Show HN: Veonid – Create a personal website for free
veonid.com
veonid.com
* I agree with other posts that the site does download quite a bit of resources for what amounts to text on a page.
* The site doesn't render with JS disabled. My guess is this was built with some JS framework -- maybe look into SSR? Could help reduce the amount of resources downloaded by the client.
* Custom domains would be nice, for example `veonid.com/id/kevinfiol`
Right now, this looks like an inferior version of Linktree (example: https://linktr.ee/idarzikfth) or, although a paid service, omg.lol (https://home.omg.lol/).
Thank you all for upvoting, there are now 100 new users registered after 6 hours of publishing on HackerNews, hope you all find it useful and please share any feedback.
"Stupidity" and "incompetence" is unnecessary IMO, but it's nice to know that you're enthusiastic about development.
I usually access HN through my RSS Reader. Sometimes I go through a very busy stage in life where I don't have time to read the article or save pertinent information on my offline organizer. So I save the article on my RSS Reader for when I have time.
I just recently went through about a year and a half of saved stuff. It isn't the first time I've saved stuff for later viewing.
What I've found (and very much to my surprise) are the number of projects that hit the front page of HN and cease to exist a year later, 6 months later, a month later... sometimes just weeks later. Poof! Gone.
This is just the stuff I've saved and not representative of all projects that make HN's front page.
I say all of this because the quoted line above has convinced me that this project will probably not be around for very long. It's not a criticism. It's just an observation from many years of following up on links.
I'd be curious to see how many new projects that make HN's front page are still around. Free vs Paid, Open Source vs Closed, one-person development vs team, etc... I wonder if someone has attempted to put this data together.
OP profile: Founder/designer at http://songy.design and http://typen.co
Both of those urls are dead.
Personal webpage url with very long UUID does not make any sense.
It may be cool development excercise, but I do not think it is HN worthy.
songy.design was a website domain I used for my UI/UX design portfolio, but now I use a personal name for it: adishasanic.com
typen.co was a writing app, basically a Notion competitor, which I founded, designed and bootstrapped to develop in 2016 and discontinued it 6 months after launch. There were 2000 users registered, but very few were using it, due to concerns about keeping notes in it and it was hard to compete with Notion and iA writer, which had also iOS and Android apps.
You can check what those websites were using Internet Archive: https://archive.org
I don't know how long a life Veonid will have, but I have much more experience now in product design and Veonid is more for publishing than for writing and storing content, so it does not have the same obstacles as Typen. It's not a development exercise, my goal is to keep working on it for years because I believe there should be a way for anyone to create their own space from which to present themselves and publish anything, without their content being branded by platform and restricted for anyone who didn't sign up to platform.
I see lots of discussion about feature comparisons to competitors like about.me, linktree, but for me, the critical component for this kind of product is the organization behind the product: do they commit to hosting the site indefinitely, and are they stable, mature, and trustworthy enough to follow through on that commitment? Does the organization behind the product have long-term financial sustainability, or is there a risk that they could fail like 90+% of startups fail? Is the organization notorious for suddenly sunsetting popular products for no good reason (see Google)?
For example, I trust Microsoft to keep GitHub Pages running in its current form indefinitely (edit: or to sunset it with such advance notice that it won't be a crisis), although the me of 20 years ago would slap myself for saying this. I just don't trust what appears to be a single freelancer who has one active product in their resume. I've been that freelancer trying to build out a portfolio with free services like this. I regret it, and everyone who trusted me regretted it too.
There is no organization behind Veonid — it's just me who designed UI/UX and bootstrapped development of it. Currently, Veonid costs me $0 per month because services like Vercel, Hasura and Clerk are completely free to a certain extent. If there is more than 5000 monthly active users, it will cost just $25 per month for Clerk, and that price I can easily pay for 1-2 years without regretting. I plan to try to include some premium features in the next few months with a goal for Veonid make at least enough monthly income to pay for itself.
Of course, there is a risk of any app shutting and no guarantee that anything will remain for years and decades, but what I can say is I intend to keep Veonid hosting up for at least the next 12 months even if almost noone uses it. With more users, and especially if there are premium users at some point, I intend to keep it much longer.
1. What do you want to call your website?
2. Here are the templates -- pick one.
3. Magic -- Do you want to view it -- yes. It is at https://myname.startup.com
4. Do you want to have your own name like "www.awesomeperson.com" (already registrar checked) and filled but with option to check other.
5. That would be ($9.99 for the domain) + ($99.99 we take care of everything) = $109.98 for the whole year. (With the optional to stay with just the sub-domain).
6. P.S. Do you want a local backup copy sync to your Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft? Hey, it is just $0.99 a month (free for the first year).
I think a website is essentially a way to share content and communicate, so the first step, after signing up, should be to write content and immediately see it live at some subdomain. Everything after that is just editing/customization. So it'd be as it is in Veonid:
1. Read a landing page and click "Sign up"
2. Enter email address and sign up via magic link (no need to worry about providing password which you maybe use somewhere else)
2. "You've signed up!" (already some reward and feedback about what happened)
3. Click "Create a website" button
4. Write content and click "Publish" when ready
5. Done! Your website is live at a domain: startup.com/123456789 (another reward)
6. (optional, complicated stuff) Change template? Setup custom domain? Edit content?
- about.me takes a few minutes to create a profile because they show a form with a lot of steps, so you have to do a lot of thinking just to put together a simple page.
- about.me requires uploading a photo to create a profile, and it's not possible to have a website without a personal photo. Veonid requires only a name and description.
- about.me shows a job title or "tags" next to a name. Veonid doesn't.
- about.me shows a background color by default, which can be excessive for some. Veonid is just white background and plain text, so it's more universal.
- about.me allows creating only 1 profile per account. With Veonid, you can create multiple profiles from 1 account — for example, if you want to create a profile for someone else, or another profile for yourself but with a different content or for a different purpose.
If it was possible, what would you do with a downloaded website and where would you take it?
> If it was possible, what would you do with a downloaded website and where would you take it?
If I'm going to use a service like this, I'd like to have a backup of the static site from day 1, so that when (not if) the person behind this eventually gets bored, retires, dies, goes bankrupt, loses their keys, or just decides it isn't worth the money or mental energy to keep hosting it for free, I'd like to be able to re-upload the static files to something like GitHub pages.
- I intend to keep Veonid a platform to publish and present things from, not to write and keep things in. I encourage using tools like Notion or UpNote to do all your thinking and writing, and only paste into Veonid what you intend to have public in nicely designed pages/presentations.
- Hosting Veonid does not cost and will not cost anything for the first 5,000 monthly active users, and after that it's only $25/mo. for Clerk.
- I intend to keep Veonid profiles text-only, so data storage is minimum and thus fast and low cost for a while.
- Thanks to NextJS, Vercel and Hasura, updating and maintaining Veonid is really easy.
- If it comes to shutting down the app, I'll notify all users at least 1 month in advance, via email and via app, so there will be enough time to save data.
- In 4 hours since I posted Veonid on Hackernews, 60 new users registered of which 56 created a profile, which is encouraging for a v1 and finding product-market fit.
- I have more than 10 years of experience designing UI/UX of web and mobile apps, and I have launched web apps before, which is no guarantee of what will happen with Veonid, but may be of passion and familarity with the challenges and obstacles of designing and building products.
For now it's not monetized, and what is free now will remain free, so no worries that something will suddenly be restricted. In the future, it may be monetized in a way where there are new features which require upgrading to premium, so there'd be a Free and Premium plan.
[Example.txt]:
WAS WAR DENN JETZT NOCHMAL BESAGTE ABLAUFSTEUERUNG NAMENS KYBERNETIK, WAS VERBARG SICH DAHINTER UND, WAS WOMÖGLICH NOCH WICHTIGER GEWORDEN, WAR, JENE NEUDEFINITION DIE SICH AUCH IM ENGLISCHEN FAND,
WAS HATTE ES DAMIT AUF SICH?
"INNERHALB EINER FÜR MENSCHEN NICHT WAHRHABBAREN UND KURZEN ZEITSPANNE,"
"DIE KLEINER WAR, ALS DIE LATENZ DES NETZWERKES DAZWISCHEN..."
DAS WAR GEBLIEBEN, UND ZUGUTERLETZT NOCH IMMER DIE RECHTFERTIGUNG, DAS ALLES AUCH ÜBER EIN KÜNSTLICHES ICH
UND DESSEN "VIELLEICHT INTELLIGENZ", DER WIR UNS DOCH NICHT BEWUSST SCHIENEN, ZU STELLEN.
DENN ES SOLLTE DOCH WOHL EIN ABGLEICH ZWISCHEN ERLAUBTEM, ODER PRIORISIERTEM, SOWIE DEN BEGEHRTEN BELOHNUNGSPUNKTEN
NICHT NUR STATTFINDEN, SONDERN GESETZ...
GING ES DOCH NOCH IMMER UM KONTROLLE...
"AUSSERDEM, WIE SONST SOLLTE DENN DIE AKKURATHEIT ÜBERPRÜFT, UND DAS SICH EBEN NICHT ALS KONKURRENZ ZU BEHAUPTEN ?"
WAREN DEINE FRAGEN BEREITS BEANTWORTET ?
FALLS JA, WELCHE FRAGEN BEZÜGLICH JENES "MODELLs" KÖNNTEN NOCH GESTELLT...?
(hint: German txt and i think they don't like hot-linking but )
COMIC://i.ibb.co/gWyYZZQ/9166-UND-WARUM-FRAGEZEICHEN-FINAL-Mail.png
[BTT:]
(LIEST:)
"DA MÜSSE JETZT ABER AUCH IRGENDWO MENSCHLICHKEIT VORKOMMEN"
UND VERTIPPT HATTE ICH MICH AUCH EIN PAAR MALE... (-;
# @COMIC
> #8476://i.ibb.co/kJwX0V6/8476-WEGE-AUS-DEM-CHAOS-nov-17-FINAL-Mail.png > #9388://i.ibb.co/RYrHgGy/9388-ABGELENKT-FRAGEZEICHEN-feb-18-FINAL-Mail.png > #9389://i.ibb.co/1n4JCx9/9389-ABGELENKT-FRAGEZEICHEN-feb-18-FINAL-Mail.png > #9390://i.ibb.co/Nn6T6dw/9390-ABGELENKT-FRAGEZEICHEN-feb-18-FINAL-Mail.png
(End of .txt)
never mind but, yes simple .html, may do it but... also your page (to give an idea)
my question is about the 'around' guess i do not want to be hosted on a page with hm illegal stuff around... so can someone make a look-around, telling me who's next?
I want to thank you for another possibility to host something...
...but still can't open 'venoid' due to a 'lack-o-scripts'... (-;
regards
edited: 'fomating'
Problem with Notion to create a personal website is it doesn't guide you to it from the landing page and it offers a lot which just misleads someone who is not so tech savvy and just wants to put together a simple personal website. At this point, the goal for Veonid is not to compete with Notion as a page-builder, but just to be the fastest way to create a personal website for those who need to share just a name, bio and a few links.
If you have any suggestions for improvement, or if you're a freelance/consultant developer, please send your feedback, availability and rate to adishasanic@icloud.com
- linktree shows their logo on each profile if it's a Free plan. Veonid does not show a logo, just profile info, so there's less distractions.
- linktree process for creating and editing a profile is not very simple and quick. There's a lot of forms to fill and a lot of buttons to click.
- linktree link requires a name or username, and if you change a username the link will become invalid or misleading. Veonid uses an ID which will never change.
- linktree requires a personal photo as an avatar by default, and if you don't upload a photo, they show a circle with initials. Veonid requires only text — a name and description.
- linktree shows a username on page by default, which is unnecessary for a professional who just wants to show a name and bio.
- linktree's branding and appearance theme options are mostly designed for young audiences, teens, musicians. Veonid is more simple and universal, making profiles more presentable for personal or professional use.
- linktree offers a lot of options which can be overwhelming when you just want to edit content.
- linktree allows just 1 profile per 1 account. With Veonid, you can create multiple profiles from 1 account, each profile with its own URL.
And this is just a v1 for Veonid. The plan is to make it more capable in the future for showing more types of content rather than more appearance themes. The ultimate goal is to make it easy to create and manage personal websites as your own space or stage from which you can present yourself and publish your work and your thoughts, without anything blocking people from accessing it such as platform branding or requirements to sign up or subscribe, which is what most website building, publishing and social media platforms do.