Comment by d11z | Hacker News Reader

Comment by d11z | Hacker News Reader

Wow, the visuals in this are truly extraordinary and unique. I have never encountered anything quite like this before. I felt compelled to list the things that struck me the most:

- Beautiful, poetic prose on a subject that resonates deeply with me

- Just about as light on bandwidth as you can be, fully embracing the default system font stack while maintaining an attractive appearance

- Seamless functionality on iOS Safari and Firefox on Windows

- Highly engaging links (the Roman pictographs were particularly fascinating!)

- Exquisitely handcrafted artisanal HTML/JS/CSS, reminiscent of Bartosz Ciechanowski's work

I can't say I would change even a single thing. One might argue about the Google Tags import, but this minor "sin" is easily forgiven due to the exceptional mastery of web design and development displayed here, I can't blame you at all for wanting analytics on visitors. This website meets every criterion of my personal "gold standard" for websites, and I can be pretty fussy having done a fair share of frontend stuff myself.

Recently I've been working on a page for a personal project, aiming to achieve a similar level of quality but it can sometimes be challenging to perfect the visual design aspects especially. This website serves as great inspiration! Thank you so much for sharing this!

I’m eating like an absolute king the past two days what with Ciechanowski’s post yesterday and now your fine specimen. The web sometimes feels like wading through a sewer but on occasion you strike gold and it makes everything feel OK.

I recently started a new blog / personal site, replacing an old Jekyll blog I hadn't touched since 2016. This time I decided to just write plain old HTML, with the minor concession of using Tailwind for styling because I wanted to learn it.

It's been wildly fun, and using plain HTML has made the site really flexible and fun to develop in a way that static site generators never were. As an example, today I wanted to add a small footer to a code sample to link back to the originating commit on GitHub, and it was just a div, a, and span away. No bullshit, just put the elements there and all of a sudden it's on the screen!

Another benefit has been just getting more familiar with HTML and CSS instead of letting a framework do the heavy lifting. Since restarting my site, I've felt a lot more confident when sitting down to write templated html or a react component or whatever during my day job.

I totally share your enthusiasm for this link, and find the site incredibly inspirational - this is exactly the kind of digital garden I hope my site can become. Mine is a little more sterile at the moment, but the beauty of each page being static HTML instead of a rendering of some template is that the style can evolve over time, and I'll be able to go back to old posts and see them in their original state.

The internet is still fun!

How are you doing tailwind with static html? If you are looking for a solution check out twind with the “shim” as a cdn import.

I'm using the standalone Tailwind CLI, which means I don't need to have any trace of node in my repo. It has a watch mode which I run while coding - that makes sure that any new Tailwind CSS directives I add to source code get added to the site CSS file.

Overall it's a really nice workflow, and doesn't feel overly invasive, or overly divergent from the point of writing the site in plain HTML. I really like Tailwind - it feels similar enough to writing vanilla CSS but has some guardrails and affordances for responsiveness that I think make it well worth the small extra setup.

I've just been adding Tailwind classes inline on elements thus far, although I'm starting to repeat myself enough that I'll probably make some custom classes with the @apply directive soon.

Overall really enjoying it!

The graphics make me want to play Return of the Obra Dinn again. Love that style.

I’m more reminded of Proteus (2013).

I got thrown out partway down on my iPhone because the background jumped from grey to white as I scrolled down, then back to grey. After spending a few minutes trying to work out what the setting was on my oh one and realising it was some JavaScript on the site I gave up.

The canvas element seems to be handled like HDR video at certain points down the page. I think it's a browser/iPhone oddity more than anything intentional by the author.

I'm only seeing plain text and offsite links, then gaps where I assume there might be images? I've turned off ad/script blocking, but still nothing. Chrome/OSX. What am I missing?

Turn off Dark Reader; make sure WebGL is working (chrome://gpu/)

Ohhhh... So I was definitely missing something ahaha. I thought it was just a very beautiful text (it did resonate with me, the part about hours spent drawing fictional maps on graph paper).

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