Hey, I'm Tim and I created Hot Page. This is a long-time side project that I'm now bootstrapping with the help of a couple of friends. The idea is to take the convenience of a drag-and-drop editor (Squarespace, Wix, etc), but never lose the connection to the basic building blocks of web pages: HTML elements, CSS rules, etc. The advent of Web Components makes this a really powerful model.
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
Well since microflash has jumped ahead, let me also jump in.
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.
Wow, this comment just made the last 7 months of long hours totally worth it. You have understood and distilled the essence of this project so accurately. This is my first time launching something like this, so it's just a great feeling to know there are people on the other side of the screen who are getting it.
The combination of web components + a visual app builder is a really compelling space. I'm working on something myself, and I love see more approaches our there!
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.
Sorry for spoiling your planned launch on HN. I stumbled across it by accident (such are serendipities on web), thought it was cool and fat fingered it here. Looking forward to things coming in future.
Thanks for posting it! Obviously it's better to launch early and often but I'm much more of a programmer than a marketer and I was afraid it wouldn't get much traction. I've never been so happy to be wrong heh
As a plain vanilla enjoyer, I'm loving everything about hot.page, as it is... At last, a web property with character. I second `AstroJetson`'s comment about your communication / documentation. Also your pricing plans and the fact that you have chosen to offer custom domain support even in the free plan. These things tell me y'all are alright people. Rooting for you!
The editor side of the site has no CSS frameworks, just plain React with Typescript. I used a lot of Hypercard as a kid so that might explain something. Also our designer really loves pixel art and totally ran with the web 1.0 mandate that I gave him. Some of the design choices have been a little controversial, but I'm glad you dig it! Hopefully users don't find it distracting so we can stick with it
I just found out about Hot Glue yesterday from this thread! Hot Page is pretty different in that the idea is to give people a way to edit DOM like they would with a text editor but with a visual UI and drag-and-drop. Hot Glue does have a visual UI but it's an abstraction on a web page that uses absolute positioning instead of the normal document flow. I've seen so many pages like this break on different devices or window sizes that I'm not really a fan of the approach. You can read more about the philosophy behind Hot Page here: https://hot.page/takes/picking-the-right-abstraction
We are working on a feature to let paid users download their sites as a zip file or export them to cloud storage buckets (s3/aws, google cloud, etc). So far though it's meant to be used with our hosting. Free accounts have an advertisement for Hot Page itself but they let you connect your own domain for free.
While checking this out I came across this site (https://alice.hot.page/) in its showcase as one of the examples and legit spent five minutes reading Alice in Wonderland and I think I need to introspect how I spend my time a little..
Looks quite nice! Oddly enough, it transported me back nearly 20 years to my student days. I didn't have the money to buy domain names but I wanted to set up a few websites on the World Wide Web!
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!)
Similar story of me in 2002. Although I didn't come across geocities, and directly found freeservers.com & made a site davinder.8m.net , which is still up. I lost its password from 2007 to 2022, and recovered it back when I recovered my yahoo email account.
Hey, Hot Page is my project but somehow I was not aware of Hot Glue. And reviewing it now I would hazard to say the projects are superficially similar. Hot Page is a visual/drag-and-drop web editor that uses no abstractions so the whole time you're using it you have complete control of the resulting DOM (all elements, nesting, attributes, CSS rules, etc). So it's kind of like CodePen but for building real sites. I wrote more about this philosophy here: https://hot.page/takes/picking-the-right-abstraction
I don't think it is very similar. Personally i thought of HoTMeTaL, an old HTML/page editor that was popular for a little bit during the 90s and had a similar approach of showing the page in a visual quasi-WYSIWYG + quasi-element-tree mode.
Wow, it's been a minute since I used HoTMeTal, I loved that editor. I cranked out a lot of HTML with it, once you got the hang of what it wanted you to do, it would be your best friend. We switched to Dreamweaver, of course that lasted until Adobe bought it. But thanks for the memory, this thread has been the Saturday treat.
Hotglue was the first thing I thought of as well. Truly freeform web design that allowed for custom code and styles via editing the <head> section. Installation for the most part required nothing besides dropping a folder into a PHP-enabled web server.
Ah, you beat me to it. Looks like a closed source hotglue clone/saas/inspiration. They shouldn't have used that similar name if they're not related to the original project.
Anyway, it's sad Hotglue hasn't seen development in the last years, some friends use it for their personal sites...
Love the design and your way of communicating!! You just made me a fan of you and your product.
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.
Wow, thanks! I've basically been building this in a silo so it's very nice to get such enthusiastic feedback. I am really dedicated to bootstrapping Hot Page with my own resources so that no one can pressure me to make the design more generic or somehow exploit the customers. Of course, it has not been easy doing all the programming and most of the marketing myself though. Right now we really need customers like yourself who are willing to use the beta version and provide feedback -- so thanks so much for your support!
Thanks so much or the early Saturday morning flashback to my Geocities page. Can you add a spinning “under construction” sign, those were my favorites.
Readit News
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
https://hotglue.me
Deleted Comment
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!)
[1]https://hotglue.me/
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.
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.