Very often I see aspiring website authors quickly make life complicated for themselves by deciding they need a blog, which then leads to numerous questions about tools and processes that can easily draw anyone into busywork. That time could otherwise have been spent on actually writing posts, articles, games, demos, etc. for their website that one can look back with joy months or years later.

Website busywork is probably fine for people who genuinely want to spend their time thinking about tools and processes. But if you just want to put your thoughts out there, it can be more fruitful to simply publish HTML, written directly or converted from your favourite text format such Markdown, AsciiDoc, etc.

This is a topic I care about quite a bit and my complete thoughts about this would be too long for an HN comment, so I will just share a link to a post I wrote about this recently, in case someone finds value in it: https://susam.net/writing-first-tooling-second.html

I would genuinely like to see more personal websites, because they make the Web more diverse and more interesting.

I cannot remember if it was here or elsewhere but there was an amazing blogpost making fun of beginner and intermediate "coding" tutorials (coding as a catch-all for programming, markdown, etc.) where the author assumes the reader has deep familiarity with the subject at hand and all of its jargon. This has the exact same vibe.

https://htmlforpeople.com/

It takes me right back to 1998, making my first few web pages - with a hand-rolled index page. I probably used NotePad.

And how easy it was - I went from reading a “how to HTML” guide to having a page about whatever hobby I was into at the time in a single session. Can’t have been much more than an hour.

I guess I deployed via FTP, into the space my ISP provided.

Armed with a CD copy of the web site, I moved it over to my hosted space. I setup password-access, and setup the syuidy group, and from there on, I frequently put in one-liner paragraphs from the professor, she sometimes managed to get them to me soon enough that I could put them in before class started that day.

I would like about 5000 more of these by tomorrow, kthxbai.

For my homepage I also don't use a CMS, I write raw HTML or convert markdown documents; my homepage URL is in my profile.

Consider checking profiles of others too, a lot of HN users share their web pages there, they are often minimal and a great source of inspiration; and there are many cool ones in this comment section already.

[1]: https://secretgeek.github.io/html_wysiwyg/html.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey#Composer

My answer is usually that you can write whatever you want on your websites. It's yours after all. None of the limitations that exist on third-party platforms exist. You can make all the pages read upside down if you want to.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-should-i-write-about

No, you need less than that! :-)

    ┍━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┑
    │                     how-to-make-a-damn-website.html                      │
    ├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
    │ <title>How to Make a Damn Website</title>                                │
    │ <h1>How to Make a Damn Website</h1>                                      │
    │                                                                          │
    │                                                                          │
    │ <p>A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start  │
    │ or they get stuck.</p>                                                   │
    ┕━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┙

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

Give me simple instructions about that stuff prior to creating the contents and id be happy.

> Don’t shop around for a CMS. Don’t even design or outline your website. Don’t buy a domain or hosting yet. Don’t set up a GitHub repository; I don’t care how fast you can make one.

I wonder how a beginner is supposed to know what a CMS is, a domain/hosting or a GitHub repository. This is not explained at all.

> Finished? Great. If you have a domain and hosting, make a new folder on your server called blog and upload your first post in there

I don't, I am a beginner! I don't even know what this means! And even if I do have a server, how do I upload a file to it?

> If you don’t have a domain or hosting yet, now’s the time to buckle down and do that. Unfortunately, I don’t have good advice for you here. Just know that it’s going to be stupid and tedious and bad and unfun. That’s just the way this is.

Oh thanks. But it really isn't. On netlify for example you can just drag a folder that contains your website and it's up immediately. Similarly on neocities.

> If you have images or other media in your post, be sure to use the absolute URL to a resource rather than a relative one.

You should consider explaining what they are and how to use them.

This post is useless for "people [who] want to make a website but don’t know where to start or they get stuck"

http://pho.tiyuti.com

Just lists of title, pic, blurb, url

Doesn't take much.

I'm still using Dreamweaver 8 from 2004 to edit some sites. I paid for it as a boxed product, including the right to transfer it to a replacement computer. It's on its fourth replacement computer now, running under Wine emulation on Linux.

The sites load really fast.

There were a few attempts to build open source tools like Dreamweaver, but they all seem to have been abandoned.

I literally laughed out loud. This is so on point, and so is the rest of the article.