Ask HN: What are some examples of well-designed personal sites?
I'm looking in particular at sites that advertise consultancy services / personal branding etc. The more minimalist the better!
I have a Twitter thread where people have made a number of suggestions ( https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1092221945427517440 ), and my own website is often mentioned - minimalist, fast, pretty, and also with a number of interesting & unusual features: https://www.gwern.net/About#design
* Stylistic enough to have some heart, but simple enough to not have the design get in the way
* Great content, his blog posts are a good mixture of technical and general thoughts
* I like his timeline on the about me page which provides some flavor to his experience.
As I was working on my personal site I was peeking into his github repo pretty consistently to see how he structured certain things.
Not a huge fan of the homepage, but the articles look sublime. Example: https://www.brandur.org/sortsupport-inet
Still, I like the style
When I built my own site (https://www.gtf.io), I tried to make it as "minimalist" as possible -- fast rendering (v little CSS, no JS, completely static). I wanted it to have no distractions whatsoever, I just wanted it to be readable.
The mobile reading is especially smooth, a point of pride
Are you using a static site generator?
The social stuff is a separate script that runs before site generation, which I open sourced (https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/activity-scraper). All runs on a "every 5 minutes" cron job that just fetches activity and rebuilds the site. It also rebuilds if I push to the server.
For the font support, the top logo is optimized to just include those four characters (RYMC), and then Aleo is stripped slightly. It's all base64 encoded into the CSS, and the CSS is all inlined into the page.
Before anybody says "but HTTP/2", yes, I know multiple requests on the page is fine with HTTP/2, and that's good for much bigger projects. I still notice a big time to paint difference for something like this where the total amount of data on the page is ~150kb. Icons are all SVGs, inlined into the page and just repeated via group/use tags - the only external request it makes is the header image, and I suppose Cloudflare injects an email decoder JS lib that's less than 1kb.
I think part of me also wanted to do it like this purely to ensure that there's tech articles out there that load fast, don't need AMP, and don't overload you with subscribe/follow/etc actions. It's old school, the web I grew up with - doesn't work for everything today and I wouldn't build most projects like it, but it's fun for my personal site. shrug
But the TeX math is interesting to discuss: it turns out that you can skip the usual multi-second download/parse/render/reflow workflow of MathJax JS libraries on a static website by preprocessing the final HTML pages using https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-node . This gets you pretty much the best of all worlds: it renders instantly without JS, looks good, works cross-browser, and is dead-simple to set up as you just pipe into a tool. Definitely the best way I've found for static sites to render math.
He wanted something that would enable anybody to PR his Wiki and wasnt at the mercy of a server side static site generator engine since the GH one screwed up his links for his former blog. Its simple and works mostly on the client side and gives you an exportable file.
Armstrong passed away sometime back sadly and my hope is that GitHub maintains his blog undisturbed. He had a beautiful way of explaining concurrency and software issues that I think anybody could follow. Also for those unaware he was one of the creators of the Erlang programming language.
Though I'm most proud of my SMIL animations.
(FYI: i'm not the author)
Shameless self promotion (my blog): https://muffinman.io/
And of course, Daring Fireball: https://daringfireball.net/
Built it on an iPad using Working Copy and Affinity Designer. Jekyll, Netlify and a good CDN means it’s free to run and super fast.
Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN
Like others I had a problem with the page cert (GitHub cert). Going to http://strml.net fixed it on the redirect to https://www.strml.net (which is using a Letsencrypt cert for www.strml.net)
I saw this template on cdnjs and fell in love. What I had before this website was an awful portfolio type site that had links on the side and a slideshow with all the images and wasn't very mobile-friendly. I knew I needed to update it... and I am absolutely fascinated with minimalism.
If you want to use it, you can find it here: https://cdnjs.com/libraries/topcoat
Adopted to my website: https://notetoservices.com/
Shameless plug: https://www.rasikjain.com
I have been meaning to redo my own to be more minimalist for a while now.
It doesn’t really serve any purpose right now. I wanted the domain mostly for email. But I tried to put up something nice.
This is a great one. Basically you want a CDN for fast. He also embeds the b64 of images as well.
Did it with https://sdan.io/cdn (I host a ton of files so my other websites can quickly access them) an example: http://sdan.cc/gradient.jpg (may be a bit slow... it's 1MB)
Case in point: I have a podcast (in German) whose name is a common German phrase ("Gar nicht so einfach", which translates to "Not that easy"). In SERPs for that phrase, the first few results are usually dictionaries, but my podcast's site (https://xyrillian.de/noises/gnse/) usually appears around 7th or 8th place still on the first page. This is without me doing any SEO, and in fact, without keeping up a regular schedule. >_> But the few episodes that there are have been reviewed overwhelmingly positively, and that appears to be all it takes.
Does anyone know of any like that? I can't remember any offhand.
It’s a super simple site that I wanted to make minimal and mobile friendly.
The blog posts are amazing and I have learned so much from that. At the same time they have convinced me of Dr. Cook’s knowledge and if I was looking for a consultant in these matters, he would be at the top of my list.
I just used Wordpress, picked a minimalist theme, edited the theme to suite me, then added plugins to improve:
Busy figuring out my own site and very certain that there will be no Wordpress involved