I am helping a small business owner make and host a static website. What are the best options for hosting the site and paying for the domain?

For hosting, I was considering GitHub Pages, since it's free and just built in to GitHub.

For the domain registrar, I see a lot of people on places like Reddit discussing Namecheap, Porkbun, Cloudflare, and Ionos. I was originally considering GoDaddy, but I saw a lot of posts were saying that was the #1 place to avoid. I saw a lot of older posts recommending Google Domains, but I see that has since been killed by Google.

Little backstory. I'm the sole developer of delphitools, a collection of free and open source tools for artists, developers and just computer touchers in general. I'm using Next.JS and as such, React, but I don't think I like it anymore. DT is a completely offline exported application, and Next is meant for middleware-heavy apps with server layers, which I just don't have. I also just don't get on with React's endless use effect garbage and have little love for TypeScript, and if I'm honest, DT happens to be made like that because I wanted to try the shiny new thing. Now that I have around 60-ish individual micro-apps contained within, I think it's time for a rewrite.

I'm therefore looking for discussion and insights on what tooling is best for me, on the following grounds:

1. delphitools is export only. There's no server component and it runs completely in the browser. Server capabilities or middleware are not a concern.
2. I'm not married to JavaScript as the runtime. It's just what I know best, I've been in the industry for a long time, although I'm more familiar with classic JS, not necessarily the JSX react syntax. I'm confident I could learn something new though.
3. I'm looking for fast build times, a smart-ish compiler that can ideally hot reload and give me insights into bad practices (Next.JS does this quite well)
4. As close to bare metal as possible, I can't begin to enumerate the amount of times the NextJS Turbopack auto-caching thing has caused me significant headaches.

I'm a designer, not a developer, but I can manage my way around. I'm also not opposed to using Agents, but I would like to - if for my own sake more than anything - be able to work without them if need be. Suggesting Ruby that compiles to HTML or some other crazy new pipeline probably won't work.

Curious to hear your experiences and recommendations. Thanks!

I'm a web developer and find the playwright MCP to be genuinely useful. My LLM is able to navigate my site, measure the size of elements, see console errors, network requests, etc. This is the only MCP I've ever installed and haven't yet had any cause to use others. But I'm interested in hearing what other professionals are using.

And as long as I'm asking ... nginx or Apache (or Caddy or whatever else you think is best).

I'm hosting a few web sites and services, but currently, everything is "out there" on VPSes. I want to bring it all in-house, go back to the old days of actually hosting websites out of my living room.

Towards that end, I am gradually upgrading and overhauling all the sites and services, fixing long-standing issues and inefficiencies in the config files, merging servers, etc.

I have never learned Docker. I've started to several times, worked with it a bit on a job once, used it a bit here and there; so I'm not clueless, but it would be a learning curve.

Also, I'm running one main service (Nextcloud) that officially, only supports Apache -- there absolutely are nginx setup guidelines and tutorials and such, but that's all unofficial, experimental setups.

And I'm running another major service (Synapse), on nginx.

And I want to merge the servers, and choose one web server to host both of them, and I don't know which way to go there.

Thanks for any feedback.

I remember way back in the day when YouTube was still in a Flash Player, you had the ability to dynamically overlay link buttons and clickable areas over videos at specific times/area and it was a lesser used but nice feature. There were a couple of videos that used it to sneak links to unlisted bonus content but it mostly helped when something was highlighted and clicking it would take you to relevant info. Think you could also use it for spesific playback controls.

I'm scoping out a small project and think it'd be cool to have a video with simmilar basic interactions and even fire off some scripts at different parts of the playback.

Since Flash died, I can't think of any web player that let's you create this sort of dynamic overlay/interface or implement logic to the media playback. I know Adobe Encore can be used to make this sort of stuff for DVD menus and I used to make training videos with old software that did similar things. But I don't believe those files are easily web compatible without Flash.

I'm sure a front-end wizard can layer a transparrent canvas and player and script their way to the same functionality and more. Or maybe use a web game engine and build a UI over video playback. But I'm curious if there's any service or library that does it already and saves me from another abandoned side-quest.

Unless I missed something obvisous, the only similiar functionality I've found in the common player libraries are overlaying adverts at set points in the display and you just set the scale and frequency.

We have this big project at work...an "all hands on deck" kinda thing that has us rank-and-file frontend devs working alongside our manager more closely than I'm used to. And it was fine, because I like the guy and he's been a decent manager. But this project is killing me.

On multiple occasions now I've written code, had it pass code review (often with his approval after a round of changes/guidance), and then every few days we get these massive re-write PRs from him where he completely rewrites large chunks of what we've done. It's leaving me feeling a few different ways:

1. Angry because how quickly your code gets replaced is a (imo, bullshit) metric used as a part of our annual reviews and promotion discussions
2. Doubting myself because in my head a good developer doesn't have their code rewritten that quickly.
3. Confused because features I thought I understood are constantly being rewritten leaving me wasting time trying to relearn how things work
4. Wondering what the point of writing code is if it's just going to be thrown in the garbage later in the week?

And like I'll be the first to admit I'm not the most proficient developer on our team. React and Typescript are relatively new concepts to me, despite a long career in web development. But I've been writing with it for about a year now and I had thought I was finally getting a good grasp on things. But now I'm wondering if I'm just an idiot? Is it imposter syndrome or have I actually somehow coasted through a 15 year career across various stacks and it's just now catching up to me?

Or is this just the nature of massive projects like this? We had a half-baked product scope to begin with and its getting daily changes with entire chunks of it not very well thought out by our PM. I can see how it would make sense that the more senior developer might see the need to refactor things when things are constantly changing and we're left writing code based on assumptions and half-written requirements. I'm also getting are comments on my PRs that request changes, but mid-comment he's like "I'll just take care of this because it's blocking me".

It's just really taking a toll on my mental health and how I feel about my job. I've been trying to find another job for a few months now, but I'm not having any luck. Job hunting sucks and when you're already demoralized as hell, it's hard to sell yourself to prospective employers.

Could really use some insight from other experienced devs, please!

hello tildes,

i am searching for a bare-bones forum/message board. i'll describe what i need and perhaps someone can point me in the right direction:

must have the ability to

• create an account
• create topics with the ability to reply
• fully customizable front-end (html/css) so i can make it match my website
• either self-host or use a custom domain on ext hosting

unimportant but nice to have

• display images in posts via external urls
• different boards (categories?) to post into (would be nice but not vital)
• nested replies (or some visual way to see what you're replying to)

free would be ideal (dreams are nice) but probably wouldn't want to spend more than $5/month as this is a supplement to a website where i don't expect much traffic at all due to the nature of the project. no images/video/audio will be hosted ideally.

i'm ok with "hacker news" or "reddit-like" software but my backend knowledge if very limited. for instance, i looked into self-hosting lemmy but i don't understand how to setup docker. options like phpbb would be fine if i could strip away everything aside from the above-mentioned features.

i want it to be extremely simplistic in appearance and for the end-user (tildes is a great example of the simplistic end-user experience). tildes could be a cool option but i think getting it setup is a bit out of my skill-range.

can anyone offer any suggestions/guidence?

edited to emphasize important aspects and clarify things that are not vital but would be nice to have.

I stopped blogging several years ago. Over the last few years, I've been writing plenty of private essays. However, very recently I have been considering starting to publish my writing and, well, start blogging again publicly. I have no desire to waste time on templates, look-and-feel, visual stuff, etc. I just want to write a bog-standard html file, and then publish it...I do value leveraging html elements that help with meta data (e.g. microformats, etc.), but don't care about how things look - and these elements that i value are all invisible to most users anyway. I would be fine with just crafting html by hand, deploying it via sftp or some boring deployment pipleine, and that's it. But, then, I started thinking: what about having an RSS/Atom feed? I used to consume content via an rss reader, but have not done so in years. But, I don't want to manually craft that feed file; nope, sorry. But, I've heard a comment or two from acquaintances that rss/atom feeds and syndication are really something that people - like my potential audience - might really desire. So, I should really consider having one. This means that either I have to craft several things manually (from the blog post itself, the list of archived posts, the feed file, etc.), or use a static site generator that will handle all this for me, etc. I don't want to get trapped down a rabbit hole where I am spending so much on the tooling, the scaffolding, twiddling with templates, or the publish process itself. I just want the minimal for writing and publishing, I want it to live on my domain name, and that's it. Am I crazy or extremely lazy for not wanting to generate an RSS/Atom feed file?

So, here's my ask of you all nice people: are feeds like RSS/Atom feeds even worth it? If so, does anyone have recommendations for a manual process where i can craft the blog post's html by hand, but somehow leverage a portion of a static site generator (or some minimal tool) to only automate the creation of the RSS/Atom feed file? Thanks in advfance for any constructive feedback!

P.S. - One thing that re-ignited my desire both to write more in public, and keep it alive with minimal fuss was my re-reading of Jeff Huang's excellent "This Page is Designed to Last" post: https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

Hey all! I've been thinking about buying a domain and building a personal website for myself -- at this point just a personal website with links to my socials, my CV, maybe any interesting projects I want to publicize. Maybe someday I'll decide I want to add a blog or build a webapp or something, but for now it'll be something simple and static.

My programming experience is very much not in the frontend side of things (I'm a data scientist and mostly use python day-to-day). I played around with HTML messing with my Tumblr theme enough back in the day that I'm reasonably sure I can build something solidly web 1.0, and I've toyed with stuff like Jekyll in the past. But I was wondering if I could use this as an opportunity to build up some basic skills that I could put on my resume for the future. But I have no idea what's out there that would be useful and quick to learn but wouldn't be massive overkill for a project like this.

I also have no idea how web-hosting works and who to go with if I want to build a personal website myself rather than relying on something like Wix or Wordpress. Most of the easily-Google-able advice is for different use-cases. Advice is either people who want something user-friendly with minimal coding like Wordpress or it's for something properly big and commercial, neither of which is me.

Anyway, I know we've got a lot of suitably tech-y people here on Tildes, so I'm hoping people here have good advice for this sort of use case. Thanks!

Does anyone have any good resources, books or otherwise, in regards do good design for web dev? I'm a self taught full stack dev who just can't really make things look "pretty". They are functional, but..that's about it. I know CSS, but maybe I just don't have an eye for it?

Any suggestions would be great, thanks.

I have a couple of old Reddit accounts I’d like to delete as fully as possible. However one of them dates back to my teenage years and it’s some of the only writings I have from that time. Any recommendations on good simple ways to scrape all the comments off of it and save them? Then what’s the best way to completely erase a Reddit footprint these days?

Looking for as simple a solution as possible, I’m not tech illiterate by any means but it’s also not a real strong suit for me.

The history of the web is littered with with many a dead image/video hosting service. Echos of their existence plague older forums in the form of broken links and images. It seems like they all follow the same path, starting up as the new "simple" service that just hosts images, no fuss. But then as interest grows, so do costs, and the service owners have to scramble to monetize. Generally this is done by stuffing the place full of ads until everyone leaves. Alternatively the owners are stubborn and stick to their guns, until they inevitably have to shut down due to drowning in costs. When they do shut down, millions of assets are lost and the graveyard of broken images across the web grows some more.

https://gfycat.com/ is the latest notable victim of this.

With all the recent social media turmoil, there as been lots of exploration of alternative sites, and all of them have to overcome the problem of hosting media in one way or another.

Tildes obviously does this by avoiding it entirely which, while a very effective solution, is just handballing the problem elsewhere. Users will still want to post images and videos but they will just have to find alternative hosts. Over time those hosts will die and Tildes posts will be filled with dead links.

Mastodon has similar problems,the biggest cost of hosting a mastodon instance is the storage and bandwidth required to facilitate media posts. And there's a real danger of an instance incurring high costs if a particular post becomes popular and is hotlinked on a big centralised social media site.

It seems like a really tricky problem to solve, something peer-to-peer could sort of solve the costs created by traffic peaks but has problems when there is many small files viewed by few individuals each.

Are there any other solutions out there? Web3, IPFS? Or is it just not that much of a problem, do we accept that media on the web is ephemeral and will be lost after a while?

Hey there! Any web developers/designers out there that have resources on creating websites that are fully accessible? I am getting back into web development after a decade away and want to learn the correct way. Thanks for any tips!