.
Actually the name “Pressn’t” comes from making blogs without Wordpress and a wordplay with present.
Nothing too fancy, just a static hugo site on github pages. I mostly write about Java and Javascript. Currently trying to complete my 100DaysOfJava. As its quite a tough thing to make time so trying to read and tinker with the concepts and then write.
Not a lot on there right now. I have a lot of ideas for blog posts and started a series porting a tiny C++ renderer to Rust (to learn both 3D graphics and Rust), but it's been hard to find time to continue with school and work. I'm trying to put out a new post before my next semester starts or gets too busy, but we'll see...
I built it kinda from scratch using Hugo. I didn't use any templates and wrote custom all custom CSS. The only JavaScript is a 2.3 KB Umami tracking script that talks to my self-hosted instance.
I've been using it as a mixed place for documenting engineering projects and hosting piles of images from various reverse engineering efforts & excursions throughout the states.
I've been slowly working on it becoming more mobile friendly. As a static site its incredibly time consuming to cleanup, but also fun. It's like restoring up rusty cookware, similar functionality but way prettier after a lot of scrubbing.
My website / blog is at https://kennedn.com/. The website portion is a bit of a weirdo. I deliberately wrote it from scratch to try and learn the basics of web design / JavaScript and evidence of that can be seen in the wacky ways I am achieving state management (sessionStorage) or the fact that the CSS is balanced on a hairpin. I made it just extensible enough that I've not had a need to refactor it to date though.
I have https://l3m.in . That's a small php website where I have a blog and a project list page. All made using vanilla php/mysql/html/css website. Very fast, very frustrating to update since I'm mostly doing Python/Django stuff now.
Aaaand https://links.l3m.in ! That's a Shaarli-like website made using Django, it helps me store my links.
https://on-systems.tech/blog/130-2022-self-published-book-ea... is a great post, thanks for sharing so much detail. I've wanted to publish on technical topics so it's good to learn about other people's experiences. It looks like the print quality of your book is pretty good!
https://nikonyrh.github.io
My blog / project portfolio, mostly Keras ML stuff in recent years but also programming and database stuff.
https://www.artistic.wtf
A free Stable Diffusion site for generating images, extra features such as image grids and higher resolution are available from paid plans.
I usually blog/link to; about user experience and privacy.
Want to do the 100 days to offload challenge this year. To force myself a bit to write and learn how to write better.
WIP.. still looking through my archives of old blogs and post on other websites (forums that are long gone, social bookmarking services etc) to add to my website retrospectively.
Using Hugo as static site generator and hosted on Netlify.
I had one, but it literally burned down with my server when ISPs air conditioner failed. Two PSUs went one by one, and the shitty HP server wouldn't even properly shut down. :( Since then, the domain was overtaken. And there's no point making another server considering WW3 situation :( And the entry point now is probably higher - one does not simply install CMS. And domains need to be paid. ( Screw Internet!
It’s built with my own static site generator (my favourite thing to tinker with). I author posts in my own flavour of markdown. Page templates are good ol’ handlebars. It’s built with indieweb ideals in mind with micropub and webmentions implemented using netlify build plugins and functions.
Been writing musings on personal projects and biking very erratically for a few years now, aiming at building up some consistency because I have stuff to say.
I have been blogging about 3d, tech and general thoughts on this URL for a long time. Originally a flat site then a WP monster and now a sleak little HUGO number.
I like this idea of blog sharing and it fits with my current feelings of decentralised posting.
My site’s content is most heavily focused on books, ML infra, and small projects. My most popular stuff is probably the Designing Data Intensive Apps flashcards mini-project and a post about K8s being a misfit for data/ML platform teams.
https://adamjhawley.com/ - built with blogdown and use it to document stuff I learn/projects I try. Fell out of the habit of writing blogs. I’ve been focusing on small projects since and might write about a few of those soon.
Just a basic Jekyll template. I have had a 2 year break and recently got back into it. In that time I also forgot to renew my old .com domain and had it taken over.
Have had a few posts that previously got attention on Hacker News.
My personal freelancing company site. I got an endorsement from the prime minister of my country, which was pretty cool! Trying to focus on which technologies and projects I’ve worked with to give a sense of what skills I have
Just started it really, trying to start writing as I miss it a bit from working in academia.
I used Hugo to generate it and host it on GitHub Pages with a custom domain. I need to make some tweaks to the template I used but not really had time!
A WordPress-based site I established way back in 2005. It's all non-fiction stories from history and science, plus I curate links to other interesting content.
Mine is https://austinnguyen00.com/. It is my portfolio site that I built a few months ago when I started my developer journey, so it may not look that fancy, but I'm proud of it :D
Constantly working on this. I wanted one of those incredibly functional, nearly entirely text-based sites (huge fan of those) ... but I decided to try to be more creative and have fun with it.
I've recently started a newsletter focused on DevOps: https://www.thinkingdevops.com/ I plan to start making videos as well (similar in style to sysadmincasts).
https://memo.mx personal blog and notes for me, if you find something useful, please use it. almost everything is under "Do What the Fuck You Want To Public License"
Wow, your circular navigation with the jumbled letters is very cool! It's a little picky about where you have to click (directly on the rune, apparently, even if it highlights when you're lose), but I enjoyed navigating around with it.
It used to be a Jekyll site but after just getting frustrated with markdown and Jekyll I moved to Ghost. Ideally, I'd like to delete all social media and just have a newsletter via it.
My only suggestion for your site is that your homepage has a lot of different fonts at once. One for the header/nav, one for the main body/CTA, another for the podcast column headers and a serif font for the podcasts themselves. It may be worth condensing those and differentiating with size/color/weight instead of font face.
Did a recent revamp, not proud of the excessive JS but it is what it is, also I've started using stable diffusion to generate thumbnails for my posts which I really like, now the only thing missing is to start blogging actively.
fully hosted on Github pages (+ github actions for deployment). I haven’t written anything on it for a while, I’m getting committed to change that for this year.
It's written with Gatsby and hosted on Netlify (which handles the build step without configuration). I picked Gatsby because I wanted to use react/preprocessors, but also wanted to be able to "just write" (and MDX lets me do both of those). It also has a vibrant plugin ecosystem and is JS based (vs Ruby, which my previous site used; I don't write Ruby any longer).
I blog a few times a year, a mix of technical topics and media reviews. The blog is meant to be mostly text, but it being in React means I can drop in rich things, like support for hide-able spoilers and nice code blocks. I've optimized the layout for reading text (good font size, max-width, line-height), so hopefully it works!
Some favorite posts are:
- Python Dataclasses from Scratch: https://xavd.id/blog/post/python-dataclasses-from-scratch/
- My yearly media review. Here's 2021; 2022 should be up in the next few days: https://xavd.id/blog/post/favorite-media-2021/
Thanks for looking!