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Todor Todorov
Todor Todorov

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Simplicity to the Rescue (My New Personal Site)

Bored with the complexity in our life... No, let me start over:

...our super high technologically smart fast pacing enormously artificially intelligent algorithmic innovative life...

Long story short: I decided to make my new personal site simple.

What do you think? Simple, no?

P.S: For the creation I used the cutting edge newest versions of these enormously almost artificially intelligent tools:

  • vim (the latest cutting edge version)
  • an unknown to me until now command line tool, called 'boxes' (unknown version)

Here you can see a screenshot of my high-tech development IDE.

I would love to hear from you what do you think about my site, also about the simplicity or complexity in our life, the universe and everything.

Top comments (26)

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fultonbrowne profile image
Fulton Browne

love it! but what if you you could use the curl command and get that as an output?

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gypsydave5 profile image
David Wickes

That would be nice! You could use content negotiation to serve up plain text if Accept-Content is set to text/plain and html for text/html.

Would depend on the site not being static though, which rather defeats the point of the simplicity...

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tttfifo profile image
Todor Todorov

Hi David,

Unfortunately the site is static, but there is a workaround, this command works flawlessly:

$ curl ttt-fifo.github.io/ 2>/dev/null | tail -124 | head -116

Thank you, this is real fun :)

Cheer

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fultonbrowne profile image
Fulton Browne

Fair. What system do you run your setup on?

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tttfifo profile image
Todor Todorov

This is an Ubuntu machine for my personal projects. I really like to work at the command line, sometimes I do not start the GUI at all. Part of the reasons - I do not have any distractions while working. The other part - you can work on whatever hardware you want (old, slow PC is enough).

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gypsydave5 profile image
David Wickes
  • Deployed to an S3 bucket which hosts the static site using a Makefile.
  • Built using a custom generator what I wrote in Go (but could easily be pandoc I guess)
  • Written with vanilla vim. Or Emacs. Or acme. Depends on my mood.
  • Running on ... well, it depends. If I'm at work it's the MacBook. If I'm at home it's a much older MacBook running either Fedora or Slackware.
 
fultonbrowne profile image
Fulton Browne

i have to use intellij sooooo no command line for me :(

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tttfifo profile image
Todor Todorov

Poor FultonB :( You can use it at home sometimes...

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fultonbrowne profile image
Fulton Browne

I have a raspi at home that only does command line I will have to turn that on and learn

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tttfifo profile image
Todor Todorov

Yes, raspberry should be perfect for this vim setup. I have one forgotten in my locker at the office - I will try to set it up and see if OK for production use...

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tttfifo profile image
Todor Todorov

LoL, haha, I just tried it with curl, it comes out pretty decent :)
But it is best viewed with 'lynx' browser :)

Thank you, FultonB, really nice idea :)

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fultonbrowne profile image
Fulton Browne

thanks for the suggestion I have never seen that browser (I don't really use the command line as a frontend android developer) but i will try it.

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tttfifo profile image
Todor Todorov

lynx does not understand java script.
I think it is coming from the age of the dinosaurs :)
No frontend developer should know anything about lynx, do not worry...

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gypsydave5 profile image
David Wickes

I'm going to be picky, so please excuse me. I think your website looks great! But...

... is this 'simple'? Wouldn't it be simpler if it wasn't in a pre tag? What's simple about a fixed width font? What's simple about ASCII art?

If you'll excuse the swearing, I think the simplest you can (or should) go for would be

motherfuckingwebsite.com

but if you wanted it to look nice(r) try

bestmotherfucking.website

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tttfifo profile image
Todor Todorov

Absolutely correct, David!
It is not simple at all, because I have pre-designed what the browser would have done automatically during the download. Suprisingly it is not easy - took me 1hr to play with the 'ascii art' :)

Thank you for sharing the 'excuse my french' links :)

At the end of the day - this is mostly for fun ;)

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leob profile image
leob • Edited

Love your site! Definitely a super original style that stands out from the rest ... main part of your site is just a

piece of text here
block with fixed font text, styled as a piece of paper made with an old fashioned typewriter (even including an ascii art dog ear upper left) - simply genius !
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tttfifo profile image
Todor Todorov

Thank you leob!

I did not know about the dog ear :)

Cheers and have fun!

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leob profile image
leob

Yeah the dogear in the left upper corner of the "page" en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dogear ... nice detail!

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tttfifo profile image
Todor Todorov

Really cool!
I learned one Engilsh verb today!
Thanks!

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leob profile image
leob

Yes or a noun ... well I'm also still learning words all the time, English isn't my native tongue so you keep learning stuff every day (and not forgetting, hopefully) :-)

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rdrey profile image
Rainer Dreyer

Looks great, Todor!

I would invert the top 2 boxes, so your name is in the top-left. At least my eyes are drawn to the "Location" over and over and not to your name.

The background might be a little too dark. It will be easier to read if you pick a whiter grey. (Especially on dim laptop screens.) But that's just my personal preference. :)

Congrats!

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tttfifo profile image
Todor Todorov

Hi Rainer,

Done and done!

I moved the "picture" to the left - your remark is correct, of course, people look for the most important information upper left first.

I made the background for a little bit lighter also.

You know what is funny?
We are two backend guys discussing frontend web design LoL :)

At least I am not much into the web design, do not know about you though, sorry if I jump into conclusions...

Thank you very much for the constructive remarks!

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rdrey profile image
Rainer Dreyer

Hehe, no worries. Yeah, I work 99% on the backend. Any design I do is "programmer art".

My first personal website also used the text-only style as inspiration: web.archive.org/web/20151017110421...

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tttfifo profile image
Todor Todorov

:)

I like it very much!

Cheers!

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chloecondon profile image
Chloe Condon 🎀

I love this so much! I may have to take some notes and make my own version 🤩

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tttfifo profile image
Todor Todorov

Thank you Chloe,

Be aware that this is my best photo.
I even phoshoped it to look nicer :)

Cheers and have fun!