Tags: websites

Back to the Crazebox! - Toons Back To A Website - Homestar Runner

Let’s go back to a website!

This page is under construction - localghost

I see the personal website as being an antidote to the corporate, centralised web. Yeah, sure, it’s probably hosted on someone else’s computer – but it’s a piece of the web that belongs to you. If your host goes down, you can just move it somewhere else, because it’s just HTML.

Sure, it’s not going to fix democracy, or topple the online pillars of capitalism; but it’s making a political statement nonetheless. It says “I want to carve my own space on the web, away from the corporations”. I think this is a radical act. It was when I originally said this in 2022, and I mean it even more today.

Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too) - Rogue Engine

Remember when every company rushed to make an app? Airlines, restaurants, even your local coffee shop. Back then, it made some sense. Browsers weren’t as powerful, and apps had unique features like notifications and offline access. But fast-forward to today, and browsers can do all that. Yet businesses still push native apps as if it’s 2010, and we’re left downloading apps for things that should just work on the web.

This is all factually correct, but alas as Cory Doctorow points out, you can’t install an ad-blocker in a native app. To you and me, that’s a bug. To short-sighted businesses, it’s a feature.

(When I say “ad-blocker”, I mean “tracking-blocker”.)

2004 was the first year of the future

I enjoyed reading through these essays about the web of twenty years ago: music, photos, email, games, television, iPods, phones…

Much as I love the art direction, you’d never know that we actually had some very nice-looking websites back in 2004!

My solar-powered and self-hosted website | Dries Buytaert

This is a neat project form Dries:

This project is driven by my curiosity about making websites and web hosting more environmentally friendly, even on a small scale. It’s also a chance to explore a local-first approach: to show that hosting a personal website on your own internet connection at home can often be enough for small sites. This aligns with my commitment to both the Open Web and the IndieWeb.

At its heart, this project is about learning and contributing to a conversation on a greener, local-first future for the web.

Back in June I documented a bug on macOS in how Spaces (or whatever they call they’re desktop management thingy now) works with websites added to the dock.

I’m happy to report that after upgrading to Sequoia, the latest version of macOS, the bug has been fixed! Excellent!

Not only that, but there’s another really great little improvement…

Let’s say you’ve installed a website like The Session by adding it to the dock. Now let’s say you get an email in Apple Mail that includes a link to something on The Session. It used to be that clicking on that link would open it in your default web browser. But now clicking on that link opens it in the installed web app!

It’s a lovely little enhancement that makes the installed website truly feel like a native app.

Websites in the dock also support the badging API, which is really nice!

Like I said at the time:

I wonder if there’s much point using wrappers like Electron any more? I feel like they were mostly aiming to get that parity with native apps in having a standalone application launched from the dock.

Now all you need is a website.

The biggest issue remains discovery. Unless you already know that it’s possible to add a website to the dock, you’re unlikely to find out about it. That’s why I’ve got a page with installation instructions on The Session.

Still, the discovery possibilities on Apples’s desktop devices are waaaaay better than on Apple’s mobile devices.

Apple are doing such great work on their desktop operating system to make websites first-class citizens. Meanwhile, they’re doing less than nothing on their mobile operating system. For a while there, they literally planned to break all websites added to the homescreen. Fortunately they were forced to back down.

But it’s still so sad to see how Apple are doing everything in their power to prevent people from finding out that you can add websites to your homescreen—despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that push notifications on iOS only work if the website has been added to the home screen!

So while I’m really happy to see the great work being done on installing websites for desktop computers, I’m remain disgusted by what’s happening on mobile:

At this point I’ve pretty much given up on Apple ever doing anything about this pathetic situation.

HTML for People

This is excellent! A free web book (it’s a book! it’s a website!) that teaches you how to make a website from scratch:

I feel strongly that anyone should be able to make a website with HTML if they want. This book will teach you how to do just that. It doesn’t require any previous experience making websites or coding. I will cover everything you need to know to get started in an approachable and friendly way.

👏

Creating Your Own Website

Building a website can seem difficult, but half the battle is just getting started! We wanted to put this guide together as an easy compilation of tutorials and places to learn exactly what you need to get started.

This is a really useful guide for beginners!

We hope this guide helps make everything feel more accessible to you, because it is! The internet belongs to all of us, so be sure to stake your claim in it.

The web is mostly links and forms | Go Make Things

In the same vein as that last link, Chris says what we’re all thinking:

Most of what we build is links from one page to another, and form submissions that send data from the browser to the server.

IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024 · Paul Robert Lloyd

This is going to be a fun weekend!

Not got a personal website? Bring your laptop or mobile device, and we’ll help you get setup so that you can publish somewhere you control and can make your own.

Seasoned web developer? Learn about the different open web services, software and technologies that can help empower yourself and others to own their content and online identity.

Grab your spot now!

The Website vs. Web App Dichotomy Doesn’t Exist | jakelazaroff.com

Amen!

If there’s one takeaway from all this, it’s that the web is a flexible medium where any number of technologies can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways.

The personality of a personal website – Manu

Personal sites—and, more broadly, our digital lives—are a mirror of who we are. Some of us will try to neatly organize everything under one hyper-curated digital roof while others will scatter things around on 12 different domains and 24 services. Some will design a site for themselves and not touch it again for a decade while others will feel the need to redesign every 6 months. Those are all right answers to a question that doesn’t have wrong answers.

Streams of Consciousness · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Your website is a way for you to share your stream of consciousness, that temporary and subjective and highly biased snippet of the universe, with everyone else, including your future self.

Ben wrote a post a little while back about maybe organising his home page differently. It’s currently a stream.

That prompted Om to ask is “stream” as a design paradigm over? Mind you, he’s not talking about personal websites:

Across the web, one can see “streams” losing their preeminence. Social networks are increasingly algorithmically organized, so their stream isn’t really a free-flowing stream. It is more like a river that has been heavily dammed. It is organized around what the machine thinks we need to see based on what we have seen in the past.

Funnily enough, I’ve some recent examples of personal homepages become more like social networks, at least in terms of visual design. A lot of people I know are liking the recent redesigns from Adam and Jhey.

Here on my site, my home page is kind of a stream. I’ve got notes, links, and blog posts one after another in chronological order. The other sections of my site are ways of focusing in on the specific types of content links, short notes, blog posts in my journal.

Behind the scenes, entries those separate sections of my site are all stored in the same database table. In some ways, the separation into different sections of the site is more like tagging. So the home page is actually the simplest bit to implement: grab the latest 20 entries out of that database table.

I don’t make too much visual distinction between the different kinds of posts. My links and my notes look quite similar. And if I post a lot of commentary with a link, it looks a lot like a blog post.

Maybe I should make them more distinct, visually. Because I actually like the higgedly-piggedly nature of a stream of different kinds of stuff. I want the vibe to be less like a pristine Apple store, and more like a chaotic second-hand bookstore.

Going back to what Ben wrote about his site:

As of right now, the homepage is a mix of long-form posts, short thoughts, and links I consider interesting, presented as a stream. It’s a genuine representation of what I’m reading and thinking about, and each post’s permalink page looks fine to me, but it doesn’t quite hold together as a whole. If you look at my homepage with fresh eyes, my stream is a hodgepodge. There’s no through line.

For me, that’s a feature, not a bug. There’s no through line on my home page either. I like that.

Some lovely people have recently made some lovely websites.

Dan has launched his type foundry, Simple Type Co. and it’s gorgeous!

For as long as I’ve been making websites, Dan’s designs have been an inspiration: Corkd, Dribbble, his own website; whenever he unveils something it always sits just right with me.

Oh, and I love the tagline for Simple Type Co.:

Never perfect. Always a-okay.

Someone who is a perfectionist is Marcin. He’s been working on his book about keyboards for years now (the Kickstarter project will launch in February) and he’s made a stunning website for the book called Shift Happens. Click around and find out.

Mandy has a lovely new professional website, courtesy of Ethan. It’s called everything changes. I love the subtletly of the different colour schemes for dark and light modes. It’s almost as if Ethan knows a thing or two about responsive design.

Look! Jason has new professional website too. The text is just scrumptious. It’s almost as if Jason knows a thing or two about typography.

And look! Lynn has done it again—a new site design for a new year. Beautiful stuff, as always—have a look through the archive if you want to the creativity she puts into this every single year.

All of these people are my web design heroes.

Indiekit

Paul’s indie web project is live!

Meet the little Node.js server with all the parts needed to publish content to your personal website and share it on social networks.

You can read the accompanying blog post.

ooh.directory

A directory of blogs, all nicely categorised:

ooh.directory is a place to find good blogs that interest you.

Phil gave me a sneak peek at this when he was putting it together and asked me what I thought of it. My response was basically “This is great!”

And of course you can suggest a site to add to the directory.

Blogroll | Max Böck

A lovely collection of blogs (and RSS feeds) that you can follow.

(Just in case, y’know, you might decide that following people on their own websites is better than following them on a website controlled by one immature manbaby who’s down with the racists.)

This is what you’re nostalgic for - The History of the Web

❤️

I believe we aren’t nostalgic for the technology, or the aesthetic, or even the open web ethos. What we’re nostalgic for is a time when outsiders were given a chance to do something fun, off to the side and left alone, because mainstream culture had no idea what the hell to do with this thing that was right in front of it.

The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website

It me:

Broadly, these are websites which are still web pages, not web applications; they’re pages of essentially static information, personal websites, blogs, and so on, but they are slightly dynamic. They might have a style selector at the top of each page, causing a cookie to be set, and the server to serve a different stylesheet on every subsequent page load.

This rings sadly true to me:

Suppose a company makes a webpage for looking up products by their model number. If this page were made in 2005, it would probably be a single PHP page. It doesn’t need a framework — it’s one SELECT query, that’s it. If this page were made in 2022, a conundrum will be faced: the company probably chose to use a statically generated website. The total number of products isn’t too large, so instead their developers stuff a gigantic JSON file of model numbers for every product made by the company on the website and add some client-side JavaScript to download and query it. This increases download sizes and makes things slower, but at least you didn’t have to spin up and maintain a new application server. This example is fictitious but I believe it to be representative.

Also, I never thought about “serverless” like this:

Recently we’ve seen the rise in popularity of AWS Lambda, a “functions as a service” provider. From my perspective this is literally a reinvention of CGI, except a) much more complicated for essentially the same functionality, b) with vendor lock-in, c) with a much more complex and bespoke deployment process which requires the use of special tools.