Hot Page – a graphical site builder

by microflash • 2 years ago

449 107 2 years ago

Thanks so much or the early Saturday morning flashback to my Geocities page. Can you add a spinning “under construction” sign, those were my favorites.

microflash2• 2 years ago

Not my project so can't change anything but I posted this because I got those Geocities vibes too :)

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

You should have seen the previous home page: https://old.hot.page/ I really loved the idea of nodding to Web 1.0 but it was a little toooo clunky heh

jsjohnst4• 2 years ago

Where’s the AI? Feels like an obvious add-on for something like this. :)

crimsoneer• 2 years ago

My god man, not everything needs AI.

croes• 2 years ago

According to MS it does.

jsjohnst4• 2 years ago

My god man, not everything needs AI.

1. This is a tongue in cheek website builder, something generative AI would be great at making images (Dalle, Imagen, MJ) and text (GPT4, Claude, Gemini, etc) for a product like this

2. Basically every website builder of substance has AI features now

So maybe chill with the hyperbolic language? ;)

lovegrenoble2• 2 years ago

No way!

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

It only uses all-natural organic intelligence, trained with love by caring people!

lovegrenoble2• 2 years ago

Strange but lovely design

wildrhythms• 2 years ago

Love the aesthetic they're using here. Reminds me of another project in this same vein https://mmm.page/

macsparrow• 2 years ago

Really cool! Love the demo option to try it out instead of just signing up.

spacebacon• 2 years ago

Great nostalgic design. You’ve built something nice here.

ianred2• 2 years ago

The pricing, bandwidth 5GB for $9 a month? This sounds unreasonably high

cqqxo4zV46cp• 2 years ago

This…isn’t S3. Bandwidth is just part of how they’re segmenting.

ianred2• 2 years ago

What does it have to do with S3? Average webpage with JS will weight at about 200kb per initial load, without images. Do the math how many page views and indexing bots will consume before the real user can even find the page.

system24• 2 years ago

I can get a WordPress-installed VPS with cPanel (or alternative, or a distro of my choice) for $4 with 20 TB bandwidth. IP6 for $3.9~

5 GB is extremely small for what it is.

gigatree• 2 years ago

The creator’s Twitter looks sketchy - a couple months old, handful of ChatGPT posts, then this.

dools• 2 years ago

Could also just mean they're shit at social media

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

this (I know because they're my accounts)

tecleandor2• 2 years ago

Being a clone of Hotglue doesn't help either.

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

It's sketchy because I don't really like social media heh. I only created these social accounts to promote Hot Page so that's why they are only a few months old. I somehow hoped my writing was better than ChatGPT. Now I kinda wish I had just used it -- that would have saved a lot of time!

thenthenthen• 2 years ago

Inspired by Hotglue[1], the opensource content manipulation system thats also self-hostable (duh)?

[1]https://hotglue.me/

tecleandor2• 2 years ago

Ah, you beat me to it. Looks like a closed source hotglue clone/saas/inspiration. They shouldn't have used that similar name if they're not related to the original project.

Anyway, it's sad Hotglue hasn't seen development in the last years, some friends use it for their personal sites...

badsectoracula• 2 years ago

I don't think it is very similar. Personally i thought of HoTMeTaL, an old HTML/page editor that was popular for a little bit during the 90s and had a similar approach of showing the page in a visual quasi-WYSIWYG + quasi-element-tree mode.

AstroJetson3• 2 years ago

Wow, it's been a minute since I used HoTMeTal, I loved that editor. I cranked out a lot of HTML with it, once you got the hang of what it wanted you to do, it would be your best friend. We switched to Dreamweaver, of course that lasted until Adobe bought it. But thanks for the memory, this thread has been the Saturday treat.

rchaud4• 2 years ago

Hotglue was the first thing I thought of as well. Truly freeform web design that allowed for custom code and styles via editing the <head> section. Installation for the most part required nothing besides dropping a folder into a PHP-enabled web server.

I wrote a blog post reviewing it a couple of months back: https://rafichaudhury.com/site/blog/Freehand-Web

ch-rs2• 2 years ago

I read your post at the time and found it really inspiring!

I've been working on my own Hotglue fork to hack in some of the features we were missing like draft pages and responsive "safe areas" like MMM.page.

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

Hey, Hot Page is my project but somehow I was not aware of Hot Glue. And reviewing it now I would hazard to say the projects are superficially similar. Hot Page is a visual/drag-and-drop web editor that uses no abstractions so the whole time you're using it you have complete control of the resulting DOM (all elements, nesting, attributes, CSS rules, etc). So it's kind of like CodePen but for building real sites. I wrote more about this philosophy here: https://hot.page/takes/picking-the-right-abstraction

crowdstriker2• 2 years ago

Yeah, Hot Page, had no clue Hot Glue exists.... Stop lying.

supermatt• 2 years ago

or HoTMetaL, or HotDog - both of which were html editors in the 90s.

kamikazeturtles• 2 years ago

The landing page looks really nice!

How does one create web pages like this without using a tool like the above? Would animating html elements with javascript be sufficient?

talksnocode• 2 years ago

You can use CSS to style the pages that way with a combination of font, box-shadow offsets without blur and overriding the box-shadow using :hover pseudo selector (also adding a translation effect).

dartharva• 2 years ago

While checking this out I came across this site (https://alice.hot.page/) in its showcase as one of the examples and legit spent five minutes reading Alice in Wonderland and I think I need to introspect how I spend my time a little..

d0ugal• 2 years ago

It sounds like you went down the rabbit hole...

kamikaz1k• 2 years ago

That down down down scroll affect was really cool, thanks for pointing to it

chrisweekly• 2 years ago

agreed!

drewhk• 2 years ago

The email verification email itself does not show up properly in Fastmail for some reason. I had to switch to the text only view to get the actual link...

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

Thanks for the feedback!

ulrischa• 2 years ago

I hope there will be an editor like Gutenberg for webcomponents. With the possibility to define all kinds of constraints (what components are allowed as subelements and so on)

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

Hey, Hot Page is my project and that's pretty much where we're going with this. The idea is to use Web Components and real DOM instead of the "blocks" abstraction present in so many editors these days.

potamic• 2 years ago

Is web components available yet? I couldn't find anything around it in the editor.

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

Hey, I'm Tim and I created Hot Page. This is a long-time side project that I'm now bootstrapping with the help of a couple of friends. The idea is to take the convenience of a drag-and-drop editor (Squarespace, Wix, etc), but never lose the connection to the basic building blocks of web pages: HTML elements, CSS rules, etc. The advent of Web Components makes this a really powerful model.

Although I'm of course pleasantly surprised to see this on the front page of HN, I was planning on waiting a few months to post it myself because we are working on some ways to make the editor much more powerful. We have a long roadmap of new features like:

* more ways to edit CSS properties visually (without losing the 1:1 connection to the CSS generated)

* inline CSS (style attribute) editor for elements that let's you use :hover and media queries

* a library of code "snippets" that lives in the left panel along side the basic elements

* tighter integration with web components

* integrating VS code language servers for accurate auto completion everywhere

* and a whole lot more.

I'm a long time lurker on HN and have long loved the community here. All of your thoughts and feedback are greatly appreciated, especially on our marketing because that is proving to be a real challenge. AMA

edit: roadmap

microflash2• 2 years ago

Sorry for spoiling your planned launch on HN. I stumbled across it by accident (such are serendipities on web), thought it was cool and fat fingered it here. Looking forward to things coming in future.

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

Thanks for posting it! Obviously it's better to launch early and often but I'm much more of a programmer than a marketer and I was afraid it wouldn't get much traction. I've never been so happy to be wrong heh

AstroJetson3• 2 years ago

Well since microflash has jumped ahead, let me also jump in.

https://fx.hot.page/ has some of the web components on it. While the slinky one is silly fun, the gallery one is very cool. Looks like it's light weight and easy to use. I was impressed by the annotated source code page where you explain in detail what is going on. While jumping, swirling, multicolored text is your mission, your forte is the documentation you've written. Nice job.

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

Wow, this comment just made the last 7 months of long hours totally worth it. You have understood and distilled the essence of this project so accurately. This is my first time launching something like this, so it's just a great feeling to know there are people on the other side of the screen who are getting it.

spankalee• 2 years ago

The combination of web components + a visual app builder is a really compelling space. I'm working on something myself, and I love see more approaches our there!

Your style is just obviously incredible. I hope some of that bleeds into your customers sites so there's more fun silly, but also real, things out there on the web.

One thing I'm working on in parallel to a visual builder is a web components catalog and custom elements manifest validator. I hope this will help boost the set of quality web components available to tools like this, and that the catalog will be embeddable in them.

Good luck!

metadat• 2 years ago

I'm really digging the Hypercard-nod styling, how did you do this?

E.g. Start from zero, or was there a pre-existing CSS kit used as the base?

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

The editor side of the site has no CSS frameworks, just plain React with Typescript. I used a lot of Hypercard as a kid so that might explain something. Also our designer really loves pixel art and totally ran with the web 1.0 mandate that I gave him. Some of the design choices have been a little controversial, but I'm glad you dig it! Hopefully users don't find it distracting so we can stick with it

pogue• 2 years ago

Are you able to self host what you generate or export it to other web hosting sites? Or is everything created hosted on your end?

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

We are working on a feature to let paid users download their sites as a zip file or export them to cloud storage buckets (s3/aws, google cloud, etc). So far though it's meant to be used with our hosting. Free accounts have an advertisement for Hot Page itself but they let you connect your own domain for free.

mikae12• 2 years ago

Hey Tim! Just wonder if you were inspired by Hot Glue.

https://hotglue.me

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

I just found out about Hot Glue yesterday from this thread! Hot Page is pretty different in that the idea is to give people a way to edit DOM like they would with a text editor but with a visual UI and drag-and-drop. Hot Glue does have a visual UI but it's an abstraction on a web page that uses absolute positioning instead of the normal document flow. I've seen so many pages like this break on different devices or window sizes that I'm not really a fan of the approach. You can read more about the philosophy behind Hot Page here: https://hot.page/takes/picking-the-right-abstraction

adityaathalye• 2 years ago

As a plain vanilla enjoyer, I'm loving everything about hot.page, as it is... At last, a web property with character. I second `AstroJetson`'s comment about your communication / documentation. Also your pricing plans and the fact that you have chosen to offer custom domain support even in the free plan. These things tell me y'all are alright people. Rooting for you!

tambourine_man2• 2 years ago

I’m glad the weird-flashy trend is back. We’ve been on the clean/flat design land for too long.

Even if we’re more self ware now and a bit a cynicism and self-deprecation is inevitable, but that’s postmodernism for you.

crowdstriker2• 2 years ago

You have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.

tambourine_man2• 2 years ago

Please enlighten us with your wisdom, then.

susam• 2 years ago

Looks quite nice! Oddly enough, it transported me back nearly 20 years to my student days. I didn't have the money to buy domain names but I wanted to set up a few websites on the World Wide Web!

My search for free hosting led me to Geocities. However, websites there were hosted under paths like geocities.com/foo, rather than the subdomain format I wanted (foo.geocities.com).

Eventually, I discovered 20m.com, which as the name indicates, offered 20 MB of free hosting space. The best part was that it allowed me to publish my website under a subdomain.

Remarkably, one of the sites I created back then is still up and running: http://encoders.20m.com/ (Please don't judge the content though. I was young, naive and I was just messing with the Web!)

davchana• 2 years ago

Similar story of me in 2002. Although I didn't come across geocities, and directly found freeservers.com & made a site davinder.8m.net , which is still up. I lost its password from 2007 to 2022, and recovered it back when I recovered my yahoo email account.

shahzaibmushtaq2• 2 years ago

I don't know if it's fair to say here that I don't like the name personally, and I think women would hesitate before putting their name in a subdomain.

ax0ar• 2 years ago

It says you can use custom domains though.

tourmalinetaco2• 2 years ago

“Hot” doesn’t always mean “sexy”. And one look at the actual website says that loud and clear. They’d definitely prefer hosting on say Neocities, but that’s more because Neocities has cats and is overall cuter in presentation.

sfilmeyer• 2 years ago

They’d definitely prefer hosting on say Neocities, but that’s more because Neocities has cats and is overall cuter in presentation.

At the risk of misunderstanding what you're saying, who is "They" in this?

timnetworks2• 2 years ago

Lots of people signed up with Hotmail.

shahzaibmushtaq2• 2 years ago

Exactly, Hotmail became Outlook.

bahmboo• 2 years ago

Hotmail did ok with their name

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

Reminded me of one of the early HTML editors, HoTMetaL.

toastau• 2 years ago

Looks cool. If any staff are here, your discord server button in the footer has a bad URL (to a channel not a server). Got an invite code?

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

Oh wow, thanks for flagging that. Unfortunately our discord is more of a want-to-be discord at this point. But please join! you will be able to chat with me and my cofounders at least

https://discord.gg/uSwA2znH

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

Here's the permanent link (I'm still learning Discord apparently):

https://discord.gg/fdXY9dTFWg

timnetworks2• 2 years ago

I am also a Tim and this is great. Geocities for Adults.

alabhyajindal• 2 years ago

Very cool!

Use The Hottest Code, Like Bootstrap

Made me chuckle

gitroom• 2 years ago

Love the comic design!

volkk• 2 years ago

i'm truly obsessed with this design. who was the person that designed it?

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

The great Carlos FAS https://x.com/itscarlosfas

iampims• 2 years ago

Nice work.

The "about" link at the bottom of the home page links to https://hot.page/manifesto which is 404 Not Found.

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

Thanks for flagging!

corytheboyd2• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if I did something wrong, but I can't load the editor anymore for this site I was getting started on just to see how it works: https://hotpage.dev/corytheboyd

Get the "Wamp wamp An error has occured: Internal Server Error" popup.

Love this idea, and the execution, so much though <3

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

There was an issue yesterday evening that was causing 500 errors. My apologies to anyone who experienced this but it's been fixed now. Please try it again!

system24• 2 years ago

Very cute and congrats. The pricing is so high for what you are providing though. For a niche stuff like this maybe $1-2 max would be okay. WordPress is free, droplets are $2-5 with 20gb diskspace + 2TB bandwidth these days (with cpanel). I hope you can make money.

azinman22• 2 years ago

I’m starting to see this new aesthetic pop up. Anyone know how to define it, or where/why it came from?

allodex• 2 years ago

It's known as Neubrutalism or Neo-Brutalism: Modern version of 1950s Brutalism. The idea is to be "brutally" raw and unedited (even though it takes great effort to make something look unedited) to convey a sense of authenticity. You may have also seen that style of "raw"/"unstyled" style reminiscent of the 50s-70s that's taking over modern fashion trends, for example with jeans and oversized t-shirt styling.

A good article on Neubrutalism: https://www.designstudiouiux.com/blog/what-is-neubrutalism-w...

Prior Hackernews post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31106892

azinman22• 2 years ago

So helpful! thank you!

fsto• 2 years ago

Love the design and your way of communicating!! You just made me a fan of you and your product.

My personal flow to love your product was: 1. I was intrigued to click this HN due to an initial feeling of the product must be more interesting than the HN title due to all the attention, so let’s check it out. 2. Once on the site I was feeling “finally someone who dares not having consensus driven design”. So please keep on daring!! 3. I thought “I know people who would love this design”. 4. Being a person often being asked to build friends’ sites and way to often having to say no due to: the time it takes, the inflexibility and the price for running with your own domain being annoyingly high for a small business, I started looking for answers on your landing page. You seem to be offering just that! As a dev I can do things quick, that look good and don’t cost a lot. 5. I started reading the this HN thread and was amazed by how genuine and down to earth you seem.

All in all you just got a big fan in me. I’ll try out the prodigy, have patience with its imperfections and if you keep on communicating with the people signing up in a similar fashion to this HN thread, I think you’ll have a big amount to fans eager to push you and your product forward.

WebBurnout18• 2 years ago

Wow, thanks! I've basically been building this in a silo so it's very nice to get such enthusiastic feedback. I am really dedicated to bootstrapping Hot Page with my own resources so that no one can pressure me to make the design more generic or somehow exploit the customers. Of course, it has not been easy doing all the programming and most of the marketing myself though. Right now we really need customers like yourself who are willing to use the beta version and provide feedback -- so thanks so much for your support!

Dxtros• 2 years ago

i’ve been looking for something just like this to make my website. I’m a graphic designer with light coding experience and this looks perfect. I would love to see a way to self host this as that is the only thing holding me back from using it.

Hot Page – a graphical site builder

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