Gregory's Servernormalise having your own static small website tbh
we need to normalise just Making Websites as a 'low-tech' skill that anyone can get into
not all of these fucking site generators that just lock you into a specific way of making them
 79 comments
 @ShadowJonathan yeah, one of my long term goals with wasm is to make a proper pluggable cms @ShadowJonathan thank you 👏 web dev has become so much more complicated than it needs to be @sykora today i realised there is no single simple static site hoster other than hosted services or complicated DIY i want to rectify this, it should be as easy as having an admin interface you can create domains with, get DNS debugging, and then drag-n-drop files into, to get things Working  @ShadowJonathan @sykora I was wondering about how cheap it would be to host static sites in azure storage or something like that. Custom domains work, https is trickier. @ShadowJonathan @sykora dedicated Web Hosters often have etry-level stuff like that. At least stratos simplest package is basically that. Just a domain and some files displayed on that domain. @ShadowJonathan @sykora I believe we can do it with fastmail: *Please note: We support static webpages only and do not plan on adding support for dynamic websites or website builder functionality.* https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000280141-How-to-set-up-a-website I've uploaded TiddlyWiki to Fastmail's spaces, and it works well. Here's an example:
http://gospel.randal.fastmail.fm/  @ShadowJonathan I thought "What about some stuff that allows to write something like markdown and would handle all the hosting and making of the website and domain" and realized that's just omg.lol @ShadowJonathan webbed sites culture and webrings are amazing, and also a huge rabbit hole that already stole weeks of my life :neocat_laugh_nervous:
@ShadowJonathan I mean wouldn't using something like Hugo with github pages be simpler and lower tech than writing HTML? (I don't use Hugo btw) @ShadowJonathan yeah, fair enough. Maybe we could bring Dreamweaver back for non-tech folks to make whatever with  @ShadowJonathan multiple problems: * hosting costs money that's why they opt for the easy options. we can't do much more than "advertise" and talk about making your own sites again. @pixel the first two problems are solvable, and the latter is just learning things ease of access to making HTML websites is a thing too, but that's a different problem but you cant solve that, or it wont get solved, if there's no incentive to make HTML easily hostable @ShadowJonathan define solvable? current society will to a degree opt for the free option even if it comes with some inconveniences and the best free options would be subdomains etc. (I'm just playing devil's advocate here, I am full on your side btw)  @pixel @ShadowJonathan I can do the third part but I don’t even know where to begin with the first two. @ShadowJonathan @pixel you can always just host a neocities page, completely free and has 1gb of space @ShadowJonathan @pixel got it yeah. im working on self-hosting for myself but moving rn so i don't wanna put too much effort into something ill have to take apart in a month  it probably takes about as much time to learn any CMS well enough to get it to work as desired as learning html and CSS I mean HTML isn't going anywhere , the rest of our lives and until civilization callapses we'll be dealing with HTML, and the promise of CMS is very deceptive as it offers convenience at the expense of lock in Also Tor exists, you can just host a static HTML page with any web server on the tor network on a personal devices, no need for domain @devils well, it's simple if the entire world is handed to you at your convenience, is there any incentive to learn? the big players in Web 2.0 made things super easily accessible with simple tools, no need to learn the very basics of making a website. and if you don't have your own intrinsic motivation, you don't really have a will to learn then. @ShadowJonathan i (barely) remember late 2000's early 2010's, where a lot of kids would learn html and have silly websites and stuff
it was quite a thing, and that got lost as those big centralized platforms grew @ShadowJonathan Agreed. I'm kinda glad that I was forced to learn HTML, CSS and JS as part of my tech support diploma. Helped me learn what to search for to make my own site. I could probably optimise and improve my site with some more fancy languages and frameworks, but the basics are good enough for me  @patterfloof tbh here you just need a browser; log in to the admin console and start writing html @patterfloof @ShadowJonathan still can do it, notepad and an sftp client is still a perfectly workable solution for a simple static page  @hi_mayank subdomains, and a service (instead of self-hostable), though thanks :3 @ShadowJonathan you can pay if you need a custom domain but the point is, it's as easy as drag-and-drop, which i think is essential for any low-tech thing. i'm fairly tech-savvy and i wouldn't dare self-host anything public-facing. i just want to build websites, not manage infra and security  @ShadowJonathan cool fact: since the last time I made a web site from scratch, you can get rounded corners without using weird little semi transparent images and nested divs! (My last non-Bootstrap site was a looong time ago....) Yes all 3 pages I've made since then are dripping with rounded edges. Sometimes even gradients! Positively decadent! @ShadowJonathan I should do this - I own hailey.rocks and hailey.lgbt but haven't used them for anything other than mail lol @ShadowJonathan i find that html has too many antiquated defaults that need to be undone with css. For example, why do we still have that janky margin that basically every modern page gets rid of. @ShadowJonathan https://xvrqt.com @ShadowJonathan is this so difficult to build a website that is not WO or Wix with all their tracking tools? @ShadowJonathan For a while I’d been thinking about modernizing my first (and personal) website, but realized it would lose a lot of that old school charm. Image maps and frames have a home there. At some point, I did get tired of replicating menus for “blog” entries and made that a dynamic portion. @shalien I mean sites with their own style and such, iirc word doesn't really allow for that Not just flat CSS, but actual personal artistry  @ShadowJonathan@tech.lgbt A repository of well documented templates to help get people over the initial hump would be good. @ShadowJonathan That’s how it was done in Ye Olden Times. Shared hosting is dirt cheap. $2.59 a month at DreamHost (Not an affiliate, but a customer). @kvillyard@wandering.shop @ShadowJonathan@tech.lgbt It still means you have to transfer money in some very convoluted way every month without fail or it goes down.  @ShadowJonathan having a static small little website vs having a website with a little tamagotchi for visitors to pet and feed @ShadowJonathan@tech.lgbt got three :sunglasses_swag:  @ShadowJonathan then there's me using a static site generator that's comprehensible enough for me to fork if I need a new feature (it's zola) @tilton@raccoon.zone @ShadowJonathan@tech.lgbt Isn't that what wordpress is for? Like make it possible for people to make a website without knowing HTML?  @ShadowJonathan IPv6 was supposed to let everyone have a server for this purpose, but it's not being leveraged because dns is still the barest of d's @ShadowJonathan@tech.lgbt Fully agree, and I think there doesn't need to be so much pressure to ... make it bombastic art. That's cool, but a lot of the small web folks implicitly want to return the internet to artists; where I just want to return it to people (which includes artists). A simple, bare, html (or markdown) blog should be perfectly acceptable, because that is low-tech accessible. @rudi this is still dependent on neocities tho and yeah, this is a next nice stepping stone thanks for sharing :3 @ShadowJonathan i mean, you can host a website made with this with a webserver or something that can host a static site, i tested it out briefly when my bf first linked to it, it's mostly html/css with a little bit of client side javascript for templating essentially @rudi yeah, but most people dont know how to handle DNS, nginx, and SSH/FTP, and so basically need to be told what to do in that regard nginx and SSH/FTP are doable, but DNS is the only "complicated" bit after that, its just drag-n-drop into the browser's file manager, and they have a website :3  @ShadowJonathan@tech.lgbt rubs a balloon made of html on the hair    @ShadowJonathan pulled my old Pi blog out of archive org and re hosted it as static HTML 🤣 not sure it counts. But, yeah, hard agree. I grew up when the web was simple and we all derped about with HTML tutorials. Everyone should be able to do the basics and that’s all you really need. Same with programming. These are powerful communications and idea sharing tools that will be soo much better in the hands of someone with other interests, who doesn’t know or care what Tailwind is. @ShadowJonathan yea yea. But things get kinda dirty when you have common parts like menus and frames aren't exactly a popular thing nowadays.   @ShadowJonathan I did this the other day! I made a small static website without anything fancy besides a little css effect and I'm proud of it :3 @ShadowJonathan we need to go back to a world where every teenager knows basic html to run their myspace @ShadowJonathan i did low budget static site generation (i fetch the template elements and apply them with jQuery)   @ShadowJonathan I'm proud of my latest site (https://hellfirehost.uk.eu.org/). Entirely hand-written HTML with no scripting and a design that will look correct in anything capable of viewing webpages.  @ShadowJonathan wait by site generators, are you talking about SSG's ? I haven't used one yet so I'm a bit confused. |
@ShadowJonathan miawinter.de is one single HTML file with some tailwind for styling