Because I mentioned the obvious problems with sites like Wordpress and you recommended Squarespace which has the exact same problems. Next I bet you'll say Wix would be a solution.

Uhm no? What makes you say that?

Are you trolling rn?

Yeah I wouldn't necessarily recommend wordpress. Probably Squarespace is better.

Hey @6nk06@sh.itjust.works! I appreciate your feedback. I'll make sure to include the ToS and privacy policy for the web app.

Yet another subscription. Yet another habit tracker. No terms of service or privacy policy.

I think Wordpress is pretty much unusable for anything commercial without creating questions of maintainability, amount of customization, and of course rights to the content being hosted.

I like the look of their forms example on the Fresh link you provided, it's nice.

Building from scratch, I'd use Fresh. It has two things I've always wanted but not seen elsewhere:

1. You can use TSX for components. Clearly the right way to build a webpage.
2. You can do everything server-side. Most sites barely need anything client-side and it's just easier and better to do things server-side where you can.

Impossible to say how much you could charge for that without way more details. Tbh there are a ton of off-the-shelf solutions like Wordpress that can do that already so probably not very much at all.

Next, try uploading a 1 GB PDF.

Makes me remember this.

I spent an insane effort of uploading one (1) document to the french government once. First you are allowed only one document but they needed 5 different, so I spent some time figuring out how to combine 5 pdfs into one, not a biggie but well, how convenient eh.

Then I spent 4 days trying to upload the 800kb document which I figured was under the 10MB limit. FF, chrome, mobile, PC, you name it. It just "didn't upload".

Then it just hit me on the fourth day, probably because I started to slowly go insane, that soneone who programmed this stuff thought that the "number of MB must be 1 to 10", not more, not less...

I was quite desperate, but who knows right? I added two grayish pages to my document to get over that 1MB and LO AND BEHOLD, it worked...

Thank you for coming to my rant 😊

Rust Object Notation FTW!

I find it surprising that JSON is so omnipresent when there are far more efficient alternatives

Do you also find it surprising that different types of food exist? /s

I enjoyed my brief time with gRPC and protobuf, when I was trying them out, and I'd happily use them again, but I think it's obvious why JSON and REST are more dominant.

For one, gRPC works great for simple server/client apps, but it makes them VERY tightly coupled. If your product is an API itself, open for public use, tight coupling is a hindrance more than a benefit.

And more to the point... have you ever tried to DEBUG gRPC traffic? The efficiency of gRPC is top notch, t optimizes for serialization, deserialization, and bandwidth, all at once. But JSON is human readable, and when you throw in HTTP compression, the efficiency is close enough to protobuf to serve the vast majority of scenarios. JSON is just far more practical.

I just need something that mostly works and doesn't have a huge learning curve. The web-dev aspect is something I really don't want to think about, but, is something that I can dive into for hyper-customization if needed.

The mention of the ELK stack made me think of good ol' LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL MariaDB and PHP/Python/Perl). That's still a reasonable choice today for many, I would say. You can get quite far with this stack serving HTML and CSS, with some JavaScript added on top where you need it.

If you search for LAMP stack alternatives you might get some more contemporary spins. Nginx is a quite popular Apache alternative. PostgreSQL is a popular MariaDB alternative. Pretty much any language has some variant of an HTTP server than can serve HTML responses, and a more or less vibrant ecosystem of libraries that makes it easier to do.

You mention Python, something to look at there is Django. I've used it before and been quite happy with it, though Python isn't the language I use most.

In the JavaScript/TypeScript world there are perhaps too many options. One approach is to use a generic server library like Fastify or Express with a templating engine of your choice (f. ex. Liquid) to make the HTML writing part a bit simpler. Templates let you reuse fragments / components, loop over collections, add conditionals and such. For Fastify it's via a plugin called @fastify/view. You can then use whatever view library you want (if you need one at all) for handling things in the browser, such as Svelte which another commenter mentioned.

If you are interested in Svelte, something to look into there is SvelteKit. With that Svelte will be your "template engine" and it includes both server and browser functionality. Though depending on your needs it may also be overkill, solving for problems you don't have.

When I was trying to find frameworks that I liked. I learned VanillaJS. Then wrote the same app using VanillaJS, Web Components, React and Svelte. I am not a professional developer either I just like to write code. I was very familiar with python. That helped me iterate through my app and also find a framework fit.

Svelte came most naturally to me. So now I either use Svelte or VanillaJS.

For me, Svelte is clean, modular and is not as confusing as React. I love the concept of Svelte stores. I use it all the time.

Bonus points of the person didn't write the article either.

Thanks for the heads up

There are a lot of good points here, but the content farm-y vibe of the post is really distracting me. I'd rather read a blog of someone simply sharing something they've built with htmx and the pros vs. cons they encountered in the process. (I like htmx a lot, I just haven't gotten a chance to use it in a production project yet!)

I remember a few years ago a client I was working with hired this kid right out of school for web dev stuff who was an absolute wizard with SVGs. Like he was showing myself and other senior devs things we'd never seen or imagined before.

SVG's are seriously incredible and under utilized but man you really have to have the brain to wrap your head around them. I envy and give kudos to people that can.

I love that, seriously. People have no idea about what stuff is capable of, while I do. It's amazing 😍

I can say that I've used a plugin for WordPress called Dark Visitors which seems to track and report on bot crawlers, including LLMs. Not sure how accurate their info is, but our marketing dept seems to believe it so 🤷‍♂️

Maybe looking into what Dark Visitors does would give you pointers on how you might detect them.