Hello, This is my first website and I want some feedback from you guys. It’s very basic and I haven’t added much. just wanted to host something so I threw invidious and whoogle instance there. My ISP doesn’t provide a static IP so I had to host it on tor :( what else do you think I should host there? server spec: 15 year old computer with i3 first gen cpu.
Edit: Here is the URL if you want to visit the website: ot6ewcgzioleglf2jp2iofludol3hw5gcaycaj7n5tolf6wcu7ofbzid.onion
Looks fine for your first website! I would change the colour of the text, though. Black on another dark colour is kinda harder to read. You can catch these problems by opening Firefox Dev Tools (F12), going to the Accessibility tab, and changing “Check for issues” to “Contrast”. It’ll list all the elements that have too low a contrast ratio.
Done! I have changed the text color. this website is great to get color contrast. https://coolors.co/contrast-checker/d2e2f4-083445
It needs an “Under construction” animated gif
Plain old static HTML is fine, and you can host it on a potato! Here are some design tips to keep it easy to read. None of them are objectively correct, and you are already doing some of them. They are just some suggestions as you move forward:
- Don’t use dark-on-dark fonts. Use near-black on off-white or at least something high contrast.
- Break up content using horizontal rules <hr> and various headers <h1 to h6> You can style both of them in css. This keeps things easy to find and read.
- Generally, do not center-align text if it is more than one line. If you need to display blocks of text side-by-side, put each in a container then left-align the text within those containers.
- Use a bigger font than you think is strictly necessary.
- My preference is to use sans-serif fonts. Google makes some good free ones. Sometimes I’ll go back and make titles serif only.
- Resize and compress your images. A bit higher resolution than you need but with lower quality is usually better than the reverse (for jpegs)
make titles serif only
I don’t want to question your aesthetic choices but I think it hurts readability.
They’re hosting on tor, they probably don’t want internet hosted fonts from Google. There are tons of CC licenses fonts available that are very useable.
I have seen multiple references to running software “on a potato” in the last hour. What in the world does it mean to run something on a potato? (Like… pickle electricity? That’s all I’ve got.) Please advise…
A potato is a very slow computer. Usually old and / or low quality. I’ve got no idea where it comes from though.
It originally referred to a camera, so a meme to draw attention to poor quality pictures–“camera is potato” and then “potato quality”
I would imagine it comes from the fact that you can generate electricity with potatoes
You could get a free oracle cloud instance https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
Free dns https://freedns.afraid.org/
Then use letsencrypt to get free SSL certificates
Then you’ll have a site that is secure and validates correctly with almost all web browsers.
You could run services in oracle cloud, or use ssh or OpenVPN to proxy traffic to your home server, or other providers free tier machines
I’d recommend Duck DNS over Free DNS these days.
And Wireguard over OpenVPN.
But yes, this is the easiest free way to stand up a solid website. Only other thing I’d add is to put sites and services behind a reverse proxy. Typically I’ve used Nginx but I’m quickly becoming a Caddy convert.
FreeDNS requires you to log in to their website once a month or so to keep your DNS name active or they will revoke it. DuckDNS doesn’t require that. It’s free and it works. I set it up forever ago and never have to touch it, with FreeDNS I was risking losing my name or having my services go down if I missed their nag email.
i disagree with the color of the text. too much contrast. may I suggest it being dark blue?
I like my users to have an interactive experience where they have to select the text in order to read it
I prefer to encourage active reading, by forcing them to move the mouse along as they read.
