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.
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.
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)
Surprisingly, I can't find that made as an actual usable font. I would have thought someone in font design would jump at the chance just for the fun of it.
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...
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.
For the IP issue: You can look into some service which automatically updates your domains DNS. It's been a while but back then one of those was DynDNS, not sure if they still exist, but others surely do.
I forgot to mention that I am also behind CGNAT. I bought a VPS for a while but couldn't keep with the cost.
Right now the cheapest way of hosting a website for me is through tor.
Have you factored in your power costs? I never do :P buuut with older machines you get closer and closer to burning enough power to justify a hosting bill.
Even without a static, you can use services like ddns.net to auto update if your IP address changes with their app. Pretty simple setup, free version too.
That's what I do. Funnily though, I can't remember which device is hosting the auto update client to update ddns. As long as it's still updated right? Lol
If it's just going to be one page with thinks to other things, an idea for making it look nice is to have 4 semi transparent background squares with border radius, with an icon and text description of the service in the square. It could adapt to screen size so the squares would either be in a row, a column, or a grid.
Of course, if you already had a vision I don't want to interfere with that.
I had this problem once, Pagekite.net is made for exactly this. There are also some VPNs that provide static IPs - one in my part of the world is Franciliens
If you use cloudflare, there's a docker container to update your sites DNS records to your current dynamic IP (also cloudflare is good ddos protection) https://github.com/oznu/docker-cloudflare-ddns
I had this problem once, Pagekite.net is made for exactly this. There are also some VPNs that provide static IPs - one in my part of the world is Franciliens