Nobody tell Paul Graham but I rebuilt his site to be beautiful | Hacker News Reader

Nobody tell Paul Graham but I rebuilt his site to be beautiful

prettygraham.com

It is prettier. But it does not mean it provides a better UX.

For example, in http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html there is a whole list of essays. No pagination (and especially not with a manual link), working with Ctrl+F.

The redesign forgets about that. It treats as if only the most recent blog posts mattered, which is not the case. It is not a news outlet, and there are quite a few evergreen posts.

Anyway, wishing you all the best with the redesign. :)

Form over function strikes again!

This is an interesting discussion I would love to listen more to.

Pagination (this site) vs a long list of all the titles (Paul's actual site). Which is better user experience?

OP seems to suggest pagination for sites where new content is high value & old content is low value. Long list of titles where all content is equal.

IMO, pagination only makes sense when you want to save bandwidth and computation. Like, if each item has images, that need to be fetched. If there is pagination, I'd prefer the option to choose the number of items in the list.

If it is text-only, I see no reason to do any pagination (except a cargo cult-like habit). In this case, no option is needed.

Use <img loading="lazy" />.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/im...

I not sure there is much to say.

Regular users will be interested in the most recent articles, seems fair to put them first.

Curious users will be interested to found an article that they may like. No need to say that a description of an article (and associated metadata) is far better than just the title.

And there is a search accessible in 1-click. Seems to me as a fair trade-off for every use case.

This is one of the reasons that pushes me towards create a document first with HTML, then style it with CSS. If needs be – interactivity —, add a bit of JS. Space can look good when you're designing on a 27" screen, but on the iPad or the MBA, it is wasteful. Butterick's Practical Typography[0] and Beautiful Racket[1] are currently my standard for websites and a delight to browse.

[0]: https://practicaltypography.com/

[1]: https://beautifulracket.com/

I second this. On occasion I'll be inclined to share one of his essays with someone else, so having multiple pages to scroll through is suboptimal because I won't remember exactly what the essay title is. Being able to see them in one place makes it much much easier to figure out which one.

Form over function strikes again!

Great point, I've added a search with a page that lists all the articles for the best of both worlds.

Once you found the article you want to read, you can also just hit the "Reader mode" button in your browser, boom automatic dark mode and readable font size.

We should give credit to the original author of the template; it looks like attribution has been removed:

https://github.com/timlrx/tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog

Direct link to preview:

https://tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog.vercel.app/

Please leave attribution up for authors of free website templates (IMO), it's the nice thing to do.

So you are telling me that someone managed to HN frontpage by making a website with: 1. content from another website 2. a look/template from a another website

and without giving attribution for it? (ok, attribution to paul graham is not hidden but it’s not clear that this is not an official website and there’s no link to the original content).

I understand that this is an attempt to get remarked by Paul Graham but it doesn’t show any skill and show a lack of understanding of certain fundamentals.

Has GPT-3 gone too far?!

My bad on this and it has been fixed!

I was using the README as a todo list for things left to do, and removed a bunch of stuff at once, didn't realise I removed the license.

You know, I actually prefer the original paulgraham.com. I can read the smaller font easily, find the article excerpts useless (as opposed to seeing more titles at once) and the publication dates are also misleading. PG categorizes the articles by month, putting in a day (always the 1st) seems like being lazy to change the template.

None of these has anything to do with beautiful in my book.

Still laughing at the comment at the bottom of the site: "Paul Graham for people with eyes"

Made me laugh too

This is wonderfully perfectly provocative. A clever button pushing projectile innocently lobbed into the everyday pitter patter. An imposter post meant to deviously short circuit the HN tropes' internal logic.

I like PG's version better--it has better information density. On my 13" MBA's display, I'm able to see the titles of 31 essays without scrolling. On this site, I can only see two.

By that logic everyone should use the minimum zoom level to cram as much information in their screen as possible.

It may be prettier, but:

1. Links aren't underlined[1].

2. The links in the footer are indistinguishable from normal text.

3. Links in the menu on top are white, while most links are blue.

In general, the site lacks consistency around the styling of links.

[1]: <https://www.tempertemper.net/blog/why-you-should-almost-alwa...>

Really bad form to:

- copy someone’s content without their permission (illegal actually)

- not link to someone else’s site prominently when you critique it

- rip another site's theme to apply to that content, removing attribution

It looks modern, and better, but I don't like it. It's not good for reading. The font is large, line height huge, side paddings really large, there is very little text per line and too few lines in the screen. There might be a max amount of text per line that can be enjoyed, but too little and I am prevented from really getting into a flow of reading, if that makes sense. It feels herky-jerky.

So the operation was a success, but the patient died.

The text isn’t large – it’s using the default font size you have configured in your browser.

The text on the original site is small – looks like pg’s sense of design is firmly rooted in the late 90s, when people were designing primarily with 640×480–800×600 in mind and there was an awful fad of setting body copy to 11–13px.

That’s too small for most people in typical reading conditions, but if that’s the size you are used to looking at all day, everything normal size looks “too big”, even if it’s actually just normal size.

Spoiler: It’s about reskinning his website. I was hoping for AI translation of PG’s text into societally useful (or at least interesting) content.

Someone should send Graham’s output through an AI filter, informed by Dabblers and Blowhards. https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Oh, the arrogance and the irony.

The one improvement I'd wish upon Paul's original site is a correct SSL certificate (it still appears to be configured with a cert for *.store.yahoo.com ) so that one can connect over https instead of http.

But that's a quibble. Otherwise I see no advantages to the new design over the old one.

Heheh, a lot of criticism here on HN like you might expect -- for what it's worth, I really like the design!

Also, you have a small CSS bug in the dark-mode version of https://prettygraham.com/blog :)

I have dark-mode by default and the bug is on light-mode for me. I guess, the problem is that the switch mode isn't applied correctly to the search.

Rebuilding someone’s personal site to be “prettier” to your own eyes, then widely publicized that is just rude.

If you want to do an unauthorized redesign pick a large unloved commercial app. That shows off your skills without coming off as snide bullying of a single persons design.

Now rewrite the content as well to something good!

(/s, I now I will be crucified for this here :D )

There is a difference between the original desktop site and the original mobile site. The mobile site looks a bit better (more modern if you will).

But this effort looks really good too.

I do wonder whether copyright allows this?

It does not unless the OP got permission from PG to republish his work. I suspect PG won't particularly care about this but it's certainly a copyright violation.

> Nobody tell Paul Graham but I rebuilt his site to be beautiful (prettygraham.com)

It's not pretty. It has too little whitespace and too much color.

To make it truly "pretty," you need to:

* Drop the light blue so it's only white, gray, and navy.

* Drop the dates and increase spacing so you can only see one article in the screen at at time, instead of three. Showing three whole titles at ones is disorientating and confusing to users.

It really needed dark mode on desktop, I've saving eyes here Paul.

Google 'plagiarism' and 'copyright violation'.

I'm curious about how any updating would get done with this kind of mirror. Is the content scraped from the original source and then uploaded through an automated process?

Don't think he'll appreciate his content being scraped and duplicated, regardless of UX

I like the original better. Quite simple, high in valuable content per pixel

Function over form any day. 'Good wine does not need laurels'.

footnotes are broken.

i'd also love a feature that links metadiscussions on HN, and perhaps ranks by number of upvotes (just as a timesaving thing)

The old one looks like a cicada 3301 puzzle

Nice work, very clean!

---

"Nobody tell him but I'll post it to HN."

What is this style of writing about?

Clickbait.

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