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, 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/ 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.
https://glitch.com is also excellent. I’ve been using it to teach a website development workshop to 10-15 year olds and it’s the most intuitive interface I’ve found so far for those with no prior experience with HTML/CSS/JS.
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.
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.
I like entering markdown in text editors, it gives me the freedom to format without fighting the editor. A preview panel helps, and yeah reddit demonstrates that people can learn it.
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!)
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.
i think slack now allows you to disable the visual editor in settings - you can still format with markdown but the formatting isn't rendered until you send.
I had more or less the same idea, but perhaps with the markdown syntax extended (I understand this is a touchy topic since there are various markdown parsers that don't all work the same) to allow for simple generation of form controls and navigation bars/layouts.
E.g for navigation sidebar:
* [Home](/home)
* [Blog](/blog)
etc
For form controls:
[ ] I'd like to receive marketing emails.
( ) Female
It'd be even better if it can support basic CRUD/BREAD operations. Basic CRUD webapp with just markdown, imagine that.
I think there are several sites that offer such functionality. Squarespace and Wix immediately come to mind due to all of their advertising. There was some other company I used a while back for a small website for an engineering team, but the name escapes me. These sites are perfect for small business and organizations that just need some web presence without having to think through any of the technical side.
You mean a WYSIWYG editor? Yeah, they want to encourage individuality, though I guess an HTML editor wouldn't be out of the question (I think kyledrake just hasn't found one he liked).
I'll second Netlify. Totally fantastic service; I've played with a lot of "github to deployed app" services, and I was still blown away with how straightforward it was to get a NextJS static site on there, auto-deploying, on a custom domain, with site analytics built-in, no code required.
I find myself torn on the specific instructions. It's certainly a lot more arcane than my early sites, but that was mostly because there was a whole lot of boilerplate handled by the host (Enter these details into your FTP program, put your files into public_html, start with index.html).
I didn't have any idea what Apache was, how files were served, or really anything about internet infrastructure. And that's fine, certainly good for a kid or to whip up a quick business site, but it doesn't satisfy the hacker in me today. There's too much magic going on behind the scenes for me to feel much ownership of it.
I suppose it sort of depends who you're aiming it at. TFA didn't feel to me like it was trying to approach novices (after all, it's talking about leaving frameworks and libraries behind, novices aren't much using frameworks). Your instructions are good for an easy introduction for people with no web development experience, to recreate that sense of ease, but I think it's a different thing from what the article is going for. Even a simple site requires a fair bit under the hood, because serving files isn't all that simple unless you just hide it away from the end-user.
I don't know, I mostly agree with you, but I disagree that a simple site requires that much. Just drop the files in a folder in some web server and you're done.
I do agree that beyond the site being tiny, an important part of taking control back is to question the hosting part. The "traditional" web is, unfortunately, not fit for minimum hosting without either shelling out some money or depending on a third-party (however good it is). It is high time decentralized web alternatives gain adoption.
1. Open Beaker
2. If you don't have any content, select "New Hyperdrive" from the burger menu, enter your site name, and start editing content with the integrated editor
3. If you already have a folder with content, select "New Hyperdrive from folder"
4. You have a website ! Update it locally and changes will be propagated. Your site address is the hyperlink in the URL bar !
There shouldn't need to be more steps and, more importantly, dependencies on external processes/companies/organization to say what you want to say and spread it.
You do need to keep your computer always[0] on, though. I don't mind depending on external companies, I mind depending on external companies that I can't pay to ensure their loyalty to me.
- Beaker, like any decentralized web thingy, allows visitors to re-share content if they wish to do so. Integrity is provided through the crypto bits
- There is of course the possibility to ask a third-party such as Hashbase (https://hashbase.io/) to host content for you. The difference with WWW hosting is that you don't depend on them to serve content at all times, only when you or your visitors can't; you aren't as dependent
Beyond self-hosting, the major differentiator is that the "web" goes further than just interlinking, it also contains safe distribution. Beaker does even more: foreign content is typically accessed through "mounting" other sites, just like you'd mount with FUSE, so an application doesn't really care where the content comes from. It's all files in the same virtual filesystem.
It can be cheaper to host own (desktop-grade) hardware instead of paying someone to host a stupid single website. The calculation is easy, especially if you only take into account electricity and not hardware purchase costs:
Monthly costs per watt are around 0,3EUR/kWh * 24h/d * 30d/m/1000 = 0,2EUR. That's roughly the price tag for keeping a raspberry pi on 24/7 (yes, it's below 0,2EUR/month). For an average desktop/laptop, which will consume way less then 30W in idle, it's 6 EUR/month. The price of an average hosting offer.
Agree.. I ran a home-hosted web site with regular traffic on a Raspberry Pi 2B for a couple of years before upgrading it to a Pi 3. If you get power issues you can always switch to a battery power bank for a while (assuming your router doesn't go down at the same time).
Agreed, you'll lose access to all that server-side stuff after not too long. Just do something dead simple: single page of vanilla html/css. You'll have to move it at some point, the hosting server will need updating or shut down, and a single file is way easier to move around.
My website, https://cyrialize.dev/, is hosted on Neocities. I used jekyll to create it and I use water.css which I found on CSS Bed (https://www.cssbed.com/). The Neocities gem is VERY useful.
Oh that would be fantastic! Where will this template show up? I didn't know Gitlab had CI templates.
How do you upload files without WebDAV? As far as I know, there's no API.
BTW I'm not sure if it still exists, but they had a lifetime supporter account, where you can get a lifetime subscription for $100 in Bitcoin. I got it to support the effort, though I don't really use it, but a bunch of Terabytes of bandwidth and 50 GB of hosting space won't go to waste.
Well that's fantastic, great job. Will it be uploading a specific directory, like in mine? That would be nice since most people keep other stuff in the repo.
Yes, it will upload the public folder only. You can see the details of how it works at https://gitlab.com/pages/neocities (I realize now this would have been a better link to share than the other one).
Yeah, that whole Firebase thing was not necessary. After creating the public folder, dragging and dropping it onto Netlify would've instantly given you a public website. No commands necessary. I use Netlify for everything, even hosting a static blog generated in Hugo. All free, only thing I pay for is my domain.
Please, do yourself and us a favour and sign up for a free account on 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/ 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.