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Comment by fancyfacebook | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to how the internet used to be. It's amazing that people's memories are so short on this subject, if you have enough smart people pushing corporate experience X or Y then everyone assumes that's the only option.

The first step is rejecting the aggressive attempts at corporations to ensure you live in their "garden" as much as possible. It's bizarre that people are doing gymnastics about how if you just restrict yourself to this certain 3% of the food in that garden everything will be ok.

How about setting out on your own instead? How about starting from: "I don't need youtube, I don't need amazon, I don't need google analytics" and figuring it out?

That's what everyone used to do.

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I recently created a web site.

Just black text on white background.

I write about stuff I find interesting. So far a few unfinished pages.

I don't even think it is indexed yet.

It is my rebellion against pixel perfect audience building technical blogging and what not.

It feels good.

I might add links to other similar pages at some point.

Anyone else makes old fashioned web sites?

Have you looked at static page generators? Wonder if that provides the simplicity you're looking for along with optional customization. One example: https://gohugo.io

Did.

Got distracted by choosing one.

Got distracted by choosing a template.

Got distracted by problems with Markdown (an8d Asciidoc).

Get distracted every time I want to write.

After I got my html "template" up and running I just copy that and write whatever I want to write.

Conclusion: for me, when writing, finding the correct tools prevented me from just writing.

(I have however spend some time on my developer tooling and feel I get a good return on investment there. Currently (for 5+ years) Netbeans and Maven, and later also VSCode + Yarn.)

Amen to this.

I've spent more time than I dare to admit trying to rebuild my person web site which I ran successfully from 2000-2012. Which coding framework should I use, CSS, database, hosting platform, the list goes on. I should have just spent the time writing it all in plain vanilla html (which I've now started doing).

Ironically if I'd start posting my content on a social network where I had no control over how it looked/functioned I would have spent my time actually putting together something useful.

Server side includes. It does everything required and doesn't bloat and doesn't change. I've been using them since the geocities era with hand-written static html content. Easy to mix and match.

Pretty much all websites I make are like this. It's text, it uses minimal HTML formatting and a tiny bit of javascript if absolutely necessary (HTML has no #include directive).

There is no CSS, I just use tables. Eat me.

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