I don’t know how to create a website

> Veering ever so slightly from the common, but entirely non-documented, approach makes it hard to get help. Places like StackOverflow are increasingly useless: instead of answers you get “Why are you doing this at all?”, “Yuck, you’re doing it all wrong, but I won’t tell you why” [...]

While I disagree with the premise (that using old approaches should still take you just as far (and further) 20 years later), I do agree with this particular quote.

Often on SO I see well-supported answers like, "that's because you're doing it wrong" without going into detail on what doing it right would mean, or better yet, suggesting alternative frameworks or patterns where what's "wrong" over here is "right" over there.

If programming in 2018 has become more like plumbing, then plumbers in 2018 have become more dogmatic, and less willing to steer novices that prefer tools like 'x' towards approaches that use tools like 'x' more often.

While the author implies that making a website is an overly complex, daunting process and things used to be so much better in the past, the key phrase in the article is this;

The tech I know may no longer be suited to do the things I want...

The old tech that the author knows doesn't work for the modern web. He says as much. If you want to build the new shiny you have to use the new shiny tools. You don't have to make a website that does all the fancy reactive, responsive, Web 3.0 stuff. You can make a site exactly how we did it 20 years ago today and it'll work fine. But if you want to build a modern website, you've got a giant pile of things to learn first.

Web apps. You don't know how to create web apps.

An actual website (meaning text, images and little more) doesn't really need all the fancy frameworks OP's talking about. The sooner we re-learn this, the better.

It is incredibly easy to create a website. As a member of a university institute you typically get a folder in your home directory "public_html", whatever you put there will be accessible from the internet. So you create an index.html, which basically can be as malformed as you want it to be and it shows up in Google search after a while. This totally suffices for 90% of all personal internet publishing, see http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/TWF.html for how far this can take you. This page contains ~20 years of original content by a mathematical physicist, a lot of it is of very high quality. Content is more important than presentation.

I really miss the days when I started almost 15 years ago sometimes when we would just build a site with Dreamweaver Templates, and FTP it up to the server when it was ready. Maybe add a CGI form if we’re feeling fancy. It was remarkably more simple to keep an understanding and mental model of the entire project.

Honestly part of me still feels like that would be good enough for most businesses these days still, but that’s just not what developers want to build.

There are people who do cargo-cult programming.

They looks like doing something. They use the famous tool and write seemingly similar code we write. But it's not correct. It's not just correct, It's also wrong in all aspects. They don't understand anything. They just imitate the activities and believe it just work somehow.

When facing it, the only answer we can give them are:

> “Why are you doing this at all?”

or

> “Yuck, you’re doing it all wrong, but I won’t tell you why”

Because, these people don't want to learn in the hard way or listen to the advice anyway.

So the last advice,

> “can you produce a complete working minimal example, deploy it somewhere, set up an issue system, accept code reviews, feed my dog, and then maybe I’ll help”.

is actually a kind advice, because these cargo-cult programmers blindly believe that, they are doing it right, it should just work, and the reason it's not working right now is a very tiny trivial issue caused by one wrong setting or something.

Since they don't listen the honest advice(you're doing it wrong in everything) and believe it will work, let them fail and let them know they are doing it wrong is the most kind advice.

I think a lot of us technical minded people fall into the same trap; we start with the technology, trying to solve problems of making a site dynamic and secure before considering the content. With the exception of sites solely aimed at demonstrating new technologies, the purpose of a site is to provide content (OK, sometimes to provide functionality too; but that's content in a sense). The key is to work out what content needs to be on the site & start with that. Once you've got that down you can consider how it can be improved; and that's where these other pieces start coming in. But start by defining the problem to be addressed, then look for the tool to fix that problem; don't go off and find something trendy then work out how you can make problems that it can handle, or how you can force your problem into being the kind of problem which that tool could fix; move on and find the tool that makes sense.

This is all obvious at the start of the project, but the moment you see a rabbit hole it's very hard to resist going down it. For that, keep a list of what's important nearby, and each time you get back from a break check that list and ensure you're obeying it. That list will start with a bunch of don'ts; to keep you away from bad habits, followed by your priority task list of what you need to create your MVP / the MUSTS of your solution. Once you have a working solution and have ticked off all the musts from your list, you can then play safe in the knowledge that you've got a checked in working version; and the remaining time is just experimenting / tweaking / playing.

Anyway, that's the theory... I've not managed to stick to it yet; let me know if it works for you though ;).

On the security and distribution side of things, I recently had to guickly throw a website together, and found netlify super convenient for that - it handles the https and cdn part, and you can use it like a folder to drop static html. It allowed me to have something up and running faster thant I thought

Apart from websites there are now other things that people deliver via HTTP and browser or a "web view". I would argue that the market for websites has shrunk. There is a booming market for web applications that are just the best way to create a gateway between customers and ever changing business logic. In this space there is a proliferation of tooling and compilers and it's only going to get more complicated in the sake of betterment (JS as a compilation target). I'd focus on fundamentals, one of which is user experience. It doesn't matter if the flow is created in Go, React or closure, it still needs to be user-friendly, intuitive and secure at the same time. The domain knowledge is much more important than tooling.

I agree.

I was in the web dev world early enough to also be uploading pages and files via FTP to production for high profile clients.

In the last 3-5 years with the addition of gulp, sass, npm, etc. it has all become way too complicated and saturated. I found myself with way to many options and worse - opinions - to filter through, learn, and master enough to use in production. Mostly this learning would be done in my own time outside of work and I really started to lose interest/drive to do it.

I'm doing https://wordsandbuttons.online with all the interactive plots, and games, and quizzes in plain Javascript. It was a bit uncomfortable in the beginning, but then I gained some experience and got better at it. I didn't want any frameworks when I started, now I don't need them.

I kind of agree but I've just followed the approach of building in what I know, it's too easy to get caught up in alternative cutting edge tech and use it as an excuse not to build something.

If you wind up with something successful you can always switch to modern technology if it provides a solution which your old school tech cannot fix.

Isn't this where WIX and similar products come in? Sure its a lot more complex to create a simple website from scratch, but the process is automated by tools like these. I have non technical friends with blogs these days.

> I no longer know how to create a website.

You do, but you are suffering from analysis paralysis. Fuck it and stick to what you know, your _web app_ will be fine.

For websites you need VSCode, type ![tab] and you are ready to go.

I feel it's easier than ever to get started with frontend frameworks since there are tons of resources to learn from (youtube, course platforms, blog post, official tutorials, etc.) compared to 10 years ago.

As a footnote, I could write a similar blog post about Haskell, but I feel I could use that time better to watch a 1 hour long video and write a fibonacci function.

If you keep up with React, it's super easy. It takes 5 minutes to get CRA working, then an hour to understand React, then days to get good at React, then a few more days to get good at the ecosystem (state management, etc...)

I agree with what you said. The pace of change is daunting, but as long as you keep an eye on where it's headed and what's working, things get easier.