My website is ugly because I made it

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Handcrafting vs. Templates

  • Many commenters resonate with building fully bespoke sites: custom CSS, homegrown static site generators, shell scripts, even toy HTTP servers.
  • The fun is in the making—like maintaining a classic car—not just “having” a website. Personal sites become playgrounds for experiments, Easter eggs, and odd UI (e.g., Lynx-only surprises, animated mascots).
  • Others prefer off‑the‑shelf tools (Hugo, Jekyll, Eleventy, WordPress, Bear Blog) to reduce friction and get on with writing.

Writing vs. Tinkering Tradeoff

  • Several people admit to spending vastly more time on backends, generators, and CSS than on content; this motivates some to return to simple SSGs or templates.
  • Counterpoint: a few report that once their small custom generator stabilized, it stopped being a time sink and hasn’t blocked publishing.

Aesthetics, “Ugliness,” and Identity

  • Strong disagreement on whether the featured personal site is ugly, cool, or nostalgic: some find it fun, “Geocities‑retro,” or even beautiful; others call it eye‑straining, chaotic, or nausea‑inducing.
  • Some liked the earlier minimalist design better and feel less receptive to the author’s message now that the site is more jarring.
  • One camp argues that “ugly but mine” is the whole point: authenticity and personal joy trump UX conventions. Critics counter that “made by me” doesn’t have to imply bad design or navigation.

Old Web Nostalgia and Non‑Conformity

  • Frequent nostalgia for Geocities/Freewebs/Flash‑era individuality: unreadable text, autoplay music, spinning skeletons, and all.
  • Modern template‑driven sites are seen as homogeneous, “millennial aesthetic” (grey, marble, Tailwind‑ish landing pages); personal weirdness is valued as resistance to this flattening.

Tooling, Hosting, and CSS Frustrations

  • Suggestions span Neocities, GitHub Pages, S3+CloudFront, Cloudflare, and cheap VPSes; some warn about AWS egress costs.
  • A long‑running meme around “centering a div” prompts discussion of CSS’s real complexity, especially vertical centering and responsive layouts.
  • Static sites, tables, and minimal/no JavaScript are praised, but mobile usability can suffer if responsiveness is ignored.

Cookies, UX, and “Good Internet” Irony

  • Many dislike the Good Internet Magazine page’s cookie banners and membership prompts; some find it more hostile than the “ugly” personal site.
  • A few jokingly add cookie popups purely for the “modern web” aesthetic.

AI and the Joy of Coding

  • Jokes about using LLMs to auto‑write posts so humans can focus on CSS; others explicitly avoid AI because writing code and handcrafting are the fun part—like hiking despite cars existing.