this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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54
Simple but modern website (monero.town)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
43 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I want to make my own website, like a blog where I talk about tech and tutorials and such. Something like https://kerkour.com and https://lukesmith.xyz. Any ideas for simple but modern design?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

My answer is probably boring, but it works, and I had fun with my own. Just set up Wordpress. At this point, you can find templates for any site design imaginable, and there are a million plugins for it. It's an all-around solid platform, that has mountains of documentation. Wordpress was made for blogging, can't go wrong there, but I've used it for all kinds of stuff, including ecommerce. It's simple and effective enough that I have a hard time going any other direction.

I used to host Wordpress sites on a home LAMP server; it was a fun project that didn't cause a bunch of headaches, mainly because of the amount of available documentation. Search "wordpress self-host" and you'll find a whole lot of information.

Good luck with whatever you decide on!

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem with WordPress and the like is maintenance. If you don't keep it up to date, it will get taken by malware. Guaranteed. Any plugins you add increase the risk.

I moved my blog to a markdown based compiled site a long time ago so I didn't have to worry about that upkeep.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Run in docker and set auto-update on? Idk seems simple...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

But why? If you don't need moving parts, don't use moving parts. Simplicity is king.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm yet to understand why people downvote comments like yours. Your answer was on-topic, provided a reasoning, was well-written... even if I haven't fully recovered from the trauma of having two wordpress sites hacked, I still think your comment has merit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It turns out that people on Lemmy are no better responsibly using a downvote button than anywhere else. I think you should have to at least select a reason why you're downvoting to add some friction - maybe options something like "I don't like this", "I disagree", "This is factually incorrect", "Spam", "Abusive language", etc. Then you can filter out the first two!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yes +1 for Wordpress, you can even make your own simple theme if you would like in no time.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Those examples you listed are not really modern imo. I'm not an UI/UX expert though.

I used Hugo to build my personal website. You can also easily build blogs with it. The difference to the usual approach is that you "code" the website in markdown which makes it super easy. Hugo then generates the html and css for you, which gets statically hosted. Check out the showcases and themes if you're interested. I used a theme called papermod, it's pretty common.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I would also second Hugo which I use for my personal site and blog which I haven’t updated for a long time. Nice thing is that it has a minimal footprint of needing to watch out for updates unlike something like Wordpress which was known for being vulnerable stable if left unmaintained. It’s mostly looking out for old themes with vulnerable javascript.

Another popular options is Jekyll and I honestly can’t remember why I picked Hugo over it but if you don’t need dynamic content, why make things more complex?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Agree on Hugo being easy to work with. I also think having a static website is a good idea in general due to the low resource usage. My Raspberry Pi, even though it is loaded with many web applications, always manages to serve my hugo website blazingly fast. If you need rich content, for example videos, you can always embed them in some way. Another option I tried that worked okay is Pelican, though I use Hugo now since it seems the better option for me. In general I think any static site generator with templates will do the job. Even a minimalist solution such as pandoc could do it, though it would be much more manual work to get working.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Static websites are also cool for security.

So many small websites gets defaced everyday because of some vuln brought by the dynamic aspect of the site.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Thank you! I made my own static site generator and ony missing thing was nice theme. PaperMod is beautiful, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

hugo last updated their user reviews on their page in 2019.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

About Hugo and similar solutions: https://lemmy.world/comment/4957077

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Learn html and CSS then create a simple static website. It's a lot easier than it sounds, Mozilla has great documentation.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I'm already doing that! I have html templates using Tera and css using TailwindCSS.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Lots of people recommending wordpress or smth. Kinda surprising to me. HTML + CSS can be incredibly fun to work with. Web development is such a huge mess I don't ever want to touch because of the bazillion frameworks and tools. But doing the raw coding is super fun.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

go with Hugo + a theme Avoid WordPress, static sites have a lot of advantages.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

https://coolify.io/ haven't tried this but it could work for the deploy? I use netlifly so i don't know. Looks like a fun little project.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Personally, I'd use just simple HTML + precompiled CSS in the form of SASS / SCSS. Because modern CSS is actually fun when it's precompiled :)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

What's "modern" supposed to mean?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Absurdly large fonts and lots of unused space and rounded corners maybe?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

A lots of purple

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Something that has CSS and doesnt look like a page from 2001.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

"Am I a joke to you?"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I love that page. But this page is better and this one is even more better than the two earlier ones

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The second one took significantly longer to load with no discernible change in quality.

The third looked worse.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

You have to scroll for miles to reach different sections.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

For my blog I use Ghost. It's pretty simple to set up, but it does require a database (like most blogging software does). So it might not be what you are looking for.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I've had good experiences with GetSimple. It uses a flat-file structure, and there are lots of themes available.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Make it in markdown. There are plenty of ways to doing this or you can make your own. I personally like the marked library

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Personally, I love Bludit as it is really simple, flat-file and perfect for blogging.

However, you could also look into WriteFreely if you want something with ActivityPub (= Fediverse). Feature wise very very plain and simple, but might noch give you most of the bells and whistles as other platforms would do it. Think of it as an alternative to "Medium".