Website development (+ tech support)

[beeps]

Everybody needs a site, having a site's pretty tight. I would say that though, making them's my job.

I do think folks should at least try having a personal homepage, though, somewhere you can create and publish whatever you feel like without the restrictions of formatting or moderation that most other web platforms require.

I also know that shit ain't easy, so I always wanna help people along too. Be that through helping solve problems or doing complementary accessibility audits, because accessibility is kinda important.

If you already have a site, feel free to show it off here. Otherwise, get on Neocities, y'all. (Other web hosting platforms are available.)

[linuxavali]

heya beeps,

What do you think of mine? https://linuxpony.dev/

It seems to pass the accessibilitychecker.org checkes for USA when I tried it but I would be interested to hear your opinion as someone concerned with accessibility.

[ihddn]

I want to recommend https://tomodashi.com/kiki Kiki - while the hosting side is a bit more complicated since you need the right PHP support, the website construction is a delight and very hackable, I'll have mine back up soon. I was hosting it off a raspi3 until a few days ago but I wanted to use that device for another project but I'll get it hosted again soon.

[beeps]

heya beeps,

What do you think of mine? https://linuxpony.dev/

It seems to pass the accessibilitychecker.org checkes for USA when I tried it but I would be interested to hear your opinion as someone concerned with accessibility.

Without going into a full on audit (cuz those take me several hours and get really long), some issues I've noticed skimming the homepage:

1. The hamburger menu icon isn't keyboard focusable and doesn't have an accessible label (text within it that screen readers can announce, an aria-label attribute, or an aria-labelledby attribute with the ID of a different element with an accessible label). The technique you used on the social icons should work fine here.
2. The navigation items that lead to the age gate are marked up as links, but behave like button elements. Same for the 'cancel' button in the age gate. They should probably be buttons.
3. The age gate modal retains the aria-hidden="true" attribute value when it is visible. This should switch to false.
4. Most of the links on the page don't meet a minimum 4.5:1 contrast ratio. They appear to be #467cca on #333333, which is a 3:1 ratio.
5. The green Derpibooru-style tags you use also don't have enough contrast between the text and background colours.
6. The arrows and dots on image carousels lack a keyboard focus state. It seems that that the styles associated with the Slick library has removed them.
7. A lot of the images in carousels seem to have repeated alternate text (e.g. "Reference sheet for [character]"). Alt text should ideally describe the contents of the image, not just the purpose, though in situations like this, you can probably be quite brief about the differences, such as only detailing the character design in the first image's alt text, then shortening it afterwards. I have a blog post on writing effective alt text if that helps.

Keep in mind that I work to the WCAG 2.2 Level AA standard, which may just be stricter than what that tool uses for US-based websites (though AFAIK it shouldn't be).

[linuxavali]

Thanks for that! I was curious. I'll fix the easy things but I plan to do a full re-write in the near future. This site is definitely not my best work and I really have grown to hate the "slick" library.

[linuxavali]

Okay, I fixed 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7.

For 3, I couldn't reproduce what you described in FireFox or Chrome unless you meant `aria-hidden=false` was invalid. Either way I made it remove the attribute instead now.

I'll deal with 6 later since it will likely be me just ripping out Slick

I also read through your blog post and noticed some of the example images didn't have alt tags, but I assume that was intentional for illustrative purposes?

[beeps]

Haven't thoroughly re-tested but at a glance things look better!

One thing I did miss earlier (probably because I was focused on the keyboard focusable issue with it) is that the hamburger menu should probably also be a button element.

For 3, I couldn't reproduce what you described in FireFox or Chrome unless you meant `aria-hidden=false` was invalid. Either way I made it remove the attribute instead now.

When I was testing the `aria-hidden="true"` attribute and value was persisting even when the modal was visible. Which might've been a bug somewhere, but regardless, removing the attribute entirely is probably fine.

I also read through your blog post and noticed some of the example images didn't have alt tags, but I assume that was intentional for illustrative purposes?

I explain that in the 'exceptions' part of the post. :3

[linuxavali]

One thing I did miss earlier (probably because I was focused on the keyboard focusable issue with it) is that the hamburger menu should probably also be a button element.

Great catch! Fixed that and the menu close button just now.

I explain that in the 'exceptions' part of the post. :3

I did read that section but I wasn't 100% sure. Thanks for clarifying.

[lopodyr]

Thanks for making this thread. It finally pushed me to get into making a website on NeoCities! I'll report back once I have stories to share haha.

[Lemma]

I really need to revamp my site... it's still hosting via gh pages and also just Looks Bad lmao I gotta give it another go

[beeps]

I really need to revamp my site... it's still hosting via gh pages and also just Looks Bad lmao I gotta give it another go

A bad looking personal site is better than no personal site, IMO!

[CrypticNoodle]

I currently have a site done in Carrd atm, but I'm considering building my own website at some point. Any pointers for someone who's very much a newbie to HTML/CSS would very much be appreciated, by anyone in this forum topic.

[Finchtale]

I currently have a site done in Carrd atm, but I'm considering building my own website at some point. Any pointers for someone who's very much a newbie to HTML/CSS would very much be appreciated, by anyone in this forum topic.

My advice is to just go for it
fuck around and find out basically
And whenever you hit any roadblock, look up how to do what you're trying to do. There's a lot of really good resources online for HTML/CSS.

I know this is maybe not the kind of advice you're looking for, but it's what I did for my website :p
And as with any new skill: Be patient with it and, more importantly, with yourself.

[beeps]

And don't be afraid to ask questions! I (and probably others here) are totally happy to help you along.

[plumpan]

Once I get done reworking the contents of my site a bit I need to see about adding a blogger style sidebar. I'm not sure if I can graft that into my CMS because I don't think it provides that information for templating without using a separate plugin. I also want to sit down and convert everything into some SSGs for fun so I'll probably learn how to do the sidebar then, and then turn around and see if I can do it in my CMS or not.

Then once all of that is done, I can go back and start asking questions about if my site needs small changes.

I'm very surprised there is not a CMS that basically acts as a remote SSG, so you get the benefits of just logging into a website to make posts, but also the speed and security of an otherwise static site. I heard that maybe some old wikis did this? But I've not found anything remotely up to date which does this.

Ironically, I have found tools that are basically a local CMS that builds a static site, which is the exact opposite!

I currently have a site done in Carrd atm, but I'm considering building my own website at some point. Any pointers for someone who's very much a newbie to HTML/CSS would very much be appreciated, by anyone in this forum topic.

This is more a personal opinion than anything but I'm more happy if someone learned enough raw HTML to make an extremely basic "white with blue links" page to link to other sites, rather than use something like carrd. Yes it doesn't look fancy, but someone took the time and effort to make it. I love that. Don't be afraid to start out small.

Past that, like others have said the best way is to just start messing with it. Learn how to use your browser's inspector tools so you can find a website you like and start copying HTML and CSS out of it, and change it until you like it. You can use this to play around with other people's sites too, since it just changes things in your local browser.

If you're on Linux there's a plethora of very basic local web servers you can use so you can actually just write an HTML and CSS file instead of working exclusively out of the browser (or inlining all of your CSS). I like Python's built in server, and that should work on MacOS too. On Windows, https://simplewebserver.org/ looks good.

[beeps]

I'm very surprised there is not a CMS that basically acts as a remote SSG, so you get the benefits of just logging into a website to make posts, but also the speed and security of an otherwise static site. I heard that maybe some old wikis did this? But I've not found anything remotely up to date which does this.

You can kinda do this via GitHub if you set up a deployment pipeline via GitHub Actions, but that is definitely more Advanced Shit territory than I expect most people to bother with.

[plumpan]

You can kinda do this via GitHub if you set up a deployment pipeline via GitHub Actions, but that is definitely more Advanced Shit territory than I expect most people to bother with.

I do not like GitHub!

I guess that'd also be possible on SourceHut since they have CICD stuff, but the whole point of it being on a website is that it's easier to manage and update. I'm always kind of surprised people are willing to use Git for such things when the website isn't directly attached to an existing Git project.

[beeps]

I guess that'd also be possible on SourceHut since they have CICD stuff, but the whole point of it being on a website is that it's easier to manage and update. I'm always kind of surprised people are willing to use Git for such things when the website isn't directly attached to an existing Git project.

Source control, innit. I want to keep versions of stuff somewhere, might as well be the GitHub account I already gotta use for other stuff. And it lets you edit stuff directly in the web interface which can be handy sometimes.

[Bee]

This is my website!
https://bumblebee.city/

I first made it when Twitter was going to shit. Haven't updated it in nearly a year, and found out recently the little Fennel in the corner doesn't work as intended on Firefox... I kinda wanna fix it up some more at some point, maybe add a little more personality.

[Micolithe]

I have had many iterations of my website but the current one, built in the aftermath of Cohost shutting down, runs on OctoberCMS. I've mostly been using it to talk about TV shows that I watch.

The most recent iteration before this was built on Joomla, and then during an upgrade attempt the whole thing broke.

https://micolithe.us

[rhubarb_nido]

I'm a web developer! I have a social links site that I made with 11ty on Github Pages. I want to add some other sections like hosting my commissioned art! https://rhubarb.gay/

I also have a Wordpress blog, but it's more about my worksona than my furry self. https://www.bensweedler.com/

It's annoying maintaining Wordpress, I would love to switch to a static site generator. Perhaps keep the CMS part of Wordpress and use it as a backend to generate the site? Dunno, at that point feels like I should consider other CMS's.