Show HN: A minimalist (brutalist?) website for sharing all your links | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A minimalist (brutalist?) website for sharing all your links

lynx.boo

303 pointsTravisPeacock160 comments

Do you remember the internet of the early 2000s? Neat single function websites that let you be creative and customize your spaces and weren't setting out to be the next major conglomerate (or to be bought by them).

I'm building a series of websites that have simple concepts but too many of the players have tried to make their product so big. I also used to live in a very rural area so my goal is to make websites that load fast even on very slow internet. I'm starting with Lynx.boo.

A linktree style website that lets you fully customize your CSS (and adds a bunch of classes to your links to help style them easier as well as very non-restrictive CSS you can do html{display:none;} if you really want to) and the features aren't locked behind yet-another monthly fee. I'll be adding analytic support when I figure out the best way to do it.

Also there isn't a user system (per se), you just confirm changes by email but you never register for the site and you won't be spammed. Please feel free to try to break the CSS (or anything) as much as you want. I think it's fairly robust but I would love any security vulnerabilities you see.

Thank you for your time!

Open articleView on HN

Instead of brutalist, I'd call it "NASA Revivalist" as it is very reminiscent of the 1970s NASA graphic design style manual[0].

Having personal experience designing in the context of / restoring brutalist architecture (the kind people live and work* in), I submit with gratitude that this tool misses some key aspects of the style:

1. No concrete used in construction, and therefore no concrete smell, aka "eau de mid-century Americana."**

2. No sense of impending arrest by secret police around every corner.

3. Does not require regular pressure washing to avoid looking like a set-piece from a post-apocalyptic horror movie.

* for certain values of "live" and "work" ** sans cigarettes

0 <https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/nasa_graphic...>

1. Interesting fact my datacentre does use concrete. 2. Then your not using the website in America 3. It does use less pressure washing.

I know your comment is being funny, but I will note that brutalist design in websites is a different design theory than in architecture (though, I'm not specifically conforming to any design)

If we're being candid I feel like brutalism for websites is more of a meme than a design theory. It's almost an anti-design theory ("hey all our modern design theories have just made websites crap, so why don't we throw those theories out").

brutalistwebsites.com seems to interpret brutalism as "I use monospace, maybe I'm monochrome and I don't need to put much on this page."

My own idea for what brutalist web design should be: "I have one good CSS file which I include in my project. It looks fine and now I'm done worrying about the design."

Brutalist architecture is about showing the bare structural elements without any decoration, so I think there's an argument for any CSS being UNBRUTAL. Which covers some recurring themes in brutalistwebsites dot com but sure doesn't cover all the "I liked the way Raygun looked but I didn't like all those itchy decayed fonts, gimme a nice clean Helvetica-wannabe please" screenshots I see in there. Just the people who said "web design went precipitously downhill the moment someone tried using a table full of images to control the page design".

During a period I flirted with architecture as a career, brutalism can, in very specific applications , work well. But ditto to pressure washing in some applications.

What's interesting is to see the overlap between NASA and MOMA in the simplicity and clarity of design.

I personally refer to my style as "Marketing Brutalism".

Have a goal for the end user (an action or an enlightenment depending on the sites purpose.)

Make it clear and concise.

Good enough is a feast. You just need to appear 51% trustworthy.

If you are IBM in the 80s and you've successfully promulgated the meme "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM" than you are already there.

This is of course assuming a blind exposure, and you've done nothing to get people to tie their identity to your brand, once a persons personality is wrapped in your brand you just have to shovel products in front of their face and their families faces during the holidays.

This is super neat! Here are some of the things I noticed:

My site link of

> Avi Perl's personal site!

Shows as

> Avi Perl's personal site!

On the edit page, there's no link to my homepage where the links are shown. In fact, it wasn't obvious that that's where I needed to visit in order to see my links. It was a guess that brought me to my page.

The confirmation links are going to spam in Gmail.

Perhaps the confirmation page can have a link to redirect me to my edit page, or my homepage?

With a very long bio, on mobile, the last button is floating over your text on the bottom which doesn't look great.

On mobile, the text on the bottom of the page is also a bit off-kilter in its centering.

Idea: If each entry had its own short name, you could also operate as a URL shorter. If I could add "p" as the "short name" for my personal site, lynx.boo/aviperl/p could function as an alternative to tinyurl. Combined with an option to hide the URL from my homepage, I never need those services again. :)

What happens when you need to reclaim a URL for the site that someone has already set up as a user? As the owner of your about page, I guess I'll find out :D https://lynx.boo/about

Wow lots of great feedback!

1) Not rendering special characters (especially basic punctuation) is a rookie mistake. Good catch. 2) confirmation links will go to spam in pretty much all mail clients. I'm investigating more because I have all the things an email should but also it's on a no reputation ip and I would bet my neighbours don't have perfect records. But as part of the whole "internet the way it used to be" thing I'm not using these SMTP operators.

3) I noticed the issue with the footer last night before bed. Luckily that's an easy enough fix.

5) your saying the footer text is off centre? I'll have to look at why..

4) redirect to the page is going in today. Before I had it as an unstyled text notification but that was too minimal for me. I haven't added a bunch of logic yet.

(I accidently read those out of order)

6) funnily enough, I have a 90% finished "bit.ly but minimal" site that I started before this which has QR support and basic analytics but I ADHD'd into this idea. I'm going to launch that as part of this minimalist suite. That doesn't mean things can't be borrowed though.

7) Actually I think there are much cooler domains to snag. You can use single characters, you can use emojis, you can do a lot. I did reserve a handful but where would I draw the line? If you are purposefully exploiting it trying to pretend to BE LynxBoo we would have problems but otherwise I want to reward creativity and I hope people grab all sorts of fun names.

Thanks for the response!

Another note: in the email, it's totally not clear what I'm "approving" which is not really a huge issue. But it might be nice to include the username in the email.

Tried it out real quick.

The validation on the form page doesn’t require a valid url but when you hit submit the validation fails if the url is incorrect. When you click back to go correct it you can’t fix it because the submit button is still spinning.

Also requiring a title for a url doesn’t seem necessary, just use the domain as the title or the url itself if it’s empty.

Sorry don’t have any other feedback I stopped there.

Love the feedback. You're the second person (that I've seen) whose mentioned what a bad user experience it is to fill out everything and then get told that you have an invalid url. I'm trying to use very minimal javascript but this seems like a good place to add a little extra.

Also I need to fix the submit button problem.

Edit: This has all been fixed.

Awesome

Some additional feedback:

Still would be nice to just put in website.com and have it assume I mean https://website.com

- If a title is required maybe offer the option to just set the title as an emoji or something. This is definitely just my personal feedback I could be an outlier here.

- Once I submitted the email went to spam. I assume there’s not much you can do here other than become more established.

- After clicking the confirm link I’m taken to a page that says my changes have been confirmed and saved. I’d expect messaging along the lines of your page has been created along with a link to my page. Screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/leus6ntppsf9yihe6i1sb/Lynx.Bo...

- At this point the only way I found to get to my page is just to type in what I assumed was the url format into the browser: lynx.boo/username

Wrote the feedback as I went through it. Once I see the page itself I understand why a title is required and an emoji might not make sense. Love the super clean layout and simplicity though, I will keep this tool in mind.

agree on the title thing, that's always annoying.

I want to follow up that the thing I think I'm really proud of is just HOW small the pages are. Of course, this is a stupid simple site but also I don't think it's ugly and even the page with the most Javascript and HTML is about 5kb large.

I spent time teaching in Alaska and it made me really appreciate websites with small footprints.

Shameless plug for my NeatCSS project:

https://neat.joeldare.com

Ooh, nice, thanks.

I made something similar eight(!) years ago called Valenski. It's a SASS library but it also only provides a couple of classes and some sane defaults: https://hay.github.io/valenski/

I like many of the decisions/opinions in this. Will dig into it more possibly on a future project.

Neat CSS looks very good! I can't remember if I gave it a proper try before.

Some time ago I trialed a bunch of classless CSS projects, paired with Hugo using the "classless-blog" theme, and these were my top picks, out of order:

- holiday: https://holidaycss.js.org/

- bamboo: https://rilwis.github.io/bamboo/demo/index.html

- fieber: https://fieber.hack.re/

- pico classless: https://picocss.com/docs/classless

- yorha: https://metakirby5.github.io/yorha/

- simple: https://simplecss.org/

- water: https://watercss.kognise.dev/

- bolt: https://boltcss.com/

- Lissom.CSS: https://lissomware.github.io/css/

All of them except yorha have light/dark modes, and all of them except yorha are IMO too light by default in light mode.

The thing I wish most people today understood is that you don’t even have to dig the spare aesthetic that your site has in order to make a site 2-3 orders of magnitude less bloated than the average. You can make a beautiful, stylish site with just CSS, applied normally to normal semantic proper HTML, no react, no styled components, JS where necessary… oh well, I’m clearly Old Man Yelling At Cloud.

Anyway nice job!

that's so true! you don't need a javascript framework to make a beautiful site - it's all css! nowadays, people reach for react and a component library when they plan to make a somewhat advanced site or app, but these aren't necessary.

the opposite is also true - just because you're using plain html and css does not mean your site must be super, super simple.

Given your tastes in websites, I hope you will be receptive to my attempt at reviving Craigslist's casual encounters:

https://LokiList.com/

Its size in kilobytes varies depending on how many posts are displayed on the front page.

Unfortunately this site contains only sexual requests.

You know what I really want to see? A new version of backpages but with peer review arms other safety tools for sex workers.

Like Upwork where the client rates and reviews the SW but the SW rates and reviews the client. New accounts on either side are treated more skeptically but also the power users are also more easily identified.

When backpages was shut down I spent a few days playing around with it but ultimately between the legal risk (which I'm fine with, generally), the social risk of being the guy who runs a SW website (even though I've never hired a SW before, myself), and the internal debate I had about trafficking (I was pretty convinced my system would protect girls from trafficking but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did actually enable someone to be trafficked.

I think you have a valuable website and I don't think enough people are willing to openly operate in this area.

I created a page. If you want to look without signing up, here you go: https://lynx.boo/dg

Brilliant that help you've offered is SEO spam. If that's not the Internet in a nutshell I don't know what it is. Good show.

2 birds. Seriously though. Adding links to a website for sharing links is now spam? Ok.

It's the way you've done it: not suitable for people, but (nofollow aside) a good format for PageRank. It's kinda crass.

If you put "Technology blog" and "Real estate portfolio" (for example) before those two spammy-looking links, it'd make it less viscerally offensive.

[edit] @wizzwizz4 Is it crass to edit your comment multiple times (with no declaration) to address a reply to your comment?

Lol. Thats how the site works. It asks you for a URL and a title for the link. It’s my page, my account, so I linked to my site when trying it out. C’mon. I’m not going to argue about it anymore. Y’all can keep downvoting me if you want to.

That would indeed be crass; but I thought my edits came in before your reply. I apologise if they didn't.

To actually address your comment: "my page" and "my account" are irrelevant. (You're not entitled to anything on someone else's server, except in special cases.) If you're linking those pages because you would like those they're relevant to to visit them, perception matters. If not… well, the perception of "spam" can lead people to treat your site as spammy. (Related: https://www.kjartan.co.uk/.)

I know I said I was done, but, let me get this straight. If I sign up for a website that was created for people to sign up to save links, and in doing so it requires you to submit a URL and a title for the link - and I use the page title as the title for the link: 1) I’m not entitled to do that and 2) It means my website is similar to a geocities page?

Interesting.

Interesting, really! Yes. And I should not step into a bar fight! ;-)

You are both right!

I love that you posted the link. You made it easy for me to get the point of the site as I did not want to use my mail. You effectively lowered my barrier of entry and I thank you for that.

Buuut. You did do the equivalent of just hitting "asdf" on the keyboard. I just put in "my own site". That was not clear to me up front either. I "felt" it "spammy" as well.

While disclaimers are often overused this would however had been nice. "Here you go (just dumb links to my own site)". That would actually have encouraged me even more to visit you.

Someone on the Internet was wrong. Please, no knives :-D

I haven't wanted to wade into this because I want people to use and experience the site in the way they want but also I am kinda interested in the discussion about what kind of "rules" should exist.

Honestly, I appreciate @Cabinguy for taking the initative to show people how it works and if the price of admission is some links to his stuff all the better. Furthermore, this is exactly what it is for. I guess in some ways it IS spammy but that's sort of the point is the market your own links. Generally this url then gets put in your instagram / tiktok / whatever bio that only allows one link.

I like that @WizzWizz4 (the greatest of the WizzWizzes in my opinion) was defending the "sanctity" of my site but also probably more importantly to them this site. However, I just don't think it is needed here. As the website was used as exactly it was intended.

:) Maybe no one was wrong.

Was it not defending the sanctity of HN? Then I mis-read.

I was just trying to explain others' perceptions of spamminess, but death of the author. My comments can mean whatever you want them to mean!

You've generalised in a direction that erases the distinctions I'm trying to highlight. I'm talking about perception (specifically, perceived spamminess), and you're talking about what is permitted. If you don't care about the perception, then that's fine and you can safely ignore me.

1) I'm entitled to pour custard on my head. Doesn't mean that will achieve my goals if I do it in an investor meeting. 2) Sadly, I'm not comparing your page to the positive aspects of Kjartan Poskitt's homepage. Look at the bottom row of links, and the analogy should become clearer.

I saw the reply chain and I feel like there's some fundamental misunderstandings.

I don't think GP means adding links is spam, they're saying the links themselves are spam (wt definition 2, content automatically generated for marketing purposes) because that's what they are.

They're saying it's crass (wt definition 2: materialistic, or 1: lacking discrimination) because the goal of TFA is to move away from the machine-curated overly-commercialized impersonal/mechanical web and bring back a web focused on human touch. Creating a list with those commercial, machine-facing pages misses that goal.

They're not saying it's bad - obviously the only way someone would view your link page is if someone posted the link page somewhere of interest to them, it's not like you're pushing it in their faces. In fact, I think they thought the juxtaposition interesting and metaphoric for current social forces.

It's possible that you are an SEO geek and find new SEO marketing pages exciting, and have a circle of friends you share marketing pages with, maybe over coffee, in which case the one who misunderstood everything is me.

At least it gives us all a way of seeing what the link pages look like after completion.

There is a "here's ours" link in the first sentence on the homepage. Sadly the css hides all it's link styling. (Proper "brutalist webdesign" would have that as underlined blue text)

When he wrote that comment I hadn't added that yet. I do need to make sure the link is underlined though.

At least the links have nofollow on them (so only the ignorant/lazy/fraudulent SEO bottomfeeders will try to abuse this. Which I guess, to a first approximation, is "all of them"...)

Boooo.

Seriously? That's a pretty low effort comment there.

Thanks! That’s all I wanted to see, and you provided a good example. “viscerally offensive” and “SEO spam” made my eyes roll like a slot machine wheel.

Yea I genuinely don't get the criticism, what's supposed to be so off the marks about dg's site? Self advertisement? Isn't that what this is for?

I was not expecting to see town names adjacent to mine!

Snagging the good names!

Thanks for the example :)

I was able to submit an edit request for the lynxboo link by guessing the email on record was hello@lynx.boo.

This seems like it could be abused pretty easily. Not necessarily insecure but I could get a lot of spam no?

I had thought about this a bit, I don't think it's any different (and actually even more secure) than someone putting in your email in a "Lost Password" field. In that case you just have to guess that email is registered on the site, in my case you have to know the email is registered to this specific Lynx.

It could be annoying but it seems an edge case to be abused.

I love the idea and drive behind your site, and the functionality, but I do have one suggestion that may help.

I suggest toning down the brutalist "look" just from 10 to 9. Two things you can do that will keep the soul of your site and make it more usable: - add system-matched light and dark mode, that 100% white is very aggressive and bright, too much so and is putting me off using it. - just bring the white and black in a tiny bit from 100% white and 100% black, make it a slightly softer grey and almost black. Again this is more about making it accessibile to eyeballs. Brutalist doesn't mean unpleasent afterall.

Cheers. I'll consider how a night mode would work with my current setup. It's great advice.

A real "brutalist" website for sharing links would just be a txt file with just a list of links and comments, or an html page without any css/style.

I switched to that setup a few years ago. I keep a text file with all the links plus some metadata, like the date and some tags https://eapl.me/links/links.txt

I also have a few PHP scripts to help me view the links https://eapl.me/links/all_links.php?tag=dev

It’s not the easiest thing to manage, so I'm thinking of more scripts to update or delete old links from the web instead from SSH like I do now.

You can browse my website with netcat[0]:

  nc apitman.com 2052 <<< /txt/feed

[0]: https://apitman.com/19/

I will use this, thanks.

+1 to the other comment about not needing to name a link (be great if it grabbed the page title or allowed the url only.)

The confirmation went to spam.

Probably this is not the spirit of minimalism (but maybe the spirit of Unix), I would love to be able to augment this with other services: this stays a very minimal link hosting but it offers web hooks and an API key. This means if a link was added, I could self host with something that uses an AI to summarise the for example, or extract a screenshot from the page, or triggers something that adds it to my notes, etc… To me, this would be a great way for the web to be. Rather than companies trying to scale up around link sharing, or be open source and hope people will dive into a codebase.

I actually forgot to mention but if you add /json to your url it will already give you your links.

I am trying to make it difficult for bots to create/edit lynx because spam etc.

I should note it on the site that the confirmation might go to spam.

Tangential, but I love your feedback responses. I’m nobody, but I feel like these are exactly how I’d show off a product & then respond to feedback.

This being brutalist, you could (optionally?) eliminate the title/url fields altogether.

Just provide a text box which accepts a list of entries where each entry is just "title URL". That's what I expect from this being brutalist.

Notify line number with the link if text box contains invalid url.

Since there's a question mark about brutalism, here's a link or two to read up on. tl;dr Brutalism in graphic design today has two distinct in popular usage meanings:

1. Bare bones. Pure utility, any styling is simply for readability. Craigslist style.

2. Big, garish, bold; sometimes called Nu-brutalism or Sportsbrut.

I should note that each of these has very little, if anything, to do with the 20th century architectural trend, which focused on applying usage of basic shapes and raw materials at a large scale. On the web, the "raw materials" part is the only real connection to the origins of the term, with the first one focused on lofi design with basic tooling, and the second highlighting garish things you can do with basic forms.

Neo-brutalism is another trend to note; think of it as a focus on raw shapes with some niceties added on top to make things more interesting.

Links:

1. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/01/split-personality-b...

2. https://medium.com/@sepidy/how-can-i-design-in-the-neo-bruta...

I tried to incorporate both as much as I could. Minimally styled (there's less than a KB of styles) and if it is styled then use thick black lines.

Great links

Seems to me that a truly minimalist website would have to be set in Times Roman (is that not still the default typeface). And that a truly brutalist website should have a gray background.

Both utterly pedantic quibbles that are completely intended to be ignored.

Good job.

Times New Roman you mean, surely

Can't improperly reference that legendary script.

Good sir, I salute you!

Barbarians

Good bait!!!

Truly minimalist: Accept the defaults. Whatever they are. Count your bytes.

Aesthetic minimalism: A non-serif font. We may have strong opinions here on which. I shall name none to avoid firey flames ;-)

By pointing out Times New Roman by name you do not imply minimalism. Rather a passive aggressive swipe at good old Times New Roman which I find too practical and beautiful to be lumped into nu-brutalism nor aesthetical minimalism. To show good faith I will let the missing "New" slide. Gentlemen shall be given room to misspeak. Happens to the best of us.

Mupen, Boa Constructor and Molend are good examples from an otherwise meh list at https://www.fontspace.com/category/brutalist.

A drab grey could be brutalist indeed. Maybe we can be friends after all! But truly! I beg your pardon! One true scotsman and all that jazz.

Pendatry to be ignored? No, no! That is not how pendantry works! You need to watch more Tim Traveller.

But good bait, fun times!

Another alternative is https://github.com/microfeed/microfeed which is self-hosted for free on cloudflare workers/pages

Microfeed is cool and I love using it! I don't see it as very similar though.

At first I thought I read, A minimalist (brutalist?) website for sharing all your "kinks" and I got excited!

Maybe just a small thing, but lynx.boo is a bit of a rough domain to use for a e-business-card sort of thing. That's pretty hard to communicate and easy to misremember. (links? link? What was the tld again?) I honestly didn't even know .boo was a thing.

It's better than my last company D&Tea. "Go to d and tea dot com... No, like the drink not the letter.. yes spell out a-n-d"

And & isn't available to search literally on Twitter so if you want to see what people are talking about you without tagging you you can't.

I need to get better at it.

Admittedly, I just assumed most people would use it in their bios on social media and I also use it on a QR code.

It's a fair critique. I was going to make the logo a lynx but decided no images.

No images, but svg would be just an xml text, right?

I love this stuff, ignore all the haters! Just here to show my support! I'll be sure to throw this on my twitter bio as long as it stays up :) https://lynx.boo/chriszhu

That's the kind of flattery that gets you on the do-follow list :P

your mockachino link is broken my friend

Nice catch! Fixed!

would love to see it working without providing an email. no demo page?

I would start with something like an example usage rather than straight create account

The more I think about it the more I realize that the home page should just be a Lynx page (but with the addition of the form to let people start their own)

I tried pasting the CSS from https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/water.css@2/out/water.css , which sets link color to #0076d1, but the links still render in black, which is hard to read when my browser is set to prefer the dark colors from that CSS.

For a site that claims to be minimalist/brutalist and has lynx in its name I was hoping that it would work without JS. But the edit/create page doesn't.

Do you have a thought on how to do the edit page without JS? I am with you I wanted to make it no js, then added a little here and there. I couldn't think of a way to allow someone to add unlimited links in a way that was clean and fast without JS. I guess I could detect if you're not allowing JS and then have an input field so you can select how many you want to have and then pass that as a GET variable.

It's added to the roadmap to investigate more.

Well, theoretically you could make your current "Add Link" button and your current "Remove" button just trigger a server-side request and then refresh the page.

maybe some combination of the <noscript> tag and then if so wrapping the buttons in <form> and making the buttons submit those forms?

I love this! Great work! Just an idea here, since you already have a form with the `action` set up, you could do some kind of `noscript` section with like 10 preset `input` elements, where the "n+1"th input appears when strings are present for the "nth" ones (using :has or something like that... the internet is lousy with examples of how to do this kind of thing). To go really hardcore "progenhance" you could even wrap that all in a @supports CSS rule. (So "if you don't want to use CSS, here's all 10 inputs. Have fun, sailor.")

Good idea. I get it. But I do not find it "clean" as Travis states.

Have a quick turn around time on the form. Let it be a server problem. Have a hidden field on the form set to "nojs". Let javascript set this to "js".

The server can then decide if this is a bulk edit or not. It can then decide it will batch approvals into one mail or wait a little longer.

Then you can optimize on what you find most clean and/or works best.

Have one form field for easy entry and turn around. Ten as you suggest? But what is the optimum number? 3? 20? And is it "clean" to have 20 form fields which the javascript version then will roll back into one.

So the non-javascript version will never be better. Somethings gotta give. But submitting a form can be superfast. And the page refresh will be super fast. Such is life without javascript.

And now I realize that I made an implied server optimization: Mail approval should in my mind be batched and dampened. 10 seconds might be enough.As long as new inpit is coming we can postpone approval anyway as the user is busy. Findong the correct number is the magic trick. Not too fast. Not too slow.

Maybe if you're not going to use js then a text area that needs each entry to be a newline link,text. If the form submitted has text there it will process it. You don't get validation but that's part of what you give up not using js.

What's the point of delayed email sending? (Lol tried to find a way to ask that which sounds genuine, but they all read as annoyed me)

You batch the emails so users get one email with multiple messages inside it, instead of spamming their inbox with 1-per mail.

Oh I see what you're saying but in what circumstance will a user have more than one email. You only get emailed when you make an update and you can't see the updates until you click the approval link... so I don't think that will be overly helpful.

That said, I could probably have a session or something so that if you approve an email then I'll let you make additional changes within that session without additional approval emails. You're "authenticated" as it is.

if the user changes something, hits submit, thinks about what they did, hits back, changes something else, there should be both changes.

you could expire the form to prevent this, or some other thing to prevent it so you're right that it's not a problem that will get hit as implemented but just something to keep in mind if things change.

Doing session management is orthogonal to this. Still a fun idea, though. Even better, actually. But it introduces a new security concern. How quickly should the session time-out (or not?). But it will be good for UX.

But to explain the original idea:

Users can work in what sometimes might seem strange ways: A user can do multiple edits and choose to be perfectly fine not seeing the updates. The flow state is then simply doing the updates - then go to mail and do the approvals. In that flow it would be nice to only approve one mail which then covers all updates.

00:00 Edit A - Timer start 00:09 Edit B - Timer reset 00:18 Edit C - Timer reset 00:28 Timeout - send one mail for approval of A,B,C

The bulk update mail will then need a top link to simply approve all. And individual links below for each edit as mistakes might have been made during edits (if userfriendly :-)). A lot of work to to save a couple of mails - I know! But the things we choose to obsess over :-) It just might fit your definitio of minimalism.

People who want a fast turnaround of approvals one by one will be annoyed by this. But mail is "slow" and can be delayed anyway. People who want fewer clicks and mails will love it. Good design is then finding the optimum or choose who to champion.

Sub-optimisation. For sure!

So not important at all. And a very limited use-case. I just ran with the idea. As you succintly said elsewhere: This is like art. I will second that with a quote from The Dude: "That's just like, your opinion, man". Very true - and you should do you! I just hope I made clear what my impulsive idea was.

A little bit akin to how TN3270 works. Powerusers did crazy things working blindly ahead while awaiting the response from the mainframe.

Your heart is the right place but your logic is upside down! :-)

The easy way to make it simple is do it as a form and then embellish it with javascript. Maybe counter intuitive but still. Let the javascript mangle the form so it does not look like a form and Bob is your uncle. By always using that pattern you easily end up with good usability and accessibility.

The same as with CSS. Make good content with nice semantic HTML. Then go crazy with super cool CSS.

But I am an old fart who hates Tailwind with a vengance. But I do acknowledge it get work done and many think it is great. So I will sulk in the corner and say that they are doing it wrong. Old man yelling at clouds.

Next: REST is great but misunderstood. I do not miss SOAP.

But know this: I love your sentiment and attitude. Nice job! Grumble ;-)

I was excited to see "minimalist" and "brutalist, but you lost me at requiring to enable my javascript, and after that using cloudflare Captcha.

I'm curious, how many websites can you even use without javascript? I imagine it would not be many, and would be a losing battle.

That is a strawman.

You can disagree and think that the OP was letting the definition of "minimalism" and "brutalism" do too much heavy lifting.

But you rather imply that without javascript you cannot create a "winning" website. And ignored that the OP has a real point: Can we call a website minimalist if it requires javascript. It was not excluded that you could embellish (maybe a lot) with javascript. In the same way I would expect javascript to load async.

While I have heard your argument before it implies a really interesting design "smell". On that we might disagree. But it is there nevertheless.

Your curiosity implies that winner takes all. I agree that javascript has won. But I feel you imply that it is then ok for the victor to burn down the village. We forgot what made the web. The foundation is still html and not javascript. What I read as the "javascript attitude" makes is harder to transition away from javascript when that day comes.

Javascript is really great. Warts and all. But the "strong" proponents keeps forgetting the beauty in separation of concerns. On this point we can then have an honest disagreement.

I hope I do not come off too harsh. I genuinely wanted to address your curiosity.

I think the OPs pov is quite clear. So with your reaction I suspect we also disagree on JS0 and JSugar. That is again some bad voodoo on how to seperate concerns from people who looks at who is winning now and missing the bigger picture.

Much like art (and everything, especially in things that line up with pedantry) every person is going to have their own opinion on what exactly minimal is, what exactly brutalist is, etc.

I don't take anyone's comments that this isn't their brutalism / minimalism to heart and any place I can use the feedback I will.

Some pages are loaded in under 1KB so for my definition I don't know how much more minimal I can practically be. Also I'm going to use spam fighting tech because this is a great tool for spammers. If I have to trade not having Richard Stallman using the site that's just a practical trade I'll have to make.

:) I think you have a really reasonable take here, thanks for spending the time to reply.

Sorry I should clarify. I didn't mean winning in terms of the website's success, I meant in terms of finding sites that can work without javascript

This.

Right here :-)

That is HN itself! Have a look at the source. How little Javascript it actually needs and see how well it can work without. I even like the idea behind the sparse styling and layout it use but I still think the looks could be much improved.

It is not for all as some sites are too much on the app heavy spectrum. But the current mindset among developers makes this leak everywhere. So many sites are really poorly designed. That is interesting in the context of debating minimalism and how broadly that can be defined in context of Javascript requirements.

Too few does what Travis did and try to do something minimalist. And the web suffers for it. Agree or not with his design decisions but his sentiment is laudable.

You only have a hard time to find sites which does not work without javascript because that is the lazy easy way. Good design and engineering is ignored as it is easy to quickly mock up a react site. Accessability then comes as an afterthought. And no-one cares about long term maintenance.

So sure; good luck finding a site which works well without Javascript. But that is my point: It might be the reality but should not be what we strive for. Some prefer the status quo while others prefer the fight. It might be against the windmills but nevertheless the point stands.

> Can we call a website minimalist if it requires javascript.

yes

> I'm curious, how many websites can you even use without javascript?

HN for a start ...

1. Awesome! This comes at a perfect time for me as I literally today let my domain expire which I used to keep my frequently used links:-) 2. What's your monetizion / business plan, or how much free hosting, support, and time can you dedicate to it?

In other words, how much should people assume this'll stick around and be with investing time and habits into?

I am going to let the confirmation link expire. Not sure I will come back to this.

Many others have said things I agree with.

I would make the submit button the higher button and make it a more compelling color.

The very first link I input was immediately erased because the button was red!

Thanks for sharing. I like the minimal design.

How come my links show up here https://lynx.boo/favicon.ico/edit but not here https://lynx.boo/favicon.ico

lmfao. you are a menace!

Honestly? I love it. It's this kind of creativity that is fun and should be embraced not banned.

Probably the way the routes have been set up. /edit matches first

I really like how minimal it is. Even the markup is super clean and readable.

I had no trouble going from landing -> working link page. The confirmation email did go to junk mail, though that was already expressed/known. I marked it as not junk in case that counts for anything.

Thanks so much for the feedback. My goal for the day is to fix the page to say "check your spam" (not the loftiest of goals but "set the bar low and over achieve" is my life motto)

Definitely, good luck with the launch!

I found Linktree is very popular amongst creators on Tiktok for sharing their various profiles, but I always thought it would be cool to find or build a simpler alternative with a cleaner UI. You built it! I think TT and IG would be a good place to advertise too if you're looking for more users, since creators there often need a table of links under a single URL.

If someone wanted to implement analytics they could do so using the custom css you allow. If they embed say, a custom font pointing to a domain they control they will get the number of views.

My home page on my computer is simply a static HTML page with a table structure and then a link in each box in the table.

It is utterly trivial and totally useful.

I got one like that, but the links aren't in a table.

The table format means the display can be used more effectively than a list on the left hand side.

Tables are pretty simple:

    <table border=1 cellpadding=4 cellspacing=0>
    <tr>
    <td> <A HREF="https://www.google.com">Google</A>
    <td> <A HREF="http://slashdot.org">Slashdot</A>
    <td> <A HREF="https://www.ebay.com">Ebay</A>

and so on...

I also save "bookmarks" to an ordinary text file. My editor will open the browser on a text link. I just don't see an advantage to an app for it.

I don't like the bookmark feature of a browser because if I switch browsers or use another computer, it's gone. The file gets backed up, too.

Aaaahhhnnd, I keep a spiral paper notebook on my desk for ... notes!

Reminds me of Linkpack a bit:

https://www.linkpack.io/lp/rWYo9k/

That's more like del.icio.us. mine isn't to share things you find interesting but rather links to yourself (generally) though you could use it for that.

Ahh I see, thanks!

More than the early 2000s, it reminds me of early 90s Apple UIs.

For increased brutalism, I'd suggest another color theme, though... needs moar gray.

If I set my own email in someone else's email linx page from lynx.boo/username/edit, can I change others' links? (I haven't tried)

"Email does not match the one on file. To change your email address email hello@lynx.boo using the email address on file for this user."

i created a link: https://lynx.boo/tos/edit ....

Neat catch, I didn't account for that usecase but it will basically just be a "hidden" page since TOS is higher in the routes.

I’m on the novice side, and I think this could be neat! I’d benefit from a demo page (unsolicited feedback, regardless cool work!)

Great point. I have https://lynx.boo/Travis

I had this on the homepage but removed it. I'll add it back, I also want to add some examples of custom CSS so people can copy/paste.

Hi! I fully support such projects, and I am for backward compatibility good luck and prosperity to your endeavors

Cool! Can we self-host? Open source?

Soon*

It's the plan but I have a bunch of stuff that I hard coded in the final push that I would need to make into variables.

congratulations, it successfully dealt with Zalgo text in the bio, link description, and css fields. https://lynx.boo/zalgo

Do you anticipate a pricing model or feature addition for making links "do follow"?

I had thought of that as well as a sitemap.xml placement but part of the fee would bring non-automated verification. Like you could only pay with a real credit card (not virtual) but nothing sounded super great. A do follow is only as good as the others on the site.

I already have the code there to make people do follow. I was just going to make an automated program that saw people who generate traffic and put it into a queue to manually check.

Seriously needs mono-space to qualify as brutalist.

if you use box-shadow on hover instead of making the bottom and right borders thicker (i.e. `box-shadow: 2px 2px 0px 2px black;`), the list won't shift every time you hover on something

This is lame. I tried using it (used the create page button) with the obvious choice of browser (lynx of course), and got a 403 error saying "Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue". I'll stick with plain html pages, thanks.

Funny, because I am a user of links and lynx browsers... which do not support css.

doh!

It’s great seeing this design evolve in near real-time. Kudos HN.

It rejects the URL

Www.myurl.com

For reasons unknown

Then I have to refresh and then I don’t want to do it again.

Likely because you're not using http:// / https:// but it's a good note that it should give more information as well as it should redirect back with the error message on top.

Edit: or better yet, a little bit of javascript to catch it first. I'm really trying to use the minimal amount of JS possible.

I think HTML forms support pattern based validation, no js required.

I just looked up https://dev.to/joelbonetr/form-input-validation-without-java... and saw this, I'll look into implementing it via this strategy.

This is bad UX. people don’t use http anymore when writing urls.

Amazing, I finished my link page in just 5 minutes!

So far I've not seen any demos of the custom css feature. I hacked together some stuff from my omg.lol (of previous HN fame) powered website.

My website: https://www.orawalters.com/ My lynx: https://lynx.boo/ora/

is it open source so we can knock the pants off linktree?

It will be, most of the time it was coded to be open source. I've added some features that have pretty tight integration into my stack but that stack is also OS.

Nice! Created a page.

mail is not arriving

arrives as spam on gmail

its not gmail its meta.ua

It likely arrives as spam there too :)

I didn't even get it in spam

If you can email hello@lynx.boo with the email address you used it would be helpful for me to determine what happened to the email. I'm hosting my own SMTP server so I don't doubt that:

1) I screwed something up (most likely) 2) Your email rejected it because it's some no name ip with no reputation.

this address has a 25 year reputation ))) it's just that now for some reason many are surprised that someone uses something other than Google

It's not your servers reputation that's the problem it's mine. Your server is likely rejecting my email.

But I'd have to check the logs.

I tried my email address with my own domain, my @protonmail.com email address, and my @[very-good-"reputation"-university].edu email address. None worked. Eventually I tried my @gmail.com address, which worked.

I'll check the logs! Thanks!

Ehhhhhhh they need a demo up before they get an email, even a Firefox relay email. Sorry they lost me already :(

https://lynx.boo/lynxboo (and I have put one on the index as well)

Check out Pinboard https://pinboard.in/tour/ for some great minimalist link UX inspiration.

My favorite 'touch' is the in-situ text replacement for canceling an action.

Pinboard's creator has some history ... right here on this website. Later I will see if I have the links still. They (in my opinion) did not behave honorably with people's subscriptions.

Choosing a .in TLD is itself a very bad decision IMHO

It sounds like a number of limitations, bugs, outages have cropped up, and the creator isn't responding.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34062802

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41533958

RE "....did not behave honorably with people's subscriptions....." My experience - Does not respond to (several) support requests. Has not even provided the paid for service over several years.

I can see based on the title how this would be mentioned but this isn't a del.icio.us type site it's linktree type site.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com