
Tiny websites are great - stokesyio
https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/tiny_websites_are_great
======
StavrosK
I love this initiative in principle, but the instructions left a rather sour
taste in my mouth. Create a Firebase app, download and install Node and run
some arcane cli commands? For what? To upload a 10-byte HTML file somewhere?

Please, do yourself and us a favour and sign up for a free account on
[https://neocities.org](https://neocities.org), and make a quirky website by
hand for all of us to enjoy.

I half want to write a post like this but with dead-simple instructions, like
"Open Notepad, write <html><body>Hello!</body></html>" inside and upload it to
Neocities. Congratulations, you now have a website!"

A good addition would be a nice CSS stylesheet
([https://newcss.net/](https://newcss.net/) looks good, linked by sdan in his
comment here) to get the site looking nice and mobile-friendly. That's pretty
much all you need to make a simple website.

~~~
reificator
Not affiliated but I think Netlify offers a similar level of initial effort
but with more room for later growth.

~~~
StavrosK
Yeah, they let you drag and drop a zip file to create a site, but is geared
more towards companies/professionals. Neocities is more geared towards a
community of independent creators, though, so I'd rather support/promote them
for indie stuff.

~~~
unityByFreedom
That's a cool initiative. The HN in me wants to critique it a bit. Why no
markdown or WYSIWYG editor? Is it because that would turn it into wordpress?

I feel like there's a place for a service that can,

* Host static content like netlify/neocities on a CDN

* Allow you to register a domain

* Choose a template and enter content with basic markup

This should be able to be done in < 5 minutes for a non-tech user. You'd think
registrars would be incentivized to build such a service.

edit: ~~markup~~ markdown/WYSIWYG

~~~
kick
WYSIWYG editors are universally bad, and so are Markdown ones. The benefit of
Markdown is that you just write it in a text editor. You don't need syntax
highlighting to use it effectively. Take reddit, as an example, which got
millions of people to write perfect Markdown as intuitively as writing
English.

~~~
saagarjha
It really depends on the editor. Some editors give you raw access to the
underlying code and apply styles to it as you type, kind of like syntax
highlighting. Some actually try to be rich text editors with a (usually
restricted) Markdown input. You can guess which ones make me want to flip a
table. (Hint: Slack, fix your editor!)

~~~
oefrha
If you think Slack is bad, try
[https://github.community/](https://github.community/).

~~~
unityByFreedom
> You ranked up to Ground Controller Lvl 1

I hate those undisableable social media accomplishments that come up as
notifications, is Github.community based on Discourse or did it just copy
their bad ideas?

edit: wow you can disable them in this one, amazing. I still hate it.

------
camillomiller
>“ Things have really changed since I began learning, and rightly so. Instead
of coding in plain HTML, CSS and JS, I'm now using endless frameworks, modules
and libraries to build increasingly more complex web and mobile applications.
It's great, if I didn't use these tools my code would be an unmaintainable
mess.”

How sad that this has become the widely accepted narrative. There’s a lot of
value right now in NOT building things that way. Last week I had to deal with
fixing another dev’s mess on a stuck project. Big company website, but nothing
fancy at all. Purely a marketing window. The amount of complexity he put into
it by using Vue.js was insane for the scope of the project. INSANE. To do
something as easy as changing the pages <title> tag we had to write an
unjustified amount of lines of code. Framework-itis really is a bad disease,
it not only affects your work, but it definitely clouds the simplest form of
judgement, it appears. Then we have exactly this: someone who got a hammer and
spent years treating everything like a nail comes to a reckoning, usually
framed as a longing for the good old days when things used to be simple. Well,
you know, things can still be simple, if you don’t offload to unjustifiably
complex frameworks the duty of understanding what’s going on in your project.
To be clear, I’m not at all against frameworks. I love and use some of them,
but they’re like a closet. If you are a tidy and organized person, your closet
will be full of neatly folded clothes; if you’re a messy person, it will still
be a repository for heaps of displaced garments, ready to fall out as soon as
you open the door.

~~~
robertlagrant
I don't understand why changing a title tag would require any code. Is it the
framework or the code?

(I don't know Vue, but this smells a bit.)

~~~
chownie
We had a similar scenario at my workplace, but with React rather than Vue.

We wanted an internal component to be able to change the page title, which
ended up with a project to transition to using react-helmet. It ended up
taking a few weeks before this project completed.

~~~
chadlavi
Which is nuts, because you can also just write your own little one-liner to
manipulate the title

```ts

const setTitle = (t: string): void => document.title = t

```

~~~
chownie
Yeah, that would've been great but it was a shared codebase among many teams
and one of the hard rules was no access to stuff like document :(

We also couldn't console.log in this codebase, it was very ideologically pure
but it took ages to make any changes

~~~
5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV
Sounds to me more insane than pure

------
jrimbault
[https://jrimbault.io/citation_needed/](https://jrimbault.io/citation_needed/)

I made that _tiny_ website for evenings with friends. It works great. You
enter a few names, hit the save button, you get a list with scores and a +1
button for each players. When you refresh the page the scores are reset. The
most important feature is the _ding_. The ding makes it fun.

It's ridiculously small, but it brings lots of fun.

~~~
turtlebits
You have a bug where adding a player doesn't work the first time (from
[https://jrimbault.io/citation_needed/](https://jrimbault.io/citation_needed/))
as it redirects to
[https://jrimbault.io/citation_needed/?#](https://jrimbault.io/citation_needed/?#)
and clears the player list. Then it works.

~~~
jrimbault
yep, didn't care about it :)

It's tiny, it's fun, it's _enough_. Keyword : enough. Yes I could add a
preventDefault, but _I don 't care_. Really, I only entered the names of my
friends once, it has been in my localStorage since, and it's only really meant
to be used by me.

Fixed it.

------
blueridge
Yeah! I am with you on this. I've used nothing but HTML/CSS for all of my side
projects for years. I manually create, update, and publish each page. Hell, I
still drag and drop via FTP. It is indeed very fun.

Here's a screenshot of my latest project, nothing fancy, just starting to
tinker with Tufte CSS and typography (Lyon Text and Concourse):
[https://cln.sh/BzBD](https://cln.sh/BzBD)

~~~
ezequiel-garzon
Looks great! Why not a link to the actual website?

~~~
blueridge
Thanks! There's nothing to show yet. No domain, no essays, no pages. Just an
early work-in-progress.

------
trog
Tiny websites are great!

It's interesting to note that the website content itself for this article is
5,045 bytes (HTML + CSS), but the analytics code (firebase-analytics.js) is
26,458 bytes, and firebase-app.js (whatever this is?) is 19,865 bytes.

Not a criticism; analytics is important & maybe the app JS is too. Just think
it's worth bearing in mind that it's really easy to blow out your website's
total delivery impact to users by several times with third party includes.

~~~
markosaric
There are also "tiny" solutions for analytics.

I'm working on Plausible Analytics which is only 1.4 KB right now and provides
a modern dashboard. It also doesn't use cookies and doesn't collect personal
data so you're not required to show the cookie/GDPR prompts which would make
tiny websites much less tiny.

See [https://plausible.io/](https://plausible.io/)

There's an issue on our Github which will help us perhaps reduce it to under 1
KB too. We're working on that [https://github.com/plausible-
insights/plausible/issues](https://github.com/plausible-
insights/plausible/issues)

~~~
def_true_false
You claim that using your analytics doesn't require user consent:

 _> "Plausible does not use cookies and does not collect any personal data.
This makes us compliant with the different cookie laws and privacy
regulations. It means that you are not required to annoy your visitors with a
cookie notice if you’re using Plausible analytics."_ [1]

 _> "Compliant with privacy regulations: Google Analytics places cookies and
collects a lot of data from your visitors. You’re required to have a privacy
policy, to show a cookie banner and to obtain consent for GDPR. Plausible
Analytics doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t track personal data so you don’t
need to annoy your visitors or worry about those prompts."_ [2]

It would seem you are collecting PII and processing it server side (?), e.g.
calculate_fingerprint here [3].

Care to explain how that doesn't require user consent?

[1] [https://plausible.io/data-policy#plausible-is-compliant-
with...](https://plausible.io/data-policy#plausible-is-compliant-with-the-
cookie-law-gdpr-ccpa-and-pecr-out-of-the-box)

[2] [https://plausible.io/blog/blog-post-changed-my-
startup#new-p...](https://plausible.io/blog/blog-post-changed-my-startup#new-
plausible-analytics-individual-product-pages)

[3] [https://github.com/plausible-
insights/plausible/blob/master/...](https://github.com/plausible-
insights/plausible/blob/master/lib/plausible_web/controllers/api/external_controller.ex#L85)

~~~
markosaric
This is what we do:

Instead of setting a cookie with a unique user ID, we simply count the number
of unique IP addresses that accessed your website to determine the visitor
count.

To enhance the visitor privacy, we don’t actually store the raw visitor IP
address in our database or logs. We run it through a one-way hash function to
scramble the raw IP addresses and make them impossible to recover.

To further enhance visitor privacy, we add the website domain to their IP
hash. This means that the same user will never have the same IP hash on two
different websites. If we didn’t do this, the hash would effectively act like
a third-party (cross-domain) cookie.

Network Address Translation allows many unique users to share the same public
IP address. For this reason we also add the User-Agent string to the hash,
although we don’t store the actual User-Agent string.

------
every
Mine[1] is rather tiny and simple. It is actually generated by the tree
command in about a second. It's a port from the gopher protocol and is hosted
by the venerable sdf.org[2]. I decided to pay an exorbitant $60 a year for an
enhanced membership simply to have an https address and some other assorted
goodies[3]...

[1] [https://every.sdf.org/](https://every.sdf.org/)

[2] [https://sdf.org/](https://sdf.org/)

[3]
[https://sdf.org/?tutorials/metaarray](https://sdf.org/?tutorials/metaarray)

~~~
Evidlo
I was considering joining SDF, but I'm confused about the membership levels.
What's the minimum level needed for static html hosting with a domain I
already own?

~~~
every
This may be what you are looking for. An ARPA membership with a small annual
fee...

[https://sdf.org/?faq?VHOST?01](https://sdf.org/?faq?VHOST?01)

------
bArray
I was nodding reading this and then:

> No libraries or frameworks (the exception being analytics)

There has got to be a better way of collecting analytics than to inject a
bunch of crappy JS from some company (probably Google).

~~~
tonymet
with static sites server-side analytics are doable. You can still cookie the
browser, record it to access log and you can get pageviews and uniques easily

~~~
anderspitman
Problem is if you're using a CDN it might not give you access to complete
logs. Still there's at least one better free option than GOOG analytics IMO[0]

[0]: [https://anderspitman.net/20/#get-off-google-
analytics](https://anderspitman.net/20/#get-off-google-analytics)

~~~
TheDong
So? I have javascript disabled so a frontend analytics option also won't give
you complete analytics.

It's a tradeoff, you get to decide if you run code on your visitor's computers
without consent and get analytics that are wrong in one way, or if you run
code on your server with your own permission, and get analytics that are wrong
in another way and simpler.

~~~
anderspitman
Do you feel that the amount of error for those with JS disabled is similar to
those going through a CDN?

------
codemusings
I think the premise of this blog post is flawed.

> During my time using frameworks I've become more and more out of touch with
> the code I'm writing. For example, when I plonk down a button in the Ionic
> Framework I get a beautifully engineered and designed button, but it also
> has 10 CSS classes attached to it that I don't really understand. I
> sometimes feel like the thing I've created isn't truly "mine".

That seems to be the nature of CSS utility frameworks. Composition over
inheritance; or in this case monolithic element styles. Is the utility
function to fetch elements from the DOM tree also truly "yours"? Where's the
line drawn? I could get the text representation of the DOM tree and write my
own parser? How about that?

> I therefore decided to go back to the basics and code my own tiny website. I
> already knew how to go about it, you probably do too, it's really easy (if
> you don't know here's how). However, I'd never actually done it, and I'd not
> made a website without a framework in over a decade.

Ah! And there's the problem! Are you creating a website or an application? I
do understand that this feels like a cleansing of sorts. But in my opinion
doesn't reinforce the original argument.

I think the more experience you gain as a developer the more often you will
come to the realization that technology evolves and also becomes more nuanced
over time. When confronted with this fact of course the first instinct will be
to feel overwhelmed and return to basics. Which if you're creating a mostly
static website in this case is perfectly reasonable. But you can't be an
expert in everything. Thus frameworks and tools emerge to alleviate some of
the pain that stems from designing _applications_ not websites.

Which again reinforces another often quoted realization: the right tool for
the right job.

------
codazoda
Most of the "small" designs and frameworks I've seen are quite large, in my
mind. I just finished building a minimalist html/css template for some of my
own projects. I'm starting to feel like this is some lost art form.

[https://neat.joeldare.com](https://neat.joeldare.com)

~~~
cxr
Your `pre` elements are set to `overflow: scroll;`. You pretty much never
really want that. (And it looks terrible on platforms that still have real
scrollbars instead of the iOS-style overlay indicators that fade away. It
should be `auto`.

See [https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visufx.html#propdef-
overflow](https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visufx.html#propdef-overflow)

~~~
codazoda
I've updated this. Still looks the same on all my devices but hopefully it's
an improvement for others. Thanks, again, for the tip.

------
bhargav
Tiny websites are indeed great. They load fast, and minimize the steps
involved in publishing content. I think my sentiment however, practically
(i.e: in a business, startup, big company) conflicts with two
things/requirements:

1\. People who usually write content are not developers 2\. People tend to
trust sites that are minimal like the one OP posted.

Content writers traditionally come from background where they are trained and
use tools like wordpress. We are now asking them to write HTML. I believe
Jekyll here is a good compromise. We can generate static sites using Jekyll
while still allowing simpler tools pre-publishing.

Regarding my point #2. Not a week ago, there was a thread to discuss how cool
Stripe's animations are. There were multiple conversations in said thread that
attest to this fact. Many people look for a sense of branding on product or
service based businesses and relate those to their legitimacy.

I think my sentiment for small/simpler sites is a pretty common one on HN, but
I think it all boils down to who your users are and what they prefer.

------
MrGilbert
My personal website, [https://g5t.de](https://g5t.de) uses a custom directory-
listing kind of framework I wrote - so it doesn't tick all of the
requirements. It's not much, but it does its job kinda well (still lacking
notable, deep and interesting content, sorry).

~~~
mrweasel
That is very nice, a little broken in some places: the [001]-how-to-not-build-
a-router link doesn't work, you have to click the .md file, and your github
link is broken

But it looks very nice and I love the idea.

~~~
MrGilbert
Thanks for your kind words! I fixed the broken links. Maybe I should automate
the creation of the readme.md files. :)

------
pdevr
I see that this is your first submission. I love that it is refreshingly
original.

Now, there are two main steps to making a website public.

* Developing the website (idea, design, development)

* Hosting it (domain, email, host, server)

What you posted is great for emphasizing that the first step can be done in a
very simple way, without any complicated frameworks.

The way you did the second part - hosting your site (Using Node.js/npm,
Firebase, and npm package) - does not fit well with the simplicity you
demonstrated while doing part one.

However, if considered as a how-to for building a tiny website using Firebase,
it is awesome.

------
ddevault
>No libraries or frameworks (the exception being analytics)

No, analytics are not an exception. Don't put fucking spyware on your pages. I
can't believe it's 2020 and people still need to be told this. It's _not_
okay.

~~~
anderspitman
Nowadays you can have your cake and eat it too. There are privacy-respecting
free alternatives to GA.

~~~
ta17711771
Name your favorite?

~~~
anderspitman
GoatCounter. I did a writeup comparing a few options here:

[https://anderspitman.net/20/#get-off-google-
analytics](https://anderspitman.net/20/#get-off-google-analytics)

------
mfish
I think the same idea can be applied to the backend as well, instead of
creating a firebase account, and allowing someone else’s code to magically
serve your tiny website. Granted, its not as simple as <h1> Tiny Website
</h1>, but it is just as satisfying to build something on the backend that is
“your own”, as least in my humble opinion.

------
p4bl0
> No libraries or frameworks (the exception being analytics)

Why? Why are analytics necessary? How does it matter for such a website?

~~~
SquareWheel
It's nice to know if people are reading what you're putting out.

~~~
Narann
I have a (french) blog[1] having analytics for first years. I realize most
page views where not necessary the ones I had the most fun at writing. It was
sad to realize your next post would not necessary bring interest and you start
to bring what you _guess_ peoples would be interested in, and not what you are
interested at in the first place. It breaks motivation on the long run. Like
if you where no more blogging for yourself.

I finally remove analytics and now write what I love without being to
rationals. It brings far less pressure.

[1] [https://www.fevrierdorian.com/blog/](https://www.fevrierdorian.com/blog/)

~~~
SquareWheel
I can appreciate that! I have some videos I've created that I've never once
checked the view stats for. In that case, I'm just as happy not knowing.

Somehow I feel differently about articles I've posted, but to each his own.

------
toto444
I have been working on a tiny website aiming to teach Japanese using HTML/CSS
and Emojis. It is hosted on Github pages. I take this opportunity to share it
since I believe it is the kind of website that people miss.

[https://drdru.github.io/](https://drdru.github.io/)

The main problem I have is that despite some love for this type of website on
Hackernews they are not really popular. Also, they are not accepted in Show
HN.

------
Tepix
Tiny websites are great, agreed. The best thing about them? They can be
deployed in a decentralized fashion and can protect the visitor's privacy.

This guide however, suggests using Google Analytics which tracks unsuspecting
users' browsing history across almost the entire web.

It hosts the website centrally by a Google owned service (which provides even
more tracking to Google). It suggests buying a domain name from Google.

Is this some kind of Google advertisement?

No, but no thanks.

------
mikeg8
> 2\. As few CSS tweaks as possible > 3\. It must be fun to build

I personally enjoy messing with CSS, it's incredibly fun to try new things and
give an otherwise boring page some life and expression. Obviously there is a
fine line between tasteful design and obnoxious/unnecessary clutter but a
simple website with some character via design is much more memorable that
black text on a white background.

~~~
saagarjha
CSS 3 is absurdly powerful and, if you use semantic HTML, progressively
degrades _really_ well. Putting just a bit of your touch on the content is a
nice feature to take advantage of.

------
julianeon
Since we're talking about tiny websites, and this seems pretty relevant:

If it's only static HTML and CSS, it's just a bucket o' files. You can store
things like that on S3 for... I don't even know how little. A tiny amount. You
will not find a cheaper hosting option than this.

I made this site on S3, using Svelte, which is intentionally the humblest,
smallest step up from plain JavaScript HTML & CSS, at the link below.

[http://pitch-deck-svelte.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/](http://pitch-
deck-svelte.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/)

Now, the one drawback here is that this doesn't have HTTPS, and you'd need
CloudFront for that. This link covers how to do that (note: you should buy
your domain on AWS, using Route 53, when following these instructions to make
your life easier).

[https://medium.com/@sbuckpesch/setup-aws-s3-static-
website-h...](https://medium.com/@sbuckpesch/setup-aws-s3-static-website-
hosting-using-ssl-acm-34d41d32e394)

~~~
the_jeremy
You will find a cheaper hosting option. GitHub and GitLab pages are both free
for static sites. I've used both, they both are pretty painless. You basically
click "make this a website" and tell it your URL. Automatically HTTPS,
completely free.

~~~
julianeon
Wow, I didn't know you can even hook up your own custom domains (looking at
GitLab pages). That's pretty amazing.

~~~
hwc
Yeah, I've been using github pages for my personal site. It even supports
HTTPS these days. I only pay for the domain.

------
6510
I eventually added an editor that displays the html source in a textarea.
Above it is a field with the file name, below is the submit button and a
password field. (There also is a cookie req that I make manually and it does
some IP checks when trying to save.)

After submitting it checks if there are links pointing at the (new) page. If
those are missing the "success!" page gets a link pointing back at the editor
with the index appended to it as the query string, the url that must be added
and the page title. (the substring between <title> and </title>)

When clicked it loads the index into the editor and inserts a link into the
html (so that I can move it around or type text around it)

That same functionality is reused by a bookmarklet to insert www links into
pages. (it also inserts highlighted text from pages)

Except the save page everything is still static html.

------
nicbou
Managing a website and writing for it are two different activities to me. I
prefer to do the latter in a WYSISYG editor. I don't want to fire up a
terminal to deploy content changes.

With proper caching, the output of a CMS can be indistinguishable from a
static site, but it can also include RSS, pagination, categories, tagging,
responsive images, tables of contents, etc.

Take [https://allaboutberlin.com](https://allaboutberlin.com). In my browser,
most of its pages load faster than the tiny website above. It has a big header
image, custom fonts and other features. You can achieve great things with
HTTP2 server push, static caching and gzip.

You should definitely consider making simple, fast websites because they're
great for visitors, but how you produce the HTML doesn't matter.

~~~
vidugavia
RSS, pagination, categories, tagging, responsive images, ToCs - all these
things work just perfectly in static sites.

~~~
nicbou
Sure, but they need to be generated by some sort of framework, somewhere. If
your definition of a static site includes framework-generated index pages and
page structures, aren't almost all websites static already? Making them tiny
is just a matter of writing better templates, not picking more obscure
frameworks.

~~~
vidugavia
In my books the difference lies in how the HTML is generated. In case of
static sites you generate it only when you rebuild the site after changes. In
dynamic sites you build it dynamically on each request. Sure, you can cache
the hell out of it and have a feeling that it's the same, but the truth stays
that perhaps you're doing 50 SQL queries for a simple "welcome on our site"
landing (something I actually witnessed some years ago). And with caching
you're achieving the result with adding another infrastructure layer on
something that could have been dead-simple from day one.

------
saityi
I tried to apply the philosophy of keeping things as simple as possible while
writing [https://saityi.github.io/sml-tour](https://saityi.github.io/sml-tour)

Initially, I wanted no JS and for it to look good in a text-based browser like
links, too, but I've strayed from that a bit. Syntax highlighting of the code
examples was easiest with a javascript include, and the TOC is a mess hidden
by CSS, so it looks particularly egregious in text-based browsers.

The website is still functional without JS and text-only, though, and without
the favicon and syntax highlighting it comes in at ~4kb to load a page, which
I'm happy with; with them it's closer to 40kb, which isn't the worst.

~~~
saagarjha
Why not do the syntax highlighting beforehand instead of on the fly? For
example, I use Rouge to highlight all my code as the site is generated.

~~~
saityi
Now complete -- thanks again for the suggestion! I never liked having to
include that bit of JS.

~~~
saagarjha
It looks great!

------
dijksterhuis
50 internet points to whoever guesses who I designed my simple portfolio site
to impress (i.e. here's my shameless plug).

[https://whoami.dijksterhuis.co.uk](https://whoami.dijksterhuis.co.uk)

\- Pure html and CSS (except embedded iframes like soundcloud).

\- hosted on GitHub.io

\- domain name from AWS

Only "server side" thing I had to do was put a special file in the GitHub
repo.

Super cheap too. I have a free pro GitHub account (student ftw) so the only
real cost is the AWS hosted zone for dijksterhuis.co.uk

I also have subdomains I set up for machines I SSH into because I'm that lazy.

------
randtrain34
Yeah, following the same principles with
[https://dumbprojectideas.com/](https://dumbprojectideas.com/)

~~~
mrweasel
Hmm, "A marketplace for golfers" I'm not sure that is an actual bad idea.

------
_theory_
How far down the abstraction tree do you go before something is 'pure'?
Programming on the whole is at a much higher abstraction level than ever.

Maybe what people are really looking for is simplicity, but this changes
depending on the complexity of your project. Therefore the question becomes,
"What is the best level of abstraction for this project?"

That changes every time you do something new.

------
sdan
This is exactly why I was so excited that so many people found
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23220081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23220081)
interesting.

I do HTML from scratch and Flask w/HTML templates at most. Adding a couple of
CSS files is all I'm looking towards, not a bunch of weird React code (which
imo looks ugly).

------
longtermd
I love the original thinking in this post. If there was no
React/Angular/VueJS, how would YOU design ANY system to help you code faster
and more maintainable? That what I'd love to see: more original ideas to solve
complex tasks, and not stopping at the first idea coming to mind.

BTW: I believe tailwindcss is fantastic at achieving and helping with the OP's
frustration.

------
SamBorick
For me the biggest requirement is > 3\. It must be fun to build

for me that requires a level of abstraction, I don't want to be monkeying with
HTML if I don't have to, I just want to write the damn article. That's why I
use Hugo, I feel like it hits a fantastic balance between speed for the user
and ease of maintenance for me.

------
alpb
I hope this keeps the author more encouraged to write, because as usual, this
is the first and the only post on their blog.

------
tjchear
Along the same vein, I've been working on a Vi-like editor for creating
webpages [0], and if anyone's looking to create a tiny website, it's worth
checking out.

If you enjoy using Vi, you'll likely have a blast using this one.

[0] [https://vivpage.com](https://vivpage.com)

------
cetra3
I've been yak shaving my website to try and get it to load as fast as
possible: [https://cetra3.github.io/](https://cetra3.github.io/)

I did cheat a little bit and used SpectreCSS but have really tried to squeeze
down the page size as much as possible.

~~~
nicbou
29 milliseconds. That _is_ fast.

------
simook
Recently I decided to build the next version of my website by going back to
the basics. [http://kyle.simukka.com](http://kyle.simukka.com)

Still unsure of what the content and goals are, but it has been a lot of fun
to work on a very simple website.

------
salmonchive
Taper is a literary/artistic venue for very small websites (less than two
Kilobytes and no links to external resources):

[https://taper.badquar.to/4/about.html#submit](https://taper.badquar.to/4/about.html#submit)

------
bg451
Really awesome idea! I ended up following suit and whipped together
[http://kojichamber.com](http://kojichamber.com) to put out the list of things
I used to build a fermentation chamber and the nuances of one.

------
krm01
Really love building tiny projects like these. Had built a simple online code
editor a long time ago for exactly these types of projects.
[http://codecast.me](http://codecast.me) (not optimized for mobile yet)

------
ryandrake
Just a nit: Using "max-width: 600px;" leaves enormous white margins on either
side of the text, when browsed on larger monitors. I wish CSS writers would
stop trying to guess the width of my screen.

------
meigwilym
Reminds me of the 90s when I first started out. In a way it's a shame that the
basics have been forgotten, and the first step taken to develop a website is a
cli app to install a load of boilerplate.

------
turtlebits
I think a better term should be lightweight, usable and performant. The
framework shaming mentality is getting quite old.

Also, the portfolio website of the author is the opposite of tiny, with a
3.6mb load.

------
_sbrk
Ugh, how I loathe the term "full stack". Many who claim this have attended a
12 week crash course where they're armed with the programming equivalent of
heavy weaponry and then turned out onto the world to "engineer" websites that
are bloated, slow me-too creations with background video, fly-in scroller
elements, and everything else that bogs down even the most powerful PC.

"Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake
coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the
trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans."
\- Adams

------
anuragpeshne
Why not go a step ahead and host it on a raspberry pi from your home. Then one
could copy the text file directly to the public folder or create the file in
the rpi itself.

------
mraza007
I really like the concept lets say you want to include a code snippet does it
support the syntax highlighting and do you write a blogpost in plain html or
markdown

~~~
blueridge
You can always write in Markdown, say with iA Writer, then export to HTML. I
typically write offline, then type and revise on the computer, then copy
paragraphs over to Sublime. Code snippets and syntax highlighting done with
CSS.

~~~
mraza007
I see

------
pcmaffey
Can anyone recommend a good WYSIWYG editor (for non-devs) for making static
sites that is not tied to hosting?

ie. I just want to output a folder of /html.

~~~
dougskinner
Maybe try publii[1]

[1][https://getpublii.com/](https://getpublii.com/)

------
mertnesvat
I liked it it's very well articulated and seems promising I just had a new
years resolution with the same goal. Keep going Ben!

------
fyfy18
The funny thing about this website is the page finishes loading before my
phone OS finishes the animation to switch to the browser.

------
luord
That's what I did with my website. Still tweak it every now and then, but it's
nice because 99% of the code is mine.

------
ulisesrmzroche
Are all these projects targeting this particular buche within HN? Soon as they
see this design, people are gonna bounce.

------
Sophistifunk
No libraries or frameworks to make development easier, but still analytics to
help Google spy on readers? Pass.

------
aabbcc1241
In fact you don't really need to depends on third party to do analytics as
well

------
intpbro
Why take so many steps to do something so simple? That defeats the whole
purpose

------
th3o6a1d
I dig the concept, but for ease, firebase-tools, node?

Use netlify! Or s3 bucket w hosting

------
pashabitz
Everything on this website is mine! ... Uses Google Firebase to host.

------
beamatronic
"Did Not Connect: Potential Security Issue"

How do you visit this site?

~~~
JonRB
I got that, but it was from the office firewall considering it to be a
malicious site

~~~
MattGaiser
My corporate network uses Cisco and it seems to block any newly set up
website.

------
armyofbots
If only there were a search engine for tiny websites.

~~~
kwhitefoot
If every tiny website linked to at least two other tiny web sites using
something that a crawler could recognize it would be easy.

Alternatively, is there a heuristic that reliably classifies websites in to
tiny/not-tiny?

How could we get this started?

~~~
ehonda
you might want to try wiby.me

~~~
kwhitefoot
Thank you. Looks interesting.

------
vfistri2
Would love to have some simple stack automated.

------
dwg
Welcome to the 90's, have a rad time.

------
Yhippa
I've been messing around with a personal site hosted on S3. Does anybody here
like any small UI frameworks that they would recommend?

------
MattGaiser
Make a tiny website, just with Node and Firebase, lol.

~~~
dang
Can you please make your substantive points without being a jerk? We're trying
for a bit better than that here, and it's all too easy to come across that
way, even if you didn't mean to.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

------
thomas
They are great but they are very bad for seo, so they are vastly
underutilized.

~~~
lvturner
Why are they bad for SEO? The author seemed to be talking more about CSS and
JS rather than content - does not using bootstrap or ReactJS mark you down on
search results?

~~~
jachee
IMHO, SEO is just shorthand for SnakEOil.

If gaming search engines is your Brad-and-butter, is your idea really _that_
novel?

~~~
ta17711771
It's not about gaming them anymore.

It's about structuring pages and content in such a way that Google et al
believe works best for the reader.

Due to Google-side analytics, it's also about bounce-rates. This leads to both
more in lengthy pages with depth, as well as lengthy pages of bullshit.

------
dhdjdjcjcjcnc
>It's your little corner of the internet to do as you please with. > >Follow
me on social media: > >Twitter Instagram

Really makes you think huh?

~~~
aethertron
Everyone knows solo blogging is lonely. That's why RSS is valuable, and the
indieweb folks have tried to make new social protocols.

