Comment by TravisPeacock 12 days ago
I want to follow up that the thing I think I'm really proud of is just HOW small the pages are. Of course, this is a stupid simple site but also I don't think it's ugly and even the page with the most Javascript and HTML is about 5kb large.
I spent time teaching in Alaska and it made me really appreciate websites with small footprints.
Neat CSS looks very good! I can't remember if I gave it a proper try before.
Some time ago I trialed a bunch of classless CSS projects, paired with Hugo using the "classless-blog" theme, and these were my top picks, out of order:
- holiday: https://holidaycss.js.org/
- bamboo: https://rilwis.github.io/bamboo/demo/index.html
- fieber: https://fieber.hack.re/
- pico classless: https://picocss.com/docs/classless
- yorha: https://metakirby5.github.io/yorha/
- simple: https://simplecss.org/
- water: https://watercss.kognise.dev/
- bolt: https://boltcss.com/
- Lissom.CSS: https://lissomware.github.io/css/
All of them except yorha have light/dark modes, and all of them except yorha are IMO too light by default in light mode.
I made something similar eight(!) years ago called Valenski. It's a SASS library but it also only provides a couple of classes and some sane defaults: https://hay.github.io/valenski/
I like many of the decisions/opinions in this. Will dig into it more possibly on a future project.
The thing I wish most people today understood is that you don’t even have to dig the spare aesthetic that your site has in order to make a site 2-3 orders of magnitude less bloated than the average. You can make a beautiful, stylish site with just CSS, applied normally to normal semantic proper HTML, no react, no styled components, JS where necessary… oh well, I’m clearly Old Man Yelling At Cloud.
Anyway nice job!
that's so true! you don't need a javascript framework to make a beautiful site - it's all css! nowadays, people reach for react and a component library when they plan to make a somewhat advanced site or app, but these aren't necessary.
the opposite is also true - just because you're using plain html and css does not mean your site must be super, super simple.
Given your tastes in websites, I hope you will be receptive to my attempt at reviving Craigslist's casual encounters:
Its size in kilobytes varies depending on how many posts are displayed on the front page.
You know what I really want to see? A new version of backpages but with peer review arms other safety tools for sex workers.
Like Upwork where the client rates and reviews the SW but the SW rates and reviews the client. New accounts on either side are treated more skeptically but also the power users are also more easily identified.
When backpages was shut down I spent a few days playing around with it but ultimately between the legal risk (which I'm fine with, generally), the social risk of being the guy who runs a SW website (even though I've never hired a SW before, myself), and the internal debate I had about trafficking (I was pretty convinced my system would protect girls from trafficking but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did actually enable someone to be trafficked.
I think you have a valuable website and I don't think enough people are willing to openly operate in this area.
Shameless plug for my NeatCSS project:
https://neat.joeldare.com