A similar post was done a few months ago and it was pretty fun so why not do it again ? share you're personal sites below and let others critique you!
I'll start with mine https://www.yusuf.fyi/
Readit NewsReadit NewsI'll start with mine https://www.yusuf.fyi/
It's written with Gatsby and hosted on Netlify (which handles the build step without configuration). I picked Gatsby because I wanted to use react/preprocessors, but also wanted to be able to "just write" (and MDX lets me do both of those). It also has a vibrant plugin ecosystem and is JS based (vs Ruby, which my previous site used; I don't write Ruby any longer).
I blog a few times a year, a mix of technical topics and media reviews. The blog is meant to be mostly text, but it being in React means I can drop in rich things, like support for hide-able spoilers and nice code blocks. I've optimized the layout for reading text (good font size, max-width, line-height), so hopefully it works!
Some favorite posts are:
- Python Dataclasses from Scratch: https://xavd.id/blog/post/python-dataclasses-from-scratch/
- My yearly media review. Here's 2021; 2022 should be up in the next few days: https://xavd.id/blog/post/favorite-media-2021/
Thanks for looking!
For those who don't know, @schmudde runs a blog called Beyond the Frame: https://schmud.de
He also has an excellent Strange Loop talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU6NvkkF4Xk
It is funny how much variation there is between books/genres though! The sentence complexity and variety definitely comes into play here.
I find the Goodreads UI _incredibly_ busy. Here's what I saw when I logged in just now: https://cdn.zappy.app/76d7cba6b409f0aa9310214401d11db9.png
It's nice to see what my friends are reading, but it's always trying to recommend me books, sell me things, etc. It makes sense (it's why Amazon bought them) but it I found it mostly got in the way of what I wanted out of it- a spreadsheet with pre-filled information. Also it's dumb, but I wanted to rate books on a 4-point scale, and theirs is out of 5.
I used to use a gSheet for this (with columns for title, author, day start/end, and review), but I wanted a way to source rich info. So I combined Zapier, the google books API, and an npm package I wrote to count the words in an epub (https://github.com/xavdid/epub-wordcount/) and fed all that info into Airtable. It sounds like a lot of work, but I set it up years ago and it's been happily humming along.
Now I have exactly the tracking system I want, and it's not at the whim of decisions on any product roadmaps.
I've thought about it. Honestly the most likely thing is that I'll make a standalone site for media reviews and consolidate everything. That's what I did for this (https://github.com/xavdid/kerfuffle; currently offline) and I was very pleased with the result. ".review" is a TLD, so I spin it up under something there. :)
Nothing too fancy, just a static hugo site on github pages. I'm most happy with the search that I added, which all happens client-side. The index is only about 129 KB so I'll probably never hit a practical download size limit either. And because it's happening in the browser it's very responsive.
If anyone is curious about the details I also wrote about that here: https://lukesalamone.github.io/posts/rolling-my-own-blog-sea...
I've also written a good amount about chess lately, if anyone is interested in that. Specifically, the intersection of chess and AI, where I've been working on a new type of chess learning tool.
https://github.com/lukesalamone/lukesalamone.github.io
Here are some essays I'm particularly fond of:
- https://taylor.town/synthetic-intelligence
- https://taylor.town/to-your-grave
- https://taylor.town/eschew-the-new
- https://taylor.town/pick-practical-principles
- https://taylor.town/10-minutes
- https://taylor.town/beware-the-grind
1. The font size on homepage is small, especially for the two columns of dates. I can't really read them from across my desk (even on a big monitor). It's also not clear what the dates represent- maybe created and updated dates for each post?
2. The dates aren't present on the post pages themselves, so someone landing directly on a post won't know how old it is.
Thanks for the feedback! I just pushed up some changes. Let me know how it looks in ~10 minutes :)
Those dates are indeed created and updated dates. I haven't thought of pretty a way to visually indicate that haha. Let me know if you have any ideas!
> 2. The dates aren't present on the post pages themselves, so someone landing directly on a post won't know how old it is.
It would be very easy to add, but I didn't think people would care!
I'll add created/updated dates at the end of each page so it doesn't pollute the header. Thanks for the recommendations!
I read the first article you mentioned and I am bookmarking the others for when I have more time
The font is ET Book: https://edwardtufte.github.io/et-book/
I borrowed heavily from Tufte CSS: https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/
I'm pretty torn on having a separation between the notion of "posts" and "projects". I don't keep the project section up to date very often, and probably should remove it. Any thoughts/advice on this HN?
Yeah, that's exactly what I think the problem is. I arbitrary consider a one thing a project and another thing a post.
Understood, thanks for your advice!
- Static site with no framework beyond basic PUG/SCSS.
- Uses no JS at all.
- Actually pretty readable on a monochrome Palm Pilot too, as far as modern HTML goes.
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My key post is my thought framework for ethical software design: https://calebk.com/articles/design-ethics
Have some fun ones on PalmOS UX and other experiments coming up, but unpublished for now. :)
I’ve used this site design for probably 6 years?
Today it’s a NextJS site on Vercel backed by markdown files (older pages) and Notion (newer pages). I’ve also built the same design with a Python SSG which was focused on one HTTP request per page, and before that a POSIX shell script I wrote focused on being as FreeBSD as possible.
I would like to share more knowledge on the site, but it’s in last place behind all my other life goals.
I’m a product designer who’s been blogging since around 2009. For several years I managed an online publication, Signal Tower. Then left it to become the host of the Designer News podcast. Some posts y’all might find interesting:
A Children’s Book Written and Illustrated by AI
https://solomon.io/childrens-story-written-illustrated-ai/
Improving Accessibility with Design Tokens
https://solomon.io/improving-accessibility-with-design-token...
Code School, 10 Years Later
https://solomon.io/code-school-10-years-later/
My personal blog as well as a place to showcase the iOS & macOS apps I’m working on.
It’s statically generated with Hugo and, for the first time, I actually created the theme myself (based on the lightweight CSS framework Bulma). Being essentially just a bunch of SASS files, Bulma allowed me to easily cherry-pick only what I needed, extend and tweak as required and easily integrate it into the Hugo build pipeline.
Designing and developing the theme was a really cool experience because my background is mostly in C, C++ Objective C and Swift and this was the most serious “web project” I have done to date. I still prefer writing native apps but have definitely enjoyed this excursion into the world of SCSS, HTML and JS :)
Now if only I got around to actually blogging more regularly :D