> Here’s another test. Close your eyes (not yet! Finish this sentence first) and try to remember what color your color theme uses for class names? Can you?
Yeah. Pink for keywords, orange for arguments, yellow for strings, green for functions, blue for classes and purple for constants.
But it’s not even important if you can. Having different colors helps you quickly / unconsciously filter through different parts of your code. I agree it can be too distracting to have lots of colors (especially with semantic highlighting, which I’m no particular fan of for that reason), but a carefully calibrated theme helps most people I think.
I can also certainly imagine that some brains just work differently. Maybe for some people colors just add more noise?
Hey, thanks for reading and it's great to read your interesting discussions.
Couple of things.
The main reason to move my data to the EU is that I live in the EU and I don't want a few non-EU companies in an unstable political climate have control over it. It's too unpredictable and I rather support companies closer to my jurisdiction.
I know the EU isn't perfect. And my stack is not 100% EU at the moment. I'm a pragmatist and just got down and transitioned the bulk of my services. Always room for improvement.
Some good points: my domain is owned by the US. That's true, but no way around it I guess (I do own the .nl too though).
I should dive deeper into using something else than GitHub / GitLab. Indeed maybe Codeberg / Forgejo.
And Cloudflare proved not to be ideal today (thanks for the hug of death). I still think using Cloudflare is a problem data-wise, because it only handles public data, but I might look at BunnyCDN again to see if they have better limits.
To be honest I implemented Lettermint before I migrated to Scaleway, so I didn't even look at TEM. At that point I was more than happy though. And I like to support my fellow Dutch startups too.
Well this is nice. Apparently I reached some limits (thanks all), and had to pay Cloudflare more. Fair I guess, although some warning would've been nice. Tried multiple payment options multiple times just now and Cloudflare botched every time without giving me an error message. Finally managed to get it through on the 10th time. Please be gentle now :/
That sucks... Bunny CDN served me and others great when it comes to a Cloudflare alternative, if you're looking for an alternative.
I understand the pragmatism with going with CF, but I'd lie if I didn't also say using CF as the front for your entire "European Digital Stack" kind of makes the blog-post feel less authentic compared to my initial impression, because of that.
Oh that's "funny". Where I work we used to pay for cloudflare, then the credit card expired and we didn't notice in time (our bad, for sure), now our account still works fine, just no premium features and all tickets we've made in order to _resume paying them_ have gone unanswered. Big shrug
I want point out the other aspect of that decision to use cloudflare because the content is already public.
If your users are in a sanctioned region or a sanctioned entity it is entirely possible for cloudflare to deny serving them traffic. In a way your website users are still bound to the US policies even if you or your country doesnt approve of those sanctions.
fwiw I've had my site on front page hn a couple of times. It is a completely unoptimized hetzner server running nginx and serving HTML.
computers are _fast_ these days, you're more likely to have an outage from cloudflare than by just skipping it IMO (for basic personal sites, like yours seems to be)
My website is absolutely for me. Anyone who wants to visit is welcome though, I put it online for a reason. (You're also free to move along for that matter, that's up to you.)
The article states "A website isn't art". This product mindset fundamentally makes the web a boring place. I would personally welcome all websites that are art.
One distinction the author didn't make was personal sites vs product / services sites. My personal site is for me, but the site for my SaaS app? That's for my customers.
Business minded folk can convince themselves that "ads are for the consumer because they benefit from knowing about our great deals!" but everyone else knows that ads are for the business to increase revenue. If they didn't increase revenue, the business wouldn't do it.
If your website provides an actual utility, then that utility is for the customers. Everything else on the site (upsells, cross sells, branding), is for the business.
I was merely trying to convey that when I go to a restaurant website, I want to: see the menu, make a reservation, see hours. There is a specific list of reasons I would go to your restaurant website. It is utility that serves me.
If I go to your restaurant's website and have to dig to find the menu and the page is just plastered with "Fine dining with a wonderful view" and pictures of models eating... that's not helping me, that's advertising to me. And now your website is no longer a utility/service, it is a billboard. The only reason I tolerate the billboard is because of the utility, and if the utility doesnt exist, why would I ever come back.
Wouldn't it be nice if there were less of a distinction? Think of old school mom-and-pop shops, which were actually a reflection of who they were, personally, vs. Wal-Mart or Target. Which main street do you prefer?
Depends on what I'm trying to do. I don't need your whole life story, Sarah, about how this recipe reminds you of your great aunt's second cousin's half sister's second home balcony plants. I'm just trying to figure out what seasoning blend makes up blackening spice. I'm not even here for the meatloaf recipe, just the spice blend.
9 times out of 10 I'd listen to Sarah's stories. Is buying a spice blend really so urgent and important? So much of life is lived incidental to transactions. Not everything improves with productivity.
Whichever converts better is good for their business and actually supports the mom and pop business materially over merely aesthetic views on their website design.
The article makes no mention of "personal" nor "business". Why not mention that it's talking about business websites? The original author made a (wrong) blanket statement, and monokai called them out on it.
The article doesn't need to make explicit mention of it because it's implied in the article's content:
> The website isn't for the founder, the marketing manager, or the board. It's for the person you've never met - the customer weighing up a purchase, the lead chasing a phone number, the visitor sizing up your credibility or the member signing up to access gated content.
Which personal website has a "founder, the marketing manager, or the board" much less a "customer weighing up a purchase?"
I really like generative art. It's part intellectual ingenuity, part aesthetics.
I've only realized later that it had a name, but since I've had my hands on a computer, I've been making generative graphics with code one way or another. First in GWBasic, later in Flash, and more recently in JavaScript.
In my view generate art is art created by an autonomous system. The trick is to balance randomness with intent and to create clever algorithms with maximum visual impact. Nowadays the term "generative" is more associated with AI, and to differentiate it from AI Art, I call it Algorithmic Art now. I wrote a piece about it: https://monokai.com/articles/algorithmic-art-as-a-subset-of-...
And I know NFT's are frowned upon here, but I've always found Algorithmic Art a perfect match for NFT's. Where before I created autonomous systems that ephemerally generated different outputs each run, now you can store specific outputs on the blockchain by just storing the PRNG seed. There are platforms that facilitate this, like Artblocks or Fxhash.
Generative systems often produce random outputs every time it runs. When run in a browser, an output just vanishes after a refresh and is usually never found again if you haven't saved the PRNG seed.
Using a blockchain, you can store a specific output of your generative system in a way that's definitive and collaboratively agreed upon. If you believe in collecting / trading digital assets, that's a prerequisite for algorithmic systems.
I'm not sure I manage to follow accurately. If you don't save the art you make then it's gone, generative or not. If you do save the output in some way (either by saving the output itself or saving the full information needed to regenerate the output) what is special about doing so on the blockchain vs anywhere else beyond the aforementioned proof of ownership?
One is of course allowed to care about proof of ownership and the method used to do so if they like :). I just didn't follow the response in context of the question of how it's different from doing the same without the blockchain otherwise.
Unrelated: Kickass you're the Monokai author - I still use that today! Have you ever posted a retrospective about Monokai?
A generative system can produce an infinity of outputs. An art platform combined with a blockchain allows you to store a finite number of outputs from the same system definitively without knowing upfront what the outputs would look like. This forces you to think carefully about your system: it should produce interesting works with each iteration. Some people call this long form generative art.
The special thing is that it’s decentralized. I know this discussion will not resolve and I’m not a blockchain zealot. I do think it’s an elegant decentralized storage system for algorithmic art where you make outputs definitive and collectible after initiating a run.
I think that's more than fair - "I like blockchain for decentralized proof of ownership more than other methods for the same." is as fine a preference as any other, of course.
This seems, either intentionally or unintentionally, an extremely narrow view of art.
E.g. are the artists who worked on Flow (2024) no longer artists because the resulting images are generated rather than drawn? Most people would disagree, and hold/put forth a very different definition as a result, given even they were already credited as the artists on the piece before I asked the question.
Even the arguments in the courts about AI, which is a very different kind of "generated" output, stuck to showing the outputs can't be copyrighted rather than trying to argue whether the outputs were still art as the problem.
Yeah. Pink for keywords, orange for arguments, yellow for strings, green for functions, blue for classes and purple for constants.
But it’s not even important if you can. Having different colors helps you quickly / unconsciously filter through different parts of your code. I agree it can be too distracting to have lots of colors (especially with semantic highlighting, which I’m no particular fan of for that reason), but a carefully calibrated theme helps most people I think.
I can also certainly imagine that some brains just work differently. Maybe for some people colors just add more noise?