Hot Page – a graphical site builder
hot.page
hot.page
Although I'm of course pleasantly surprised to see this on the front page of HN, I was planning on waiting a few months to post it myself because we are working on some ways to make the editor much more powerful. We have a long roadmap of new features like:
* more ways to edit CSS properties visually (without losing the 1:1 connection to the CSS generated)
* inline CSS (style attribute) editor for elements that let's you use :hover and media queries
* a library of code "snippets" that lives in the left panel along side the basic elements
* tighter integration with web components
* integrating VS code language servers for accurate auto completion everywhere
* and a whole lot more.
I'm a long time lurker on HN and have long loved the community here. All of your thoughts and feedback are greatly appreciated, especially on our marketing because that is proving to be a real challenge. AMA
edit: roadmap
https://fx.hot.page/ has some of the web components on it. While the slinky one is silly fun, the gallery one is very cool. Looks like it's light weight and easy to use. I was impressed by the annotated source code page where you explain in detail what is going on. While jumping, swirling, multicolored text is your mission, your forte is the documentation you've written. Nice job.
Your style is just obviously incredible. I hope some of that bleeds into your customers sites so there's more fun silly, but also real, things out there on the web.
One thing I'm working on in parallel to a visual builder is a web components catalog and custom elements manifest validator. I hope this will help boost the set of quality web components available to tools like this, and that the catalog will be embeddable in them.
Good luck!
E.g. Start from zero, or was there a pre-existing CSS kit used as the base?
<3
My search for free hosting led me to Geocities. However, websites there were hosted under paths like geocities.com/foo, rather than the subdomain format I wanted (foo.geocities.com).
Eventually, I discovered 20m.com, which as the name indicates, offered 20 MB of free hosting space. The best part was that it allowed me to publish my website under a subdomain.
Remarkably, one of the sites I created back then is still up and running: http://encoders.20m.com/ (Please don't judge the content though. I was young, naive and I was just messing with the Web!)
I wrote a blog post reviewing it a couple of months back: https://rafichaudhury.com/site/blog/Freehand-Web
I've been working on my own Hotglue fork to hack in some of the features we were missing like draft pages and responsive "safe areas" like MMM.page.
Is it possible to password-protect pages as well? I tried to do it by setting an .htaccess rule for the folder I had them in, but wasn't able to get it to work.
I'm assuming you tried putting something like this in your root .htaccess file (the one that you renamed from htaccess-dist on installation)?
<Directory "/private-page">
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Restricted Area"
AuthUserFile /.htpasswd
Require valid-user
</Directory>
If that doesn't help, make an issue on my repo and we can work it out there. Today I added password protected pages as a built-in feature, but it would need much longer in the oven before I could suggest switching an existing site over.
Anyway, it's sad Hotglue hasn't seen development in the last years, some friends use it for their personal sites...
Even if we’re more self ware now and a bit a cynicism and self-deprecation is inevitable, but that’s postmodernism for you.
My personal flow to love your product was: 1. I was intrigued to click this HN due to an initial feeling of the product must be more interesting than the HN title due to all the attention, so let’s check it out. 2. Once on the site I was feeling “finally someone who dares not having consensus driven design”. So please keep on daring!! 3. I thought “I know people who would love this design”. 4. Being a person often being asked to build friends’ sites and way to often having to say no due to: the time it takes, the inflexibility and the price for running with your own domain being annoyingly high for a small business, I started looking for answers on your landing page. You seem to be offering just that! As a dev I can do things quick, that look good and don’t cost a lot. 5. I started reading the this HN thread and was amazed by how genuine and down to earth you seem.
All in all you just got a big fan in me. I’ll try out the prodigy, have patience with its imperfections and if you keep on communicating with the people signing up in a similar fashion to this HN thread, I think you’ll have a big amount to fans eager to push you and your product forward.
5 GB is extremely small for what it is.
https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
OVH also has SoYouStart which is around $2 per month. I also remember getting yearly commitments and under $3 per month deals. You have to subscribe to their email blasts to get these deals but $3-4 per month is average for the industry.
There is also Digital Ocean which is around $4 per month. I've been using them for over a decade. Not even one time down. Sometimes I see deals under $3 per month. https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
I agree though, pricing seems high. I guess a CDN could be put in front of it.
At the risk of misunderstanding what you're saying, who is "They" in this?
Get the "Wamp wamp An error has occured: Internal Server Error" popup.
Love this idea, and the execution, so much though <3
The "about" link at the bottom of the home page links to https://hot.page/manifesto which is 404 Not Found.
How does one create web pages like this without using a tool like the above? Would animating html elements with javascript be sufficient?
A good article on Neubrutalism: https://www.designstudiouiux.com/blog/what-is-neubrutalism-w...
Prior Hackernews post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31106892
> Use The Hottest Code, Like Bootstrap
Made me chuckle
1. This is a tongue in cheek website builder, something generative AI would be great at making images (Dalle, Imagen, MJ) and text (GPT4, Claude, Gemini, etc) for a product like this
2. Basically every website builder of substance has AI features now
So maybe chill with the hyperbolic language? ;)
I don't think so at all, AI generated stuff usually has a certain soulless generic air to it that I don't think would suit this.
Probably completely fine for websites that want/need to look like every other website, like classic site builders, Squarespace etc. or internal business apps, forms and such, but for something that seems a bit targeted at letting people be creative, gen AI would do more harm than good I feel.
I can’t believe I’m forced to defend myself here as I generally agree with the premise that adding AI doesn’t make something better (hence the smiley face in my original post), but FFS the FUD and hyperbole is simply in bad form. LOOK at the examples on the site. TRY the experience. Then come back and try and tell me you can’t generate endless amounts of images just like that what’s shown trivially with AI. You are entitled to your own opinion about AI, but that doesn’t make you factually right.
I think the disagreement is less on whether it's technically possible to use AI to help with this and more on whether it's a good idea to do that.
If you want to shift goal posts to that, then we are in agreement, adding AI to something without real care in how it works with the experience isn’t a good idea.
There's nothing stopping anybody from using AI tools directly to generate images, and uploading them onto their site on this platform, if they want to.