Tiny Awards for Small Websites
tinyawards.net
tinyawards.net
What happened to "I'll edit this .html file and FTP it up, with maybe a light sprinkling of CSS and js for any interactive elements"? Why did devs get obsessed with a deeply complex jamstack type thing to do even incredibly simple sites?
It's like a sort of "iceberg web" - small on the surface but hiding a mountain of complexity and dependencies under the surface.
When all you have are frameworks, everything looks like JavaScript.
I made my own static site builder (typical HN!) and it's just a python package. At its simplest it depends on Python Markdown and Jinja.
The website itself is dead simple and gracefully degrades. It's just text on a page after all.
Same! I designed the look of my site, and then wrote Python to generate it, though instead of Jinja I even wrote my own templating library. The goal of reinventing the wheel was to learn Python through writing a non-trivial, useful app and libraries.
I haven't quite mustered up the courage to publish the source, yet, though: being a learning exercise I'm painfully aware some of the code is not as good as it should be. And I'm still learning what makes Python code Pythonic.
> What happened to "I'll edit this .html file and FTP it up..."
A SSG _is_ that, these days. My SSG generates my own site design. If I tweak the site's look and feel, I do that once and re-run the SSG. I wouldn't want to have to do that across multiple HTML files.
My process is:
* Write Markdown
* Run the SSG script
* FTP it up (overwriting previous contents; I have dated backups of every version, and the most recent run of the SSG is the canonical version.)
I entered the site in the competition, since it's no-Javascript, pure HTML & CSS, minimal, manuscript-style typographic focus, with articles on design, management, and the just plain miscellaneous. Very much going for the 'old-school personal site about whatever someone finds interesting' feeling, and hopefully some bits will be of interest to HN people too, maybe. https://daveon.design if you're interested!
There should be a reasonable amount of accessibility markup too (in how it's structured plus some specific accessibility items) for screen readers as well.
Seamonkey is an old school fork of Netscape before they pulled out Firefox. I suspect the CSS rendering is marginal CSS 2.
I use Seamonky on OpenBSD i386 arch as Firefox no longer supported. I am using deliberately low spec computers for personal surfing.
The links render shows the 'skip to main content' link which is always a good sign that accessibility has been addressed.
Loads fast, looks clean, content seems to be available - each of the 'cards' opens a page with a graphic, a table of contents in a contrasting grey colour and then text giving information. There is then a 'classified ads' section with links at the bottom.
Looks identical on my 'normal' machine with Firefox 102-esr and ublock origin and more ram/faster processor &c.
A quick look in the text mode browser links in a uxterm window showed that text content was available. The home window links show as two rows of text links - works ok.
I'm on a pretty fast G4 'mobile broadband' connection in UK with around 2.5Mb/sec (probably the old Thinkpads wifi limit) and around 45 mSec latency from ping.
Just one observation:
https://allaboutberlin.com/ works fine
https://www.allaboutberlin.com/ gives a page not found.
This reply is not very timely - I'm not logged in on HN that often!
It also converts and resizes images, processes SCSS, and a few other things that suit my workflow.
Editing source-controlled files in a familiar text editor is blissful.
What happened are people being annoyed with hand-fucking html every time they want to write a blogpost started writing/using static site builders
I moved from ConTeXt to XeTeX because the people making context didn’t care about documentation.
I moved to Jekyll because the people behind it were making Github. They built something rock solid.
I moved from Apache to Nginx because the people making it were trying to build something simple to configure. It showed and I could solve my redirect issues in minutes.
Because devs don't think of websites like a place for personal expression; to them, personal websites are usually roughly structured wikis of stuff they've learned that would be mostly hard to read or follow for others.
So they geek out over the details of the blog infrastructure. If instead of a website, they were asked to draw something, they'd focus on the sturdiness of the paper.
https://www.seazhang.com/, Link are given as examples, because blog content is Chinese and personal, not worth mentioning.
It’s text with some images. Even Word could do this better.
Frontpage would be a massive improvement.
This "tiny" web page loads content from 8 other sites. The html of the page is 122k big.
Add to that more than a megabyte of useless javascript frameworks.
That’s notwithstanding the fact that tiny in scope != tiny in size.
1) People trying to sell something: courses, books, their resume, etc.
2) People interested in blogging, who give up after less than a year due to lack of visibility (compared to Medium/Substack)
3) People who created their website in the 90s and saw no reason to stop.
You don’t think most people that post to the likes of Medium or Substack also give up quickly?
> You don’t think most people that post to the likes of Medium or Substack also give up quickly?
I think the parent meant "lack of visibility compared to Medium/Substack", not "give up after less than a year compared to [longer viability on] Medium/Substack". (If you, in turn, meant implicitly just to say "read Medium/Substack", then I think that fails on the "small, personal" criteria, and possibly also on "non-commercial".)
Is it worth it to submit projects like this?
Otherwise I think all awards will automatically go to Nicky Case (ncase.me).
I wonder if you will be happy when you small website will be rewarded as you may suddenly get a lot of traffic resulting in either becoming unavailable due to heavy traffic or forced on a more costly plan by the ISP. That is one reason why I am hesitant to post links here to my private website.
Links on the command line can resolve the text but of course does not display images. So when the OA says...
"Desktop AND mobile: projects must work across both desktop and mobile web"
...could we perhaps focus on what 'work' actually means for a Web site in 2023?
A one-off $500 prize is just enough to get some interesting websites in there, while also not being enough to keep out the Linktree-type sites.
You do!
Ff Android. Cut off the right margin
Found a tracker in it that the usual uBlock Origin lists aren’t blocking, too: https://api.june.so/sdk/{page,track}.
Really doesn’t endear mmm.page to me.
I believe the “small” web is more than being an independent entity and instead also should avoid wasted resources. Developers need to respect their end users’ bandwidth and time. Just my two cents.
* grunts *
* breathes *
This is 0.001% (0.004%) of meaningful data, surrounded by bells, whistles and tracking cookies.
"No, it's the children who are wrong."
It says nothing about page size, but 80% of the comments are pointless bickering about JavaScript by grumpy HN readers that prefer their web experience to be permanently stuck in 2005.
I will never understand how do you never get bored of fighting windmills.
How do you not get bored of fighting windmills?
Your definition of ‘small website’ is certainly a reasonable one, but I think to claim that only a tech geek could think that ‘small’ meant ‘small file size’ is overstating it.