Kiki – a tiny homepage construction kit with a small footprint
tomotama.com100 points by tobr 4 days ago
100 points by tobr 4 days ago
Oh ! i cannot see myself doing php again, loved the language and have some good memories too but that me was 10 years ago
> kiki is shareware.
Now that is a blast from the past.
Is much else distributed that way these days?
This is a tangent to this post, but...
I happen to have a cat named Kiki who looks rather like the mascot for this project. Her health is failing, now. I just spent the night on my living room floor next to her. I'll, likely have to put her down, today.
I might use this project to make a memorial page for her.
Oh geez -- we went recently through this with our tuxedo, who sadly passed a few years ago. I am glad you'll be able to give her the peace she needs.
The kiki this software is named after, is an extremely rambunctious rotten kitten whom we adopted after our tuxedo passed away.
https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/115742268356907140
:)
I'm sorry you're dealing with this. I had an orange tabby also named Kiki for most of my childhood through early adulthood, 16 years. He suffered from kidney failure and it was a sad day when we had to put him down.
May you have peace during this time.
I’m sorry you’re going through this. She’s very cute.
Dedicating a project to her sounds like a great idea.
If you use Reddit, I can also highly recommend the r/petloss subreddit for a bit of “group therapy”. It was very helpful for me a couple years ago.
Wishing you peace during this time — and thank you for cherishing Kiki as much as you have. A memorial page is a nice way to honor her.
> kiki was built around the idea that the web took a wrong turn a couple of decades ago. HTML was supposed to be simple and straightforward
Hear, hear. We need more of this kind of courage to start over from first principles.
That must be the first time in a very long time that I've seen something claim to support PHP 4.
Should have been written with bouba philosophy.
"It's built so that if something looks wrong, you can change it yourself without spending hours reading tutorials and watching coding videos"
Does anyone do this? Every none coder I know just has llms build everything for them - can't imagine why they'd be looking up coding tutorials for a homepage.
I wish we could get back to a “mom and pop” software market. Itch.io feels like it’s doing a lot of work for indie software that used to just be everywhere and easy to stumble onto.
If selling software for money wasn’t such a pain in the arse I would put stuff on my website rather than itch.io
It took me two weeks, plus sending IDs, incorporating an ltd, to get a license to sell software with Paddle. With itch I just need a paypal/stripe account.
I am going through this right now! I am provisionally approved and still waiting. Even worse I am going through SMS phone number verification with SMTP2GO.
Apparently if you wanna send automated texts in America, you need a real phone number. And to not get immediately blocked, you need to fill out a form that goes to the major carriers for approval (like AT&T). And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.
Yep, it's called 10DLC. My teams work on telephony integrations, and for the devs to even test that outbound SMS is working, we need to go through this process with every provider we integrate. Massive pain, indeed.
If you accept cryptocurrency you don’t need to do any of this, and not even deal with PayPal (who WILL rob you without a second thought, as has been well documented on the internet for MULTIPLE decades at this point).
I would like to (Bitcoin Lightning only, with a healthy convenience discount) but I'd have to move off Hetzner for my servers because they are really against crypto in a very vague way, and again, that's a lot more work than just using itch.io
Kiki's themes can be edited to suit one's personal tastes. The theme .css files are about 120 lines long.
PHP was and still is the best.
Reminds me of a time when my homepage (before lj blog) was using cmsimple. BTW, c still exists. Not sure if it is still "simple" tho.
> c still exists
C and Go are two languages I feel like if you learn them, you can come back years later and if your memory is still good, you could get back up to speed pretty darn quickly. Every few years I go back to Go and try to build web apps using only the standard libraries, and I always find myself very quickly picking up all the concepts.
For some reason, Java has the same feeling. Professionally I do both embedded and statistical computing, and Java's been nearly anathema to this. But every 5 years I patch a hobby project I did once in college, and it comes right back (and with JVM hot reloading too.) It gives me the engineering warm and fuzzies.
The design philosophy says you should be able to repair your own tools, but this is closed source proprietary software.
Cute page, but does not walk the walk.
[flagged]
Idk man, I think it's pretty charming even if it's not exactly the design choice I'd have gone with.
1. There is a link to a demo website, which is in fact in similar style.
2. I don't think the website is _nearly unreadable_.
3. Pretty rude remark.
> 2. I don't think the website is _nearly unreadable_.
For me personally, the color scheme is uncomfortable to read. Dark text on a dark background
It's the decades-old problem of blue on black, which has led to interminable discussions of which exact tint of blue should be ECMA-45 blue on a terminal. Pick one, it has poor contrast with a black background. Pick another, it has poor contrast with a white background.
* https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#dont_like_...
So, pick two? One for each background?
There is only one 'blue', colour number 4, in ECMA-45.
A terminal emulator could choose to display different foreground blues, depending on the background colour.
try the demo. it’s an entirely different style, which shows how versatile the tool is
It still doesn't reflect the design philosophy at all, though. A wacky approximation of early MacOS that offers nonfunctional UI affordances doesn't fit my bill of No obscurantist programming languages and styles, or simple, maintainable software akin to machines that need to work under all circumstances in the far north.
I was also a little disappointed with the philosophy's goals in general, which seem to be mostly the personal preferences of a lone-wolf style open source developer, not a universal approach to software design.
When you describe my programming and design philosophy as "the personal preferences of a lone-wolf style open source developer, not a universal approach to software design", I consider that the absolute best compliment I could have ever hoped for!
A "universal" approach to software design is the problem I am addressing, not the solution. Coming up with your own philosophy of design and implementation that works for you, and hopefully works for others, is how we get better software.
I'm not arguing with that, I think; I agree with your general sentiment and apparently read many of the same books you read as well. Yet I still believe there's value in a shared understanding of what quality software is, and what ideals to strive for in its conception.
> I was also a little disappointed with the philosophy's goals in general, which seem to be mostly the personal preferences of a lone-wolf style open source developer, not a universal approach to software design.
How would a universal approach to software design be in any way appropriate for this?
I like the general concept of software that treats its users as responsible adults, in the sense of not restricting them in how they can use the software; the analogy to machines that must work in remote areas with an extreme climate and no connection to the outside world is an apt one. Rejecting complexity in favour of maintainability, allowing to reach into and modify if necessary, those things I feel could be sharpened into proper, and universal guiding principles.
Troll trots out the old "You should only be allowed the web site aesthetic I approve of and anyone who doesn't agree with me is stupid!" and is shocked that not everyone on HN appreciates their insightful genius.
Some things are a standard, and thats a good thing... Line lenghts discussed here for example: https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability
HN Guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. [...] Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative. [...] Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
idk, the demo thingy looks great.
Obviously we have different monitors, but on mine the geneva-9 font doesn't render properly in the subpixels causing alternate green and purple, the underlines don't line up to the beginning of the words, and the whole thing stretches across the window the same way.
Could use some more attention to responsive layout though - too nav links aligned left flow into and overlap with top nav links aligned right. I’m on my phone right now so I can check but flex or plain old float could’ve solved that.
I prefer text over the whole width compared to websites that put all their content in the left 80 columns of the screen, taking up about a quarter of my screen width
Why does my eye need to move more than it needs to?
Why does my screen need to be used less than it needs to? If you're only going to use 1/4 of my screen for your content, you could at least put a cute cat picture in the rest of it or something
It is for sure readable, why so dramatic?
My vision isn’t great and I do find it more difficult to read comfortably than most sites. I haven’t checked the actual contrast ratio, but for this particular font and size the text color feels like it’s lacking strong contrast against the background. The tabs at the top are even more difficult to read comfortably than.
But I understand that sites that look this way are not made for maximum legibility, but as an in-group signifier.
The text flows over the whole width is one point, the paddings and margins is another one. Sure, you can read this if you really want, but it's painful.
I would like to introduce a wild concept -- browser window is resizable.
Do you think I will resize my browser window just because you fucked up your layout? No, I will leave.
sure, but I prefer this layout to majority of big tech today.
Gives me flexibility and choice and does not punish me with 600px wide content box because majority of users have trouble grasping the concept of window management.
Fair enough, I'd say for niche content it may be okay, but for targeting broader audiences I'd guess you lose many readers with that readability on fullscreen browser windows (what most people will have in front of them while surfing I guess).
if you move your mouse to the edge of your browser window it turns into a little bidiretional arrow, if you click then drag you can make your window more narrow until it suits your desired reading preference