> If you don’t have a domain or hosting yet, now’s the time to buckle down and do that. Unfortunately, I don’t have good advice for you here. Just know that it’s going to be stupid and tedious and bad and unfun. That’s just the way this is.

I cannot remember if it was here or elsewhere but there was an amazing blogpost making fun of beginner and intermediate "coding" tutorials (coding as a catch-all for programming, markdown, etc.) where the author assumes the reader has deep familiarity with the subject at hand and all of its jargon. This has the exact same vibe.

This is a nice post. Thanks for sharing it here. The only thing I would like to add to this fine article is that it is perfectly fine for a personal website to simply be a loose collection of pages arranged in an arbitrary manner. Not every personal website needs to be a blog.

Very often I see aspiring website authors quickly make life complicated for themselves by deciding they need a blog, which then leads to numerous questions about tools and processes that can easily draw anyone into busywork. That time could otherwise have been spent on actually writing posts, articles, games, demos, etc. for their website that one can look back with joy months or years later.

Website busywork is probably fine for people who genuinely want to spend their time thinking about tools and processes. But if you just want to put your thoughts out there, it can be more fruitful to simply publish HTML, written directly or converted from your favourite text format such Markdown, AsciiDoc, etc.

This is a topic I care about quite a bit and my complete thoughts about this would be too long for an HN comment, so I will just share a link to a post I wrote about this recently, in case someone finds value in it: https://susam.net/writing-first-tooling-second.html

I would genuinely like to see more personal websites, because they make the Web more diverse and more interesting.

Probably not too useful for many in this audience, but I wrote a web book for *absolute beginners* learning HTML. It's very much in the same spirit as the OP's post.

https://htmlforpeople.com/

I never thought that the writing HTML is the hard part. Instead where my Sister struggled was to get a domain, get a server, deal with DNS pointing to that server. That shit is also omitted on posts like that one because it's done differently for each domain registrar and you need quite some knowledge in network stuff to be able to understand what you need to do.

That resonates with https://plainvanillaweb.com/ - which inspired me to ditch my own CMS and use plain html on my website.

That's how I did it in GradSchool. I took over the web page another student started for the grad-level algorithms class I was taking. The student who started it discovered he had volunteered for too many things. I jumped on it when they needed to change because I needed the extra credit.

Armed with a CD copy of the web site, I moved it over to my hosted space. I setup password-access, and setup the syuidy group, and from there on, I frequently put in one-liner paragraphs from the professor, she sometimes managed to get them to me soon enough that I could put them in before class started that day.

"While the best time to make an RSS feed was 20 years ago, the second best time is now."

I literally laughed out loud. This is so on point, and so is the rest of the article.

https://www.yourhtmlsource.com is my favorite resource from the early 2000s on how to make a website and I'm so happy it's still around. It could be modernized to teach things like viewport and whatever but I found it super simple to understand as a teenager.

It’s not clear to me who this is useful for. If you have a server already, yes, it’s trivial to put up an HTML page. But most people with servers, I would guess, already know that. Most people _don’t_have servers, though, and it seems to me that thats what the “easier” ways of getting started (hosted wordpress, Cloudflare pages, github pages, etc.) are for. I agree, though, that it’s good to start with plain HTML. I’d probably recommend that new people go with a serverless setup like Cloudflare pages rather than get into administrating a VM, though.

This isn't how to make a damn website, this is how to make a page for a damn website. Missing is all the stuff about actually setting up a website, like hosting, domains, blah blah.

Give me simple instructions about that stuff prior to creating the contents and id be happy.

The blog that I started ~13 years ago started as 3 .html files. Everything else followed as needed (styling, rss, comments, etc.). If you can get past building it, the next question becomes "What should I write about?" [0]

My answer is usually that you can write whatever you want on your websites. It's yours after all. None of the limitations that exist on third-party platforms exist. You can make all the pages read upside down if you want to.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-should-i-write-about

Still using Seamonkey Composer here (descendant of Netscape Composer/Kompozer):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey#Composer

> This is honestly all you need.

No, you need less than that! :-)

    ┍━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┑
    │                     how-to-make-a-damn-website.html                      │
    ├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
    │ <title>How to Make a Damn Website</title>                                │
    │ <h1>How to Make a Damn Website</h1>                                      │
    │                                                                          │
    │                                                                          │
    │ <p>A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start  │
    │ or they get stuck.</p>                                                   │
    ┕━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┙

I have seen at least one blog where the author updated his RSS feed manually, but it's one of the first pieces of busywork that you want to automate away, after applying the page template and entering <p> tags at every double-newline. Jekyll is useful for that; it builds automatically in GitHub Pages, which also conveniently serves as a free web host.

I wrote a very lite touch web list maker, so people / I can have a simple fast way to make a list of stuff, and share the url.

http://pho.tiyuti.com

Just lists of title, pic, blurb, url

The title should be "How to make a damn blog.", as that appears to be the primary focus of the article.

Sites written by hand don't need RSS. If you absolutely need RSS, you can start a WordPress blog before you can say "what the hell is XML?"

https://1kb.club/

Doesn't take much.

And then you find out that the company running the server misconfigured caching, and suddenly half your userbase sees a different version than the other half.

Been thinking about this lately. Thanks for sharing.

With the amount of crap and complexity we now have online, I miss gopher and well arranged text files.

I love websites, something about stumbling across someone’s random content put together with old school hand typed code just stirs a warm and fuzzy feeling, especially if the do something “weird” that doesn’t follow any kind of modern trend or convention.

Another technique (or consideration?) that deserves attention is how to get output from notebook engines (e.g. Quarto) to play well with your existing plain text website... while Quarto does a decent job of plain text websites, it does the best job if it takes over the whole website.