A directory of handmade webpages | Hacker News Reader

A directory of handmade webpages

gossipsweb.net

152 pointscookingoils70 comments

Hey, it's Elliott (creator of Gossip's Web, Special Fish https://special.fish, and other projects (https://elliott.computer). Thanks for checking out Gossips. There's a renewed interest in building websites by hand using basic but powerful tools (HTML/CSS/a little JavaScript). Gossip's is a directory of some of these sites and lets you submit your own.

The submission criteria is pretty straight forward (no links to social media or website builders). Also, please don't submit your latest startup : ) . Personal websites, web experiments, and small community sites are all very welcome. The $1 submission fee goes toward running/maintaining the directory (I make about $3-5/month on submissions so it's not about the money). Happy to answer any questions the HN community might have and have a nice weekend!

A word of warning: you’ll have to browse or crawl these pages periodically at minimum.

Best case would be to diff the latest page with various IPs and user-agents against the known and then let you know when it changes. Someone will inevitably submit a page that looks good, then changes later or dynamically depending on datetime, user-agent, request IP, etc. to become malicious.

Unfortunately, these are the sorts of problems that many companies have to deal with automatically (like Google) or manually that startups don’t typically.

While you’re charging, if someone can get by with paying $1 for installing ransomware, they may do it.

It’s a neat idea, but it’s risky. I like what you’ve done, though, and hope the artisanal webpage index pays for itself and more quickly.

Or he could just take people's word that they're honest human beings. You know — default to believing that people are good, not evil.

Since he's charging to be on the list, there a very low chance that he'll get flooded with bots from China, India, and Russia pushing low-quality web sites.

someone can get by with paying $1 for installing ransomware, they may do it.

Or some ransomware company may take over an abandoned domain that' s linked from his page. Or some ransomware company may buy one of the sites. Or some ransomware company... Nevermind. Just don't build anything ever anywhere, because of edge cases.

I submitted. When does it appear in the directory?

Thanks for submitting. I got quite a few submissions from the HN traffic. Going through them now to make sure they meet the criteria.

Hey there it is. If it was a snake it woulda bit me.

What is the color picker for?

Looks like each site is assigned a color which displays as a square 'thumbnail' alongside it in listings.

I don't see any meaning to the colors, so I guess it's whatever color you feel represents your site?

Your search appears to not work.

For example, I'll enter "fiction" and it will return "Found 0 websites related to fiction". But I see one with the "fiction" tag listed right on the first page.

Same goes for the "programming" tag. And "meditation".

I just finished a site especially for writing handmade pages: https://codasite.app. Users get a Monaco code editor (think VS Code, but in the browser) and they write one HTML, one CSS, and one JS file. Hit "deploy", and you get a website.

It's targeted towards people learning to code, but maybe the handmade webpage crowd would like it, too. I'd love to get some traffic and feedback.

I wasn't expecting to launch today so it's still on a $5/month server. God speed, little guy.

Aren’t all webpages handmade to one extent or another? Or are these webpages that don’t use frameworks like React and Angular?

"handmade" in this context usually refers to writing the raw HTML yourself; no framework, no nothing.

So using Markdown or something similar disqualifies? Even if i write the HTML template and generator script myself?

It depends. Did you write the scripting language?

If you look at the submission form, he excludes "website builders" which I think would exclude things like Squarespace, Wix, etc. I suppose if one of those builder tools let you use Markdown, that would not qualify, but if you are using Markdown with something like Hugo or Jekyll, that seems legitimately "handmade" to me, but I don't operate that site. :)

What about a handmade template for a CMS?

By the spirit of the thing, Markdown ought not qualify

I don't think "handmade" should be taken to literally, but rather be attached the meaning as described below.

In my experience there tends to be a strong correlation between a website being hand-written and the quality of the content on the website.

My hypothesis is that it somehow hits the sweetspot between:

- creating your own SSG and only writing mundane blogposts about how you wrote that SSG (am guilty of this)

- and pumping out raw thoughts on Twitter/Wordpress/Medium/Substack etc.

I think that is at least part of what this website is trying to capture.

adjective: hand-written written with a pen, pencil, or other handheld implement.

...?

All websites are the result of a human pushing power through a cpu and sending low voltage signals to it via a keyboard, so in a way all are handmade. That's why so many are wondering what qualifies as handmaid to this site's author - site builders like Wix-created sites probably don't count but do SSGs count? What about using _any_ css framework?

Tho it's hard to define, it's pretty easy to distinguish.

I think this could be said about much of reality.

adjective: hand-written written with a pen, pencil, or other handheld implement.

Lately I've been writing my personal web pages on my TRS-80 Model 100. I can hold that in my hands.

In my experience, markdown doesn't offer much advantage over HTML, as writing a few short tags isn't much of a burden. (Even more so, if you use the old-style `b` and `i` phrase elements, which are apparently considered ok again. Personally, I still use `strong`, etc, which may be the most annoying feature for hand-written HTML. But this can be fixed by an editor shortcut.) Otherwise, a bit of server-side scripting for adding headers and footers and providing navigation is fine, but probably already outside the specs of "entirely handmade".

For me the difference between writing markdown and writing HTML directly is that if I use the latter, I won't actually write the darn article. HTML is pretty bad for re-reading and editing, as the tags get in the way.

I find the opposite. I almost never use Markdown unless forced to.

I find it much easier to remember

    <a href="https://foo.com"><img src="foo.jpg" width="300" alt="foo"></a>

that some

    [foo(foo.jpg)]

or is it

    (http://foo.com)[(foo.jpg)(alt=alt text)]

or is it

    [foo.com(foo.jpg) width=300]

or is it

    (foo.com)[foo.jpg](alt text)[::width="300"]

...? I can never remember the goddamn inconsistent syntax.

and is it 2 asterisks for bold, 1 for italic, or 1 and 2, or is it 2 and 3? With html it's

    <b>this is bold</b> <i>this is italic</i>
    <b><i>this is bold and italic</i></b>

Much easier to remember.

Same here.

Same problem for me.

these syntaxes now suffer the same problem that forum software went through... each has their own syntax and they are not usually compatible.

HTML, for better or worse, is the syntax we all know by heart and is universal.

I’ve never seen a markdown flavour with anything other than 1 for italic and 2 for bold. Emphasis and strong emphasis respectively.

I agree that the link to image syntax is easier to remember in html. That said, since markdown supports inline html you can always use that.

Go and use MediaWiki markup, then you won't be able to make that assertion any more. (-:

Hard to remember. <b> and <i> are easier to remember than 1 and 2 (or is it 2 and 1) and now I have to figure out how to escape a damn asterisk, and how to do bold italic. Too much stuff to figure out. HTML is easier.

I just write the article in the code editor, then go back and add the tags.

Seems obvious to me, but maybe because back when I was a journalist, that's how we did it. The tags (how and what varied by system) triggered chryons and video playback and other events.

> HTML is pretty bad for re-reading and editing, as the tags get in the way.

There is https://pugjs.org if you want to write html in a cleaner, concise way.

Eh. That’s just yet another templating engine. What I like about markdown is that I can use an editor (such as iA) with previews, highlighting and style helpers.

Is it similar to HAML? I just started using that at work and really quite like it for templating.

It's sort of a more pythonic HAML with good JS tooling is how I would describe it.

The "strong" and "b" tags don't mean the same thing, nor do the "em" and "i" tags. HTML, used properly, will tell you why the typography appears as it does, which means that the meaning isn't locked up in the typographic conventions of the day (which change, often making old documents confusing to read, and are not accessible). Markdown is lazy.

Technically they don't mean the same thing, but in practical reality, they almost always display the same way, which is what matters to most people.

They might display the same way, but they shouldn't read the same way, which matters a lot to users of screen readers.

Handmade in the sense that they don't use frameworks like React or Angular. Just like how technically a box cake mix cake is "homemade" but usually if someone says "homemade cake" they made it from scratch.

Cool collection, but it seems like it's just modern examples. Surprised scaruffi.com is not in this directory

Seems like a collection of websites that were manually submitted by their creators. Scaruffi has been online for decades, I doubt that person would be interested in submitting to a website directory.

What definition of handmade does this use?

How do we create a search engine which looks into hand crafted sites only? Back to the roots!

you should try wiby.org

At least one site is created using Roam Research. Does this really qualify as handmade?

https://www.rodrigofranco.com/How_is_this_website_made.html

Thanks for letting me know. Some things slip through the cracks and sometimes it's pretty hard to tell when a site is actually coded by hand. I'll take a look at the submission in question.

You're welcome. I like the site in question, but it may not fit the criteria you're using.

There are just so many websites on this page, all of which have their own art style and their own experiments. Honestly makes me feel very small on the internet but also happy that there are so many people who do this kinda stuff.

> handmade webpages

Here is one of such: https://www.leocad.org

Source: https://github.com/leozide/leocad/tree/gh-pages

Pity it costs money to submit sites，but I'm glad projects like this exist

I can't imagine the fee causes any kind of practical problem, unless someone doesn't have a credit/debit card — it IS a shame it doesn't support any other payment means. I'm currently earning less than I'm paying out, and even I was happy to pay the dollar! It makes the site that much more valuable that it isn't overwhelmed by spam.

I'm not judging, it's the author's choice.

As I said, big up for the idea. Cheers.

I think a nominal fee is necessary to ward off bots. $1 to potentially get your site listed someplace where like-minded people might see it is not bad.

The majority of these sites will never have enough content to rank in the top 10 for some query on search engines. And if you're not top 10, your site is essentially invisible.

without some kind of old-school directory/webring structure that users can peruse, the odds of people continuing to make and share personal websites (that aren't shilling a course or product affiliate links) will dwindle to nothing.

Just today, I discovered this site by pure chance: http://ratbehavior.org/PawPaintingRats.htm

An extremely information-dense site about rats, hand-coded sometime in the '90s and last updated in 2012. A site like this to me is fascinating, but increasingly a very rare breed.

Is it possible to pay with a different method than credit card?

I think https://neocities.org has some of these same vibes, except neocities also has hosting.

Cool idea and I submitted my site. You've got a minor bug - on a tag page, the submit link goes to /tags/submit.

Thanks for letting me know. Fixed.

why would it cost $1 to submit?

> The $1 submission fee goes toward running/maintaining the directory (I make about $3-5/month on submissions so it's not about the money).

Seems utterly reasonable to me.

I really like a.slow.cab

Yes, me too. I actually wonder how the header graphic was made? Looks very nice.

Although I must admit, I have no idea what this site is supposed to be. Could be random musings from GPT-3 for all I know (even the explainer is very cryptic). But as with all art, one probably shouldn't ask too many questions :-)

Edit: Found a small arrow at the bottom that does in fact lead to more content. Looks like it's from an actual person after all ;-)

Once upon a time, this would have been called "micro-blogging".

Looks like it got a lot of traffic. The author seems to have removed all the links on the homepage and Google and archive.is do not seem to have it in their indices either.

Why do they all have to be so damn ugly?

That's what I say about most all commercial or "mainstream" sites.

it's an interesting thought experiment to try and make sense of what it is about a website that makes it seem ugly, or not ugly. at what point does an 'ugly' web site become beautiful? is there a threshold?

i'd like to see an example of a site that you feel is not ugly, not so i can be a contrarian and say 'well, i think those are ugly!' but, just to get a feel for what you believe is exemplary of beauty.

de gustibus non est disputandum

Some of the best content on the internet is "ugly." And by that, I mean specifically this site: https://www.agner.org/

>It costs $1 to submit.

No thanks. I'll just keep my handmade websites to myself and let people find them by surfing.

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