Ask HN: Share your personal site
A similar post was done a few months ago and it was pretty fun so why not do it again ? share you're personal sites below and let others critique you!
I'll start with mine https://www.yusuf.fyi/
I'll start with mine https://www.yusuf.fyi/
It's written with Gatsby and hosted on Netlify (which handles the build step without configuration). I picked Gatsby because I wanted to use react/preprocessors, but also wanted to be able to "just write" (and MDX lets me do both of those). It also has a vibrant plugin ecosystem and is JS based (vs Ruby, which my previous site used; I don't write Ruby any longer).
I blog a few times a year, a mix of technical topics and media reviews. The blog is meant to be mostly text, but it being in React means I can drop in rich things, like support for hide-able spoilers and nice code blocks. I've optimized the layout for reading text (good font size, max-width, line-height), so hopefully it works!
Some favorite posts are:
- Python Dataclasses from Scratch: https://xavd.id/blog/post/python-dataclasses-from-scratch/
- My yearly media review. Here's 2021; 2022 should be up in the next few days: https://xavd.id/blog/post/favorite-media-2021/
Thanks for looking!
For those who don't know, @schmudde runs a blog called Beyond the Frame: https://schmud.de
He also has an excellent Strange Loop talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU6NvkkF4Xk
It is funny how much variation there is between books/genres though! The sentence complexity and variety definitely comes into play here.
I've thought about it. Honestly the most likely thing is that I'll make a standalone site for media reviews and consolidate everything. That's what I did for this (https://github.com/xavdid/kerfuffle; currently offline) and I was very pleased with the result. ".review" is a TLD, so I spin it up under something there. :)
I find the Goodreads UI _incredibly_ busy. Here's what I saw when I logged in just now: https://cdn.zappy.app/76d7cba6b409f0aa9310214401d11db9.png
It's nice to see what my friends are reading, but it's always trying to recommend me books, sell me things, etc. It makes sense (it's why Amazon bought them) but it I found it mostly got in the way of what I wanted out of it- a spreadsheet with pre-filled information. Also it's dumb, but I wanted to rate books on a 4-point scale, and theirs is out of 5.
I used to use a gSheet for this (with columns for title, author, day start/end, and review), but I wanted a way to source rich info. So I combined Zapier, the google books API, and an npm package I wrote to count the words in an epub (https://github.com/xavdid/epub-wordcount/) and fed all that info into Airtable. It sounds like a lot of work, but I set it up years ago and it's been happily humming along.
Now I have exactly the tracking system I want, and it's not at the whim of decisions on any product roadmaps.
Nothing too fancy, just a static hugo site on github pages. I'm most happy with the search that I added, which all happens client-side. The index is only about 129 KB so I'll probably never hit a practical download size limit either. And because it's happening in the browser it's very responsive.
If anyone is curious about the details I also wrote about that here: https://lukesalamone.github.io/posts/rolling-my-own-blog-sea...
I've also written a good amount about chess lately, if anyone is interested in that. Specifically, the intersection of chess and AI, where I've been working on a new type of chess learning tool.
I read the first article you mentioned and I am bookmarking the others for when I have more time
The font is ET Book: https://edwardtufte.github.io/et-book/
I borrowed heavily from Tufte CSS: https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/
1. The font size on homepage is small, especially for the two columns of dates. I can't really read them from across my desk (even on a big monitor). It's also not clear what the dates represent- maybe created and updated dates for each post?
2. The dates aren't present on the post pages themselves, so someone landing directly on a post won't know how old it is.
Thanks for the feedback! I just pushed up some changes. Let me know how it looks in ~10 minutes :)
Those dates are indeed created and updated dates. I haven't thought of pretty a way to visually indicate that haha. Let me know if you have any ideas!
> 2. The dates aren't present on the post pages themselves, so someone landing directly on a post won't know how old it is.
It would be very easy to add, but I didn't think people would care!
I'll add created/updated dates at the end of each page so it doesn't pollute the header. Thanks for the recommendations!
Dates on posts is nice because knowing when a post was written (and/or updated) gives a lot of context. For instance, your timeline is super cool. Knowing where a given post fits into that is useful.
Maybe a slightly smaller and lighter "C" and "U" preceding them?
I'm pretty torn on having a separation between the notion of "posts" and "projects". I don't keep the project section up to date very often, and probably should remove it. Any thoughts/advice on this HN?
Yeah, that's exactly what I think the problem is. I arbitrary consider a one thing a project and another thing a post.
Understood, thanks for your advice!
- Static site with no framework beyond basic PUG/SCSS.
- Uses no JS at all.
- Actually pretty readable on a monochrome Palm Pilot too, as far as modern HTML goes.
---
My key post is my thought framework for ethical software design: https://calebk.com/articles/design-ethics
Have some fun ones on PalmOS UX and other experiments coming up, but unpublished for now. :)
I’ve used this site design for probably 6 years?
Today it’s a NextJS site on Vercel backed by markdown files (older pages) and Notion (newer pages). I’ve also built the same design with a Python SSG which was focused on one HTTP request per page, and before that a POSIX shell script I wrote focused on being as FreeBSD as possible.
I would like to share more knowledge on the site, but it’s in last place behind all my other life goals.
I’m a product designer who’s been blogging since around 2009. For several years I managed an online publication, Signal Tower. Then left it to become the host of the Designer News podcast. Some posts y’all might find interesting:
A Children’s Book Written and Illustrated by AI
https://solomon.io/childrens-story-written-illustrated-ai/
Improving Accessibility with Design Tokens
https://solomon.io/improving-accessibility-with-design-token...
Code School, 10 Years Later
My personal blog as well as a place to showcase the iOS & macOS apps I’m working on.
It’s statically generated with Hugo and, for the first time, I actually created the theme myself (based on the lightweight CSS framework Bulma). Being essentially just a bunch of SASS files, Bulma allowed me to easily cherry-pick only what I needed, extend and tweak as required and easily integrate it into the Hugo build pipeline.
Designing and developing the theme was a really cool experience because my background is mostly in C, C++ Objective C and Swift and this was the most serious “web project” I have done to date. I still prefer writing native apps but have definitely enjoyed this excursion into the world of SCSS, HTML and JS :)
Now if only I got around to actually blogging more regularly :D
Inspired by an iPad-style layout, along with some other personal sites I admire. Not too fancy, just a home for my photos and some (not very much) writing.
I mostly write about research and reading. Here are some recent posts:
Interesting books from 2022: https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-books-2022/
Interesting articles from 2022: https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-articles-2022/
Foreign Affairs at 100: https://bcmullins.github.io/foreign-affairs-100/
I also read Jekyll and Hyde in the past few years, but I felt like it didn't grip me because its "big twist" is so well known today; I can imagine it was different at the time.
Also, instead of Project Gutenberg, it may be worth mentioning that the book is available at Standard Ebooks. They're a open source operation that makes high-quality modern ebooks out of public domain works. Here's J&H: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/robert-louis-stevenson/the...
In the early days of covid lockdown I began a weekly page "Five Reads Friday" of recent internet finds for (old) colleagues from my (old) research lab. — and for anyone else who may be interested
Its still going. Todays 5RF (number 134) is at
https://learnbyexample.github.io/escapist-reviews/ - reviews about fantasy and sci-fi books I read, many are self-published as I read a lot on KU
My tech / software / dev blog - running since 2008. https://www.shogan.co.uk/
My Trail and ultra running blog - running a few years now: https://trailrunningforlife.com/
I have a couple of other sites for projects with my kids that we blog about, and some other smaller projects, both of those are static using Hugo.
A humanities take on tech. I'm always nervous how the sidenotes render on other webviews. But my favorite part is the automatically generated historical timeline (https://schmud.de/timeline.html). It is essentially a meaningfully different ordering of the same writing.
I've just started blogging and it has been a great way for me to consolidate new things I've picked up into easily digestable articles. The blog is very simple. It's built with Hugo and a modified instance of Congo[0] and is hosted by Cloudflare Pages for free.
If anyone here is interested in adding our widget to their site, please ping me (contact at beelinereader dot com) and I'd be happy to make this happen.
Here are various examples of HNers who have implemented our tech on their sites:
• https://jaack.me/2022-dati-previsioni-2023/
• https://programaudioseries.com/1-you-had-me-at-hello-world/
• https://wildcardpeople.com/what-is-a-wildcard-person
Other sites, including MIT Press Reader, have also implemented the tech and included it in their text settings
• https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-new-art-of-making-boo...
More info is available on the BeeLine Reader website: http://www.beelinereader.com
Fun fact: A long time ago I had a blog post/rant about reCAPTCHA end up on the HN home page, and some time later I had a coworker ask me if I knew I was on Wikipedia. Turns out someone linked my blog post in the Wikipedia article for CAPTCHAs, but it's since been removed.
Anyways, I did literally just switch from Wordpress to Statamic (which is even self-hosted on my homelab!). WP is a pain to manage, and having a flat-file based CMS does provide me some flexibility. I setup (again, using my homelab and N8N!) an automatic Masotdon-to-Statamic cross-poster, which was much easier to integrate than if I had my old WP setup.
I've had this one for a couple years now. I've had more polished-looking sites in the past, but this time I wanted to emphasize having fun with it and not being too precious - this allows me to update it without worrying about everything being perfect.
It's a static site built by Eleventy. I edit/build it locally, and then when I push up to Github it's rebuilt there by a Github action. Details here: https://www.justus.ws/how/
Edit: An interesting tidbit: my avatar in the upper-left corner blinks on a random timer thanks to a very simple bit of JS[0]. However, it exhibits a strange and unexpected behaviour: if you don't interact with the webpage for a while, my avatar "goes to sleep"; e.g. the eyes close until you interact with it again.
I love this, but I don't know why it happens! I get that the browser probably pauses scripts after a time, but why would it always end up with its eyes closed, especially when the eyes are only supposed to close for 150ms at a time?
[0]:
async function blinktimer() {
async function blink() {
var src = $(" .avatar ").attr('src');
console.log("BLINK!");
$(" .avatar ").attr('src','/images/dadi-avatar_blink.png');
await sleep(150);
$(" .avatar ").attr('src',src);
}
while (true) {
var delay = Math.floor((Math.random() * 11000) + 0);
await sleep(delay);
blink();
}
};I should specify a better fallback font though.
As an aside, for some reason all of your comments are showing up as dead (including a comment you made on another post 29 days ago). I vouched for your two comments here to bring them back. I'm not sure why that is, but you might want to reach out to hn@ycombinator.com
BTW, I made a vanilla JS version for fun, without jQuery or promises (untested)
function blinktimer() {
var avatar = document.querySelector(" .avatar ");
var srcBlink = '/images/dadi-avatar_blink.png';
var blink = function() {
console.log("BLINK!");
var srcOpen = avatar.src;
avatar.src = srcBlink;
setTimeout(function() {
avatar.src = srcOpen;
var delay = (Math.random() * 11000) | 0;
setTimeout(blink, delay);
}, 150);
}
var delay = (Math.random() * 11000) | 0;
setTimeout(blink, delay);
}I was happy I could get the domain! Pretty simple hand-rolled server-rendered site using the kit-clj[0] and neat-css[1]. Main backbone of the site is here[2]. I used to use a CLJS SPA but it was overkill and not as nice to use (load times particularly.)
[0]: https://kit-clj.github.io/ [1]: https://neat.joeldare.com/ [2]: https://git.sr.ht/~luciano/laratel.li/tree/main/item/src/li/...
https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/
I write posts using Hypertext - my open source HTML Document Editor - and sync to S3 with a simple static blog generator. It's so nice to write essays using rich-text with the same CSS style as my site and not have to look at Markdown line noise and guess what the end result might look like.
The site doesn't have a particularly stylistic design, and my writing tends to focus on theistics and cognitive philosophy.
The physiological constraints of free will https://specularrealms.com/genetic-freedom
Secular vs God's morality morality https://specularrealms.com/godsmorality
But I also write goofy articles like how Sean astin used basic programming language to hack a password. https://specularrealms.com/2021/04/21/strangest-things
I'm still a student so nothing too cool in there but slowly getting better. I mostly find specific ideas that interest me, group a bunch of those together and try to build a project that uses all of them. I usually blog about those although I think in a bit too much detail.
I also relatively recently published an RSS aggregator that sends emails here if anyone wants to give feedback https://github.com/AntoniosBarotsis/Rss2Email
Cant wait to find cool blogs in these replies
I’ve also worked on a project involving tiny ML models for sentence embeddings so I have a lot of respect for what you’re doing.
Thanks for the kind words, by the way!
I advertised it originally as a financial technology blog, ended up mostly a career advice blog for navigating toxic environments and some hard truths.
EDIT: Typo.
https://carefulwords.com - A more inspired thesaurus + historic quotes. Example: https://carefulwords.com/solitude
currently working on a microblogging social network, though only about 1 hour a night, so it will take some time.
With my most recent iteration, I have started using my website more as a mental decluttering tool than a show-tell medium. The wesbite is a bunch of markdown files spiced up with Next.js and my first attempt at structured navigation. I keep a similar private one.
I've now been rethinking of reorganizing into a flat heirarchy + what I like to call "theme portals" - essentially big picture entrypoints into details. This avoids a long list of scattered blog posts. The orrganization style of clean overarching themes like tech/math etc. isn't working for me.
The typography/layouts come from Tailwind Typography [1]. I like their defaults.
The story is that I was going to make my own blogging platform from scratch with vanilla Django for personal use, but then I thought about making it available to anyone for use, but then I noticed that there are already plenty of those, so I made one with a twist.
Actually the name “Pressn’t” comes from making blogs without Wordpress and a wordplay with present.
Nothing too fancy, just a static hugo site on github pages. I mostly write about Java and Javascript. Currently trying to complete my 100DaysOfJava. As its quite a tough thing to make time so trying to read and tinker with the concepts and then write.
The article i am most fond of will be https://mohibulsblog.netlify.app/posts/java/100daysofjava/da...
Not a lot on there right now. I have a lot of ideas for blog posts and started a series porting a tiny C++ renderer to Rust (to learn both 3D graphics and Rust), but it's been hard to find time to continue with school and work. I'm trying to put out a new post before my next semester starts or gets too busy, but we'll see...
I built it kinda from scratch using Hugo. I didn't use any templates and wrote custom all custom CSS. The only JavaScript is a 2.3 KB Umami tracking script that talks to my self-hosted instance.
No blog, it's purpose is to show off projects/my cv.
I'm proud how it turned out, it's quite a unique design.
On your CV there’s a dash at the start of the first bullet point, might need removing
Functional, and small download. But really not anything to write home about.
I've been using it as a mixed place for documenting engineering projects and hosting piles of images from various reverse engineering efforts & excursions throughout the states.
I've been slowly working on it becoming more mobile friendly. As a static site its incredibly time consuming to cleanup, but also fun. It's like restoring up rusty cookware, similar functionality but way prettier after a lot of scrubbing.
I don't publish frequently, but when I do, I aim to cover underrepresented topics.
Aaaand https://links.l3m.in ! That's a Shaarli-like website made using Django, it helps me store my links.
moon musiq is a netlabel for experimental industrial electronic music. Raises funds to fight human trafficking too.
They made a compilation of 30 second bug songs a few months ago https://moonmusiq.bandcamp.com/album/small-sounds-for-small-...
I just published a post 2 days ago about 2022 Self Published Book earnings! I was kind of hoping hn would find it interesting but no luck so far!
https://on-systems.tech/blog/130-2022-self-published-book-ea...
Blogging inconsistently since 2013, experimented with and morphed the site a whole lot over the years.
stats (self-made and self-hosted) at https://s.cri.dev/ using https://github.com/christian-fei/minimal-analytics
It's a simple static site built with jekyll.
I'm most proud of the chatbot I wired up to answer basic questions from visitors. I explained how I did it here: https://jedfonner.com/2021/08/03/Dialogflow-v2
https://www.artistic.wtf A free Stable Diffusion site for generating images, extra features such as image grids and higher resolution are available from paid plans.
I usually blog/link to; about user experience and privacy.
Want to do the 100 days to offload challenge this year. To force myself a bit to write and learn how to write better.
WIP.. still looking through my archives of old blogs and post on other websites (forums that are long gone, social bookmarking services etc) to add to my website retrospectively.
Using Hugo as static site generator and hosted on Netlify.
But I've been working a lot on its "videos for people who hate videos", here: http://angg.twu.net/eev-videos.html
It’s built with my own static site generator (my favourite thing to tinker with). I author posts in my own flavour of markdown. Page templates are good ol’ handlebars. It’s built with indieweb ideals in mind with micropub and webmentions implemented using netlify build plugins and functions.
Basically a programming blog in English, these days about iOS and Swift development, statically generated with Hugo, hosted on Netlify.
I also run https://www.kulman.sk which is my original personal site in Slovak with non-programming stuff.
Started putting posts about legal tech recently.
i'm pretty new to web development. i made this site with react as an excuse to practice using react.
i'm interested in your feedback about how to best make myself contactable via this site. do you use a contact form? just post your email address?
I have been blogging about 3d, tech and general thoughts on this URL for a long time. Originally a flat site then a WP monster and now a sleak little HUGO number.
I like this idea of blog sharing and it fits with my current feelings of decentralised posting.
My site’s content is most heavily focused on books, ML infra, and small projects. My most popular stuff is probably the Designing Data Intensive Apps flashcards mini-project and a post about K8s being a misfit for data/ML platform teams.
don't mind the mess
Built with a little static site generator I use for a couple other projects as well: https://radishjs.com
Mostly resume and recommendatios I had on LinkedIn. Was planning to write regularly but couldn't find ideas to write about.
Those here who persistently write personal blogs where do you get content ideas from?
Just a basic Jekyll template. I have had a 2 year break and recently got back into it. In that time I also forgot to renew my old .com domain and had it taken over.
Have had a few posts that previously got attention on Hacker News.
Link: https://idiotlamborghini.com/articles/using_gpt3_and_hacker_...
My personal freelancing company site. I got an endorsement from the prime minister of my country, which was pretty cool! Trying to focus on which technologies and projects I’ve worked with to give a sense of what skills I have
Just started it really, trying to start writing as I miss it a bit from working in academia.
I used Hugo to generate it and host it on GitHub Pages with a custom domain. I need to make some tweaks to the template I used but not really had time!
A WordPress-based site I established way back in 2005. It's all non-fiction stories from history and science, plus I curate links to other interesting content.
God bless Hugo.
- most recent project: https://glthr.com/cj -- solution to a literary puzzle
and https://forum.krehwell.com/ for hackernews clone of mine.
aint much, but honest work :')
I write about anything that interests me, from tech to religion.
If you only want to subscribe to tech posts, there should be RSS feeds for specific categories and tags. Let me know if they don't work.
Constantly working on this. I wanted one of those incredibly functional, nearly entirely text-based sites (huge fan of those) ... but I decided to try to be more creative and have fun with it.
Haven't written anything in the past few years, but this year I decided I'm going to start writing again.
It's generated with Hugo and uses a theme I found on GitHub. Nothing fancy there.
Built with a simple static site generator in PHP: https://rogerclark.org/website.php.txt
Hosted on gitlab pages (for now), built with the Hugo SSG.
Mostly showcasing some small side projects as well as my ceramics. I’m considering opening a small web shop as well.
Was featured many times on HN and it seems the community really liked some of my posts
I post bookmarks at https://jamesg.coffee.
It’s the first personal website I’ve ever felt happy about. Every so often I’ll get inspired and write a post but I have quite a few ideas in draft.
Lots of Emacs and generative art.
Buffalo chicken thoughts go to https://theflyingbuffalo.com/
All very nerdy electronics stuff: connecting GDB over JTAG, logic design, playing with FPGAs, repair of old test equipment, LED projects
Hand written HTML/css/js deployed via cloudflare pages
This is my personal site hosted on Micro.Blog where I try to keep track of spare projects that I make for myself, friends, or family!
Otherwise: https://web.navan.dev
Random blog posts on frameworks for thinking, ideas, and projects. I aspire to write more!
I regularly blog about stuff I do at work/self hosting/anything I find interesting.
The blog is made with Zola and hosted on GitHub pages.
it's mostly an e-resume, but my hackaday and github profile links are at the bottom if you want to see my electronics projects :)
"Good artists copy; great artists steal.
- JAREK LUPINSKI"
I regret the TLD.
I also run my email server there. Telling people my email address, I have to go character by character. Oh well! :-)
It's a pelican blog, uses the pelican octopress theme is hosted on GitHub and served with cloudflare static
Just did some redesign and cleanup.
I especially like the idea of a /now page. Experimenting with adding more pages and content soon.
Digital Garden is the right word here. ;)
It used to be a Jekyll site but after just getting frustrated with markdown and Jekyll I moved to Ghost. Ideally, I'd like to delete all social media and just have a newsletter via it.
LISP, compilers, array programming, science fiction models, statistics, meditation, programming languages, etc...
Put this together very recently. Generated with Zola and hosted on GitHub Pages. Quite happy with the little music feed!
It's got one article about complex integrals. There's also my CV in there as well (looking for work atm ;) )
It's a blog with a mix of written articles & showcasing products I've built.
Just a list of random stuff I’ve worked on, including a lot of abandoned side projects.
Its a simple hugo generated static site with my own theme.
A random collection of my favorite GIFs and SoundCloud embeds over the years
Something like a landing page, but I tried to recreate aesthetics of csgo hvh websites
Still barebone. I want to explore about federation stuff and indieweb movement.
Programming projects, little web games, miscellaneous other topics.
A blog I rarely write, and some pages about my collection of pet computers.
Static website (my blog plus some more) built with Hugo and hosted on GitHub Pages.
A bunch of side projects/gigs and ideas. Site is almost all static HTML/CSS.
Old, out-of-date website, but still works :) Works better on desktop
I saw a site a few weeks back and create a similar website for myself.
Tutorials and ideas and analysis, started back in 1999!
My only suggestion for your site is that your homepage has a lot of different fonts at once. One for the header/nav, one for the main body/CTA, another for the podcast column headers and a serif font for the podcasts themselves. It may be worth condensing those and differentiating with size/color/weight instead of font face.
I document small issues and set up guides for myself about Laravel.
Just a personal blog and some bio with links to projects.
Just some HTML really :-/ ... :-)
My personal site made with Next, Sanity, and Tailwind
Did a recent revamp, not proud of the excessive JS but it is what it is, also I've started using stable diffusion to generate thumbnails for my posts which I really like, now the only thing missing is to start blogging actively.
Rambling about design, programming, hardware and Linux
It's most simple, I hope
Blog and other personal site stuff
fully hosted on Github pages (+ github actions for deployment). I haven’t written anything on it for a while, I’m getting committed to change that for this year.
Blog and stuff
Mostly quantum computing
Research, blog, and stuff
Try double click
(And potato.horse for meeting notes)