For a while I have always wanted to start writing a blog or atleast have some sort of personal homepage. I have made several attempts to do this. First with github pages, then gitlab pages and now codeberg. I always started the pages got some simple stuff up and then never got to writing anything (due to being distracted with other things). It was a always a blank page in a style that I didn't entirely like. Now I have decided to change that. I am going to spend the next few days and write up some good css styling in style that is truly mine. I have even started some basic articles which are under construction. Here is the site if anyone is wondering: => https://257m.codeberg.page/. Feel free to critic it and give suggestions in how I can style it. I am trying to make minimalistic and functional while having it also be pleasant to the eye. Maybe I should use a lighter font color?
This is my first time posting here. It seems like a cool place. Might just stick around.
Also any suggestions on how to get good on writing? My writing is a bit bland right now (not that I have a lot of content anyway).
Honestly, the trick is to do it, dislike it, and try again. There's no tricks to writing well, or to creating websites, other than to sit down and do it, to completion or close enough, again and again and again.
How to get good at writing? Write.
Julia Cameron wrote a book called The Artists' Way that has awesome advice for letting your inner creative out.
And a couple of the things I've picked up are:
• You take care of quantity and let time/experience take care of the quality.
• You can't get better and look good at the same time... be happy to suck for a while.
• Keep your butt in the chair and write.
Good luck!
i love it. i use lynx sometimes when i browse in my free time, so it's perfect for that.
my site has also been simple & html-only since i discovered gemini/smallweb, and it's my favorite iteration of my personal site yet. i'm sure it's crafted poorly, but i don't care because i made it quickly and i can maintain it simply :-)
as far as writing tips, your writing looks great to me. it gets the point across, flows well, & isn't fluffy. i love 'bland.'
but if you want to hone your style to better appease your internal critics, what works for me (i'd like to think!) is just writing, reading, & trying to be an interesting person.
i don't believe in the 10,000 hour rule at all, but i do believe that writing is a great way to get better at writing. writing intentionally and not just to hit word counts. writing is a way to play around with ideas. to figure out & refine my style. to experiment with different techniques for making external a portion of my internal thoughts. mainly this 'playing' helps me realize which of my existing habits/tendencies annoy me the most by repeatedly bringing them to the surface and forcing confrontation.
reading is another way, of course. when i read writing that i like, i'll try to find a way to incorporate bits & pieces of its essence into my own writing. or i'll at least mess around with it for a bit.
doing other non-writing things might be the best way to write better (imo). writing is best when the writer is unique, interesting, & interested in what they're writing. 10,000 hours of practice can't make somebody interesting, just capable of transmitting their ideas in an effective way (which is nice, but secondary to the content of the writing, to me). i would rather read "bad" writing from a niche/inspired perspective than technically- or stylistically-competent writing from somebody with few/basic/irrelevant interests. people can be good at writing, have good 'taste,' or both.
i guess a final suggestion/idea might be to write privately from time to time. it personally helps me sometimes if i know from the start that something i'm writing won't be read by others. it enables more fluidity & freedom, for one, but it also means i can scrap a piece of writing the moment i lose interest in it or realize it's too far gone. but that freedom can be good or bad, i guess.
I like it, its simple and keeps to the point of an easy accessible blog.
I'm currently using Hugo via Emacs (read: write posts in org, export to markdown, post to static site generator which rebuilds the site, all done with a single trigger).
One problem I have with HTML only websites, is that they're just a little bit too boring for me. I detest JS library bloat, but I do love vanilla JavaScript.
Check out this Hugo theme: its simple, accessible, and just interactive enough to be pleasant.
I totally get where you are coming from on the topic of writing. It's almost as if we work on making every aspect of the vessel to carry the work but deny ourselves from actually doing the work.
Writing is not easy. It'll take a metric ton of writing to "get good". My advice would be to hold a "fuck it, we ball" attitude and just write your heart out. So what if it's bad? Better to have a mess to show for your efforts than nothing but a blank slate.
A lighter font against your dark background would provide better contrast and thus easier reading.
I'd suggest running your pages through <https://wave.webaim.org/>, or (in the case of your homepage) checking out <https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://257m.codeberg.page/>. There's minimalist web design, and then there's inaccessible web design, and I'd hate to have to use a screen reader to visit your website.
Likewise, it's plain that you're designing your pages to be read in text-mode browsers. I'd suggest at least adding the standard viewport meta tag so that it doesn't look terrible on janky old mobile devices.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1" />
I'm curious as to why you're using <div id="main">. HTML5 (which you get using the "html" doctype) provides tags like <header>, <main>, <article>, <section>, and <footer>. These semantic tags make it easier for humans and machines to understand a page's structure, and make your page more accessible to people using screen readers and other assistive technologies.
I'd also suggest running your pages through the W3C validator. I did that with your home page and it turned up some errors. Check out <https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2F257m.codeberg.page%2F>.