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Would anyone like a free website?
I do web and graphic design professionally, but currently have some free time.
You can see some of my work here.
You would still need to pay for the domain registration (15$/year), but I could provide hosting.
Bonus if you’re a starving artist, non-profit, or doing something humanitarian. I’d prefer not to do one for a business, since they should be able afford to pay someone, but feel free to make a case.
I would build it with Wordpress and incorporate Divi so you wouldn’t be entirely dependent on me to make future edits yourself.
I’m far from an expert and mostly do front-end, but like helping people and love the community here.
I'm just going to chime in here for a moment, because there's a pretty important point that I feel I need to make:
WordPress is widely used by many people and is thus a very common target. It's so common to exploit vulnerabilities in the WordPress core and in its many plugins that my own non-WordPress server logs are constantly littered with exploit probing from various sources. phpMyAdmin comes in second place. This isn't necessarily the fault of WordPress being WordPress, just the fact that it's such a popular framework/platform for people to use and thus has a greater potential to contain high-value sensitive data.
When developing any website using such a high-profile framework, please be very careful about what you're doing. Keep your use of plugins down to a minimum, and if you do use them, then review them extensively for possible sources of vulnerabilities. The most common attack vector that I see with web frameworks is object deserialization. If you see any unserialize calls anywhere in a plugin, or in any tool for that matter, throw that shit away immediately and never touch it again. Ever. That may seem a bit extreme, but it's so stupidly common that you're better off not risking it at all.
If you're the owner of a WordPress site, I would caution you against placing any sensitive data or assets on your website unless you can 1) perform thorough penetration testing of your system on a fairly regular basis to ensure that your data is as safe as you reasonably can, and 2) regularly update your software to ensure that any vulnerabilities are being patched on a rolling basis. Barring doing (1) and (2) yourself, you should have someone who can perform these tasks on your behalf.
My personal recommendation is that for a WordPress site that isn't being professionally monitored and maintained (e.g. you're not paying for a managed hosting service), you should limit your use to non-sensitive projects. For example, a portfolio or a blog would be excellent examples of use cases that could provide a lot of value for you without exposing yourself to a lot of risk.
That's my two cents, anyway. The stakeholders in a project are ultimately the ones who decide whether or not to shoulder risk. I just want to make sure that the risks are clearly stated for everyone involved :)
A lot of people use WordPress as a CMS for non-interactive (static) sites. To anyone doing this I would strongly encourage using a plugin like this one to publish your site to static files and just serve those from S3 or a comparable service. I was responsible for a small bakery's web presence and had a lot of success with this method. Because the application only lived in a VM on my local computer, the risk of attack was effectively zero. Also, serving flat files out of S3 is is both faster and cheaper than leveraging a full hosted LAMP stack. If you don't need server-side interaction there really aren't any drawbacks.
All great points. I use a payment processor so I never have any credit card info on my servers. To be clear, that's no excuse for poor security.
Do note that in the event of a severe enough vulnerability, not having credit card information on your servers doesn't necessarily make you secure. If, for example, someone utilizes a vulnerable plugin to generate a backdoor, they could then issue a malicious patch that e.g. either a) directs the end user to a phishing site that looks like your payment processor in the event that you use an iframe or other external link that you direct the user to, or b) modifies your displayed contact information to direct all correspondence to the malicious actor in the event that you require the end user to contact you before being directed to said processor.
A practical example: if you ordinarily use Stripe to process a transaction by utilizing their Stripe Elements to securely receive a token associated with a credit card, then a malicious actor could simply replace the URL to the external script to their own phishing version while passing the original public key to their iframe, effectively facilitating a man-in-the-middle that a normal user would never notice.
This is just one example of several possible exploits that can be used to take advantage of a false sense of security.
That's great to know. Thank you!
Your portfolio looks nice, kind of you to offer!
Is it just me, or do you have some sort of scrolling effect on your portfolio website? The scrolling is not smooth for me (using a Macbook trackpad). If you've got some Javascript messing with the scrolling, I'd suggest removing it/revising it, as it feels very unnatural.
JS affecting scrolling is almost always a terrible idea.
Hmmm, I think I found what might have been causing it. Although, I have a Macbook and haven't seen what you're experiencing. Would you be willing to check it once more and let me know if it's still doing it?
Seems better now.
I run a small for-profit business and have done my own design with wordpress and Avada (looked at Divi). I'm currently re-doing it from scratch to incorporate much of what I've learned over the last 4 years that should hopefully serve as a long-term platform for the business. As everything is public on Tildes now, I don't want to provide the URL here, but if you're interested in getting involved in some way, let me know.
Like I said, I've been planning on doing the re-vamp myself...but I'm not opposed to paying something if it helps me get up and running more quickly. To be clear, this is still quite a small business...
I'd take a peek. Toss me the link in a DM.
Sent. And thank you!
This may be something for it's own topic, but I was considering a comic I was making and how best to present it to the world digitally. (My artist wants to start with a dead tree run, but he's not here right now.) I like the idea of the Korean Webtoon format, (Infinite Vertical Scroll top to bottom) but with modification that the official Webtoon site wouldn't have, (Page breaks that would have to be swiped over to or scrolled through, sound cues and music layering that changes as you scroll as opposed to music on/off, vibration when you come to a panel on mobile.) I've made websites before, but I have no idea how to start on something of this scale or if it would be something better served by just going with a mobile app framework.
You could likely use something like ScrollMagic for the effects. The swiping to scroll function I'm not certain how to impliment and might be a bit hard to make intuitive. The rest of it would be just a regular webpage (as there are many ways to quickly setup a long scroll of vertical images).
pinging @moocow1452, since I think you meant to reply to them but accidentally made a new top-level comment instead. :)
Yeah, saw it, looks like something to poke around with.
My mistake, thank you!
This is super cool of you.
I was looking to get a site up and going for a story I'm writing but it would be 90% text only and thus a waste of your skills.
Thanks for the offer, but I'm content with my own design. It might not be as slick or as stylish as yours, but it runs like a bat out of Hell and it will work on any device and any platform, even on dialup.
I like to party like it's 1999. But it isn't just for shits and giggles. All of the old web 1.0 tech we tend to dismiss as "obsolete" in favor of using the latest Lovecraftian horror of a JS framework still works.
Hell, last week I joined a private netnews server that doesn't federate with USENET. It's got plenty of posts anyway even the community consists of <10 people at the moment.
It's also blazing fast. A traditional site with minimal javascript (like tildes) runs great on even the cheapest phones. If all you want to do is serve text for a blog or web serial, then a traditional tech site is the best way to do it. Most sites don't need to be a webapp. Plus, most of the "slickness" comes from CSS and modern design standards rather than javascript, so you can sort of have your cake and eat it too.
There are fewer moving parts on the server side, too. For a site like mine, the only webserver you really need is an OpenBSD machine running httpd with a properly configured sshd so you can upload updates via rsync. You don't need Apache or Nginx. Nor do you need PHP, or MariaDB, or any of the other stuff WordPress depends on.
If Verizon weren't such pricks about running servers on residential connections, I could self-host my website and email out of my basement.
Anything kicking on usenet anymore other than binaries?
I have the deep-seated but completely unfounded belief that a lot of these old technologies can be repurposed in some way to help create a decentralized web. Another rabbit hole I'm slowly going down is the ability to send data via shortwave radio (not personally a shortwave person...yet, but it's very interesting).
I don't know about the public USENET, but orbitalfox's server doesn't pull from the public USENET. They have their own hierarchy and newsgroups. If you're curious, you should email them and ask for an account.
I had read your comment and understood it but had just assumed you had kicked the wheels on public USENET more recently than I have. Sorry for the assumption! Now there's a saying about that somewhere...
I did have a look at public USENET via sdf.org, but I don't know if they pull the full feed or how active the moderated non-alt.* groups are. Sorry.
All good. I don't imagine there's much activity. Eternal September and all that.
I really do like your site. Nicely done and it fits very well with the minimalist aesthetic I see favored by Tildes users.
Thanks. I built it with Roman Zolotarev's tools and inspiration taken from various motherfucking websites. :)
Love the motherfucking websites lol... so spot on.