To me the idea of a small web is a great one. But then for some reason everyone equates small with "static builder" and before you know it you're into a hellscape of complexity with static site builders, SPAs and other madness.
What happened to "I'll edit this .html file and FTP it up, with maybe a light sprinkling of CSS and js for any interactive elements"? Why did devs get obsessed with a deeply complex jamstack type thing to do even incredibly simple sites?
It's like a sort of "iceberg web" - small on the surface but hiding a mountain of complexity and dependencies under the surface.
I like static builders. It's just markdown files and some templates. It makes editing much easier. If your website is about the content and not the presentation, it makes a lot of sense.
I made my own static site builder (typical HN!) and it's just a python package. At its simplest it depends on Python Markdown and Jinja.
The website itself is dead simple and gracefully degrades. It's just text on a page after all.
> I made my own static site builder (typical HN!) and it's just a python package
Same! I designed the look of my site, and then wrote Python to generate it, though instead of Jinja I even wrote my own templating library. The goal of reinventing the wheel was to learn Python through writing a non-trivial, useful app and libraries.
I haven't quite mustered up the courage to publish the source, yet, though: being a learning exercise I'm painfully aware some of the code is not as good as it should be. And I'm still learning what makes Python code Pythonic.
> What happened to "I'll edit this .html file and FTP it up..."
A SSG _is_ that, these days. My SSG generates my own site design. If I tweak the site's look and feel, I do that once and re-run the SSG. I wouldn't want to have to do that across multiple HTML files.
My process is:
* Write Markdown
* Run the SSG script
* FTP it up (overwriting previous contents; I have dated backups of every version, and the most recent run of the SSG is the canonical version.)
I entered the site in the competition, since it's no-Javascript, pure HTML & CSS, minimal, manuscript-style typographic focus, with articles on design, management, and the just plain miscellaneous. Very much going for the 'old-school personal site about whatever someone finds interesting' feeling, and hopefully some bits will be of interest to HN people too, maybe. https://daveon.design if you're interested!
Thankyou! I'll check SeaMonkey. I've tested only Firefox, Chrome and Safari (and desktop and mobile) so far. Really glad to hear it works in links! That's awesome.
There should be a reasonable amount of accessibility markup too (in how it's structured plus some specific accessibility items) for screen readers as well.
If you have a few minutes to kill, I'd love to know how allaboutberlin.com feels on such a device. I sometimes choose convenience over coverage, but I still try to make the website accessible.
Loads fast, looks clean, content seems to be available - each of the 'cards' opens a page with a graphic, a table of contents in a contrasting grey colour and then text giving information. There is then a 'classified ads' section with links at the bottom.
Looks identical on my 'normal' machine with Firefox 102-esr and ublock origin and more ram/faster processor &c.
A quick look in the text mode browser links in a uxterm window showed that text content was available. The home window links show as two rows of text links - works ok.
I'm on a pretty fast G4 'mobile broadband' connection in UK with around 2.5Mb/sec (probably the old Thinkpads wifi limit) and around 45 mSec latency from ping.
Not the person you asked, but I just opened it on Firefox on Mac. That website is _blazing fast_. It opened in a fraction of a second. Really good job!
> Why did devs get obsessed with a deeply complex jamstack type thing to do even incredibly simple sites?
Because devs don't think of websites like a place for personal expression; to them, personal websites are usually roughly structured wikis of stuff they've learned that would be mostly hard to read or follow for others.
So they geek out over the details of the blog infrastructure. If instead of a website, they were asked to draw something, they'd focus on the sturdiness of the paper.
This seems like the correct answer. I can't think of how many times I've been like "I should publicize all my notes" and then I restart the cycle of looking into blogging or note-taking/wiki software (with publishing options like Notion). I'm not much into writing long-form content, but I journal and log pretty consistently. It's always the "distill this body of knowledge into an easily consumable article-style thing" that I lose interest, both because it's hard but also because I feel the return on investment is super low. I already get the benefits of my notes, and blogs are too 1-way to get meaningful feedback unless it goes "viral" on a link aggregator like HN or Lobsters. Maybe I just underestimate how much feedback is typically given or over estimate the difficulty in making it to the front page...
So instead of typing ("hand fucking") a few HTML characters around your blog post you trade it in for a big complex orgy of additional abstractions, tools, and processes.
Yes. HTML is not great and when you have to fuck with CSS to it becomes distracting. Just put the effort once into making template I want then just write markdown.
Well, I run my own blog on Gatsby, and about once per year I have to dedicate a weekend to figure out how to make it run locally again, because the entire JS ecosystem is an unstable hellscape of ever-changing complexity that morphs from one shape to another for absolutely no reason at all.
While I totally understand the node.js idea of building the backend with the same language as the frontend, I don’t understand why anyone should use JS for a static website. The point of a static website is to get away from server troubles, and it seems like building something static on top of JS is just the worst house of cards. I’m happy with my tech choices because I always think about the people behind my choices.
I moved from ConTeXt to XeTeX because the people making context didn’t care about documentation.
I moved to Jekyll because the people behind it were making Github. They built something rock solid.
I moved from Apache to Nginx because the people making it were trying to build something simple to configure. It showed and I could solve my redirect issues in minutes.
I don't think it's fair to equate static site generators with SPAs. At its core, a static site generator just renders markdown and slots it into html templates. That's nice and convenient and still perfectly simple.
in my bolg, i use vscode write markdown files，next run a simple nodejs script: use pandoc convert md to html and rewrite index.html.I'm happy with this simple enough build system that it gets me started writing lightly.
https://www.seazhang.com/, Link are given as examples, because blog content is Chinese and personal, not worth mentioning.
imo using your language of choice as an html templating engine that serves your "static" files is the best choice - you can essentially be left with editign css/js and html files but if you have some neat feature you want to add you can implement it and start taking advantage of the templates to interpolate your new stuff. Keeps your clients small and it's up to you to keep it simple or add what ever giant frameworks you want.
Thanks for the feature. We made the website with https://build.mmm.page/. It is the most fun wysiwyg builder I have used. Highly recommend it, bugs included.
I would think that a collective concerned with such an award would take the care to ensure their own "small" website works well on mobile, both in terms of performance and presentation. As already noted, the site is quite bloated and, on my phone at least, the end of most lines of text is cut off due to insufficient spacing.
In their defense they implied that the award was tiny, and that the award was for tiny websites… there was no implication that their own website was (or need be) tiny.
That’s notwithstanding the fact that tiny in scope != tiny in size.
This is awesome. Almost all content on the internet has been centralized by social networks, so it brings me joy to see an appetite for small, personal, non-commercial websites.
Eh, I've been on the hunt for non-commercial websites for close to a decade. It's pretty barren out there. Three types of people have websites these days:
1) People trying to sell something: courses, books, their resume, etc.
2) People interested in blogging, who give up after less than a year due to lack of visibility (compared to Medium/Substack)
3) People who created their website in the 90s and saw no reason to stop.
I'm sure they do, but I'm not looking in those places. Setting up a personal website comes with a certain amount of friction compared to SS or M, which IMO iS a better signal for whether that person is serious about doing this.
> > 2) People interested in blogging, who give up after less than a year due to lack of visibility (compared to Medium/Substack)
> You don’t think most people that post to the likes of Medium or Substack also give up quickly?
I think the parent meant "lack of visibility compared to Medium/Substack", not "give up after less than a year compared to [longer viability on] Medium/Substack". (If you, in turn, meant implicitly just to say "read Medium/Substack", then I think that fails on the "small, personal" criteria, and possibly also on "non-commercial".)
I read rchaud as saying “people that give up on blogging not long after starting because they’re not getting readers, whereas if they had posted on Medium/Substack they would get readers and would continue”, but I think that doesn’t reflect reality or the reasons people stop.
I agree! Which is why I'm excited by an award promoting small personal websites. It's like an oasis in a barren desert of people trying to sell you things.
I wonder if there'll ever be a webpage submission on HN where 50% of the comments aren't just complaining about the presentation or the way it's been implemented.
It doesn’t normally happen by any means. It happened this time due to the nature of the submission, which makes it relevant: it’s about the “small web”, but has itself used techniques of the “big web” (and poorly implemented at that) that mesh very poorly with that goal. Ultimately, it is unfortunately an unusually poorly put-together website, which has (at least to this audience, which is more sensitive to such matters than most) undermined its otherwise interesting goal and purpose.
It's an award for sites that "embody the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web", not for who can code the most minimal and efficient HTML. I don't know what these commenters are trying to demonstrate other than that they missed the point of this entirely well-meaning effort.
I think you have misunderstood their use of the word "small". It is not small in the sense of having a small file size, loading quickly, or eschewing the use of JavaScript frameworks, but "small" in the sense of being humble, independently created, small in scope, outside commercial activity.
The website’s text does not render with JavaScript disabled. IMO, this is a huge blunder for such a simple, static website. Just put the text in the HTML document.
I remember awards being a thing back in the 90's. Best blog, top 10 websites... This and banners exchange. I put i banner on my website point to yours and you do the same. Fun times.
The requirement is that the website should be created in the past year. That cancels out all those small websites (with no ads) that were created before social networks became dominant.
I wonder if you will be happy when you small website will be rewarded as you may suddenly get a lot of traffic resulting in either becoming unavailable due to heavy traffic or forced on a more costly plan by the ISP. That is one reason why I am hesitant to post links here to my private website.
Seamonkey browser reveals no visible content at all when visiting this site - just a blank window. I can see content in 'view source' but the main window won't resolve anything.
Links on the command line can resolve the text but of course does not display images. So when the OA says...
"Desktop AND mobile: projects must work across both desktop and mobile web"
...could we perhaps focus on what 'work' actually means for a Web site in 2023?
This is a good start. Back in the Flash days, there used to be "Site of the Day" type sites where you could find cool stuff. Unfortunately this quickly got gamed and became a love-in for agency websites, each one upvoting the others, Product Hunt-style.
A one-off $500 prize is just enough to get some interesting websites in there, while also not being enough to keep out the Linktree-type sites.
Currently rendering as an entirely blank page for me in Safari. Largely because it seems to be scaled to some ungodly size and all I'm seeing is the left margin - but horizontal scrolling is disabled. A+ superb. 10/10. No notes.
I loved this! I'm itching to see the results for "Tiny Awards for Small Websites with a ton of unnecessary scripts and trackers". Oh wait, they're already listed on this site.
Yep. About 1.7 MB of JavaScript (yeah, less across the wire) to do literally nothing interactive, and have a janky, ridiculously-scaled document where everything is the same shade of blue, links are not distinguished in any way, and a decorative image even collides with the text in one place. The whole thing should have been under 20KB of pure HTML, SVG and CSS.
I’m sure this is in jest, but it truly is baffling that this purely informational webpage is so massive.
I believe the “small” web is more than being an independent entity and instead also should avoid wasted resources. Developers need to respect their end users’ bandwidth and time. Just my two cents.
Genuinely curious, why does the page make 20+ requests for ~1.5Mb of non-content for a site that quite literally exists to showcase small websites? Oversight?
I think they use another definition of "small" than most of tech-oriented folks here at HN. They don't seem to be interested in filesizes, number of requests, or even usability. They used a WYSIWG builder (see their advertisement somewhere else in this thread), which is responsible for all of the bloat. It looked good on their (fruity?) devices, and they went with it. It doesn't look like anyone with a technical sensibility was ever involved.
“Tiny Awards is a small prize awarded by an equally-small selection committee of online makers to the website which we feel best embodies the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web.”
It says nothing about page size, but 80% of the comments are pointless bickering about JavaScript by grumpy HN readers that prefer their web experience to be permanently stuck in 2005.
I will never understand how do you never get bored of fighting windmills.
A small website means something that is a one-person operation and personal in nature. Only on HN could that be interpreted to mean 'smallest possible file size'.
> A small website means something that is a one-person operation and personal in nature. Only on HN could that be interpreted to mean 'smallest possible file size'.
Your definition of ‘small website’ is certainly a reasonable one, but I think to claim that only a tech geek could think that ‘small’ meant ‘small file size’ is overstating it.
I didn't say tech geek, I said HN. Tech geeks understand personal websites. Only on HN do those threads turn into monotonous pontifications about Hugo v Ghost or whether a site renders with JS turned off.
What happened to "I'll edit this .html file and FTP it up, with maybe a light sprinkling of CSS and js for any interactive elements"? Why did devs get obsessed with a deeply complex jamstack type thing to do even incredibly simple sites?
It's like a sort of "iceberg web" - small on the surface but hiding a mountain of complexity and dependencies under the surface.