My blog can now be browsed with cURL | Hacker News Reader

My blog can now be browsed with cURL

anderspitman.net

2 pointsanderspitman12 comments

This is not a good look.

How so? Did you read it?

I posted when your submission still had your defensive title up. It didn't help that your site still didn't work for me without JavaScript enabled. It doesn't reflect well on you.

So you didn't read it? Because both of those points are addressed in the post (and it's not very long). And come on, after taking all that heat yesterday I'm not allowed to poke a tiny bit of fun back at HN? ;) I really am grateful for the feedback everyone gave and did something about it.

More to the point, I _couldn't_ read it. What I'm saying is that the combination of your defensive title and the fact that the site still wasn't readable is not a good look, regardless of the content of the submission.

If it's still not working for you without JS, that's either a bug in my site or your browser (the noscript includes a link to the text version and GitHub), not a design decision on my part. Can you access this link?

https://anderspitman.net/txt/17

Yes, but linking to the text version instead of simply providing the text is hostile to the user. You know what resource I requested. You know where that resource is. Give me the resource.

I agree it would be ideal to return a static HTML file for direct requests. I'm working on adding that back in. But I think the /txt version of the site is still valuable. I tried to come up with a way to return it without requiring a separate URL, but short of doing magic on the server (such as detecting user agent) couldn't think of a way to do it without having nasty HTML in the result. Any suggestions?

EDIT: I updated it to HTML-redirect to /txt/feed for noscript users. Still not ideal if you're trying to find a specific post, but it includes instructions to help. I think it's a reasonable compromise.

Yeah, that works. I'm glad you're willing to put in the work, but I have to tell you, if you'd just focused on delivering the content and followed the principle of progressive enhancement, you'd be delivering a better experience for probably the same amount of effort at this point.

I think something that got lost in the conversation is that a big part of my personal site is experimenting with different ways of delivering content. My current experiment was to see if I could serve a git repo as-is without any build step, and what the trade-offs would look like. Unfortunately everyone just assumed I was ignorant or lazy.

I read it, and I lurked in the thread in question. It looks more like HN called you out on your bullshit. Why do you even need a SPA for a blog? Who are you trying to impress?

It's a shame when dev sees html as challenge.

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