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Comment by ivanhoe | Hacker News Reader

err, or you could just upload index.html to any shared hosting in 5 minutes? The trouble of making a site (at least for people who can edit html directly, as in this example) is not about how to do it, but about high expectations and standards that we impose on ourselves... I'm guilty of this mysqlf, my site hasn't been updated in like 5 years, and I've built dozens of sites for others in that period...

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> I'm guilty of this mysqlf

A typo only someone from this community would make.

Haha that's awesome, I do the same thing. Though I just wind up typing "mysql" instead of "myself" or "mysqlf". I type the word "mysql" much more frequently than "myself" that the muscle memory takes over on the keyboard. Glad to see I'm not alone. :D

> The trouble of making a site (at least for people who can edit html directly, as in this example) is not about how to do it, but about high expectations and standards that we impose on ourselves

I've found that it helps to start with the content first. Whenever I've tried to create a site where there was no content it felt really overwhelming since it's difficult to figure out how to present things nicely when you have no idea what you're trying to present! Of course, if it's your first personal site you very likely don't have much content for it, so it's a bit of a catch-22.

The OP's one-hour recipe is strictly better for a pure static site, because it's substantially cheaper than shared hosting (which is $5/mo, github pages is free). Note that shared hosting provides persistent compute/store capability, which this project doesn't need.

> The OP's one-hour recipe is strictly better for a pure static site

But it's still a lot worse than the simple web page builders (using a web-based UI) that have been around for 15 years or so. Why not just use about.me or some similar modern service?

Because we are software engineers and website designers and we can do better... (Please don't look at my website...)

Certainly we can do better, but 20 carefully researched one-liners aren't nearly as technologically advanced, elaborate and useful as a well-crafted, intuitive UI with a more maintainable end result.

We can do better than 3 pieces of About.me advertising over our homepage, including a modal: http://i.imgur.com/p9NY8k6.jpg

Taken from https://about.me/laraodm, which I got to from the About.me homepage > staff picks.

If you're making a purely static site, you could save yourself ~40 minutes of that by using http://neocities.org instead of github. You don't have to bother installing git, creating files locally, intializing a repo, committing changes, signing up for github, or pushing code if you don't want to. Of course, using version control is a good practice, but neocities will host your static pages, scripts, stylesheets, and other assets for free, and there's an in-browser code editor. You still have to register your domain name and change your DNS record to point to neocities, but if your goal is to get a page up and running as fast as possible, that's the way to do it.

Also, don't github pages need to be deployed to the gh-pages branch?

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