Chris CoyierIs there any particular *way* of building websites that you're nostolgic for?
Thanks for all the replies! Kinda seems like “plain code” and “ftp” are very popular answers.
Eric A. Meyer@chriscoyier I keep telling people they don’t have to wallow in nostalgia, they can build sites that way right now and live the dream. That’s pretty much how I do meyerweb (if you sub SFTP for FTP), except for the WordPress part, and even for that I edit template files over an SFTP connection. Old ways are the best ways, eh, Major?
ppk 🇪🇺@Meyerweb @chriscoyier +1. I still build websites like I used to: with a text editor, FTP, sometimes a graphics program, and lots of browsers.
I am nostalgic only for a good old Photoshop copy that you can just install on your computer, no hassle.
@ppk @chriscoyier Acorn (https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/) has met 90% of my Photoshop nostalgia, “install locally” and “no subscription” included. There are some bits that still feel weird to me, but overall I’ve really liked it.
Roma Komarov@Meyerweb @ppk @chriscoyier I'm using Pixelmator (same one-time purchase model, and they're on mastodon — @pixelmator!), and I really like how it works for videos as well: possible to open up a video and effortlessly crop or adjust it (that's how I do most of my example video fallbacks on kizu.dev).
@Meyerweb yeah that’s what I’m mulling on a bit. For the most part you can do now whatever you did then. And yet, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Large Heydon Collider@Meyerweb @chriscoyier I used Filezilla until about a week ago when I learned their CEO is taking a massive salary.
@heydon @chriscoyier I’ve been using Panic’s Transmit (https://www.panic.com/transmit/) for years now, basically no complaints. Especially since I can hook it up to BBEdit, which is how I edit over SFTP.
@Meyerweb @chriscoyier Interesting, I'm going to look into doing things more this way again.
Krijn Hoetmer@heydon @Meyerweb @chriscoyier macFUSE and mount your remote stuff as if it were a local disk, via sshfs. For all projects I work on alone, I code everything that way (cssday.nl, perfnow.nl, royalholidays.eu, fronteers.nl, etc). Cmd+S has been my deployment strategy for almost 20 years now (so no build steps or transpiling either).
@KrijnHoetmer @heydon @chriscoyier I’ve toyed with this sort of setup (Transmit enables a similar setup) but I feel more comfortable with my local files all being a dev setup, and the server on the other side of an SFTP application launch as the production environment. (Hopefully that makes sense.)
@Meyerweb Completely, I just don’t like maintaining (slightly different) server environments, so trying to keep that number as low as possible. It also feels kind of liberating to only have one point of truth to worry about.
wesruv@Meyerweb @heydon @chriscoyier
And they published Untitled Goose Game and had the most beautiful Mac icons back in the day 😂
Adam Meyer@Meyerweb @heydon @chriscoyier I have moved away from Dropbox, but still maintain an account since clients use it. I use Transmit to get at their shared files when necessary. Works great. And I use it for all SFTP needs.
Alexis Deveria
alpha1beta@chriscoyier goddamn manually
brad_frost@chriscoyier SLICE TOOL
Brian Rinaldi@brad_frost @chriscoyier Heck yeah. In Fireworks. It was the one time I actually was modestly good at design (because there were so many constraints on what could be designed).
Tyler Gaw
Ian Tindale@chriscoyier framesets then plain ftp up to my ISP’s free webspace
Caleb Albritton@chriscoyier Writing HTML and CSS and JS by hand, then uploading it via FTP to some server. Maybe doing some .shtml includes, and eventually, later doing some form processing in PHP or Perl. Simpler times.
Emelia 👸🏻@chriscoyier idk if I'm nostalgic for it, but I have enjoyed switching back to just plain HTML & CSS and a few template files for my own small sites.
Dave 🧱 
@chriscoyier dragging HTML files into an FTP client, blissfully ignorant of all the possible deployment stacks out there
Artur Kot@chriscoyier small tweaks using the ftp client
Ben Judson@chriscoyier I’ve been doing a side project hypertext collage in HTML/CSS and it’s so fun. Nice to have VSCode autocomplete, and a GitHub -> netlify pipeline release (rather than FTP), but I never have to think about upgrading anything. https://www.shiftingedges.com/collage/
Danny Blue@chriscoyier manually ftping files to a prod sever to test changes.
Chris Enns@chriscoyier FrontPage ‘98
sam@chriscoyier Slicing a static image mockup into Dreamweaver
Nathan Knowler@chriscoyier ```html
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="website.swf" width="0" height="0">
<param name="movie" value="website.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
</object>
```
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="website.swf" width="0" height="0">
<param name="movie" value="website.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
</object>
```
Zach Leatherman@chriscoyier there are beginner-friendly parts of PHP that I miss but for the most part no 😅 it’s never been a better time to make web sites, if you know which gnarly parts to steer clear of
Will Boyd@chriscoyier I've got big nostalgia for the Dreamweaver era.
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦@chriscoyier anything static, ideally not involving any JS at all.
Random Geek in limbo@chriscoyier I occasionally miss the immediate available functionality of a CGI script.
Robin Whittleton@chriscoyier honestly, writing small jquery plugins for mini interactions. I certainly felt at my most productive at that point, though working for an agency on small sometimes-throwaway sites probably coloured my experience.
Tyler Hillsman@chriscoyier Netscape Composer.
Sjors Rijsdam@chriscoyier The way were you just build cool stuff. Without having to deal with all kinds of talk about metrics, funnels, SEO, newsletter popups, etc.
Keith J Grant@chriscoyier I remember a lot of time spent in photoshop, learning various shading effects (faux chrome!). I both miss it and am glad I can do most of that sort of thing in plain CSS now
Candy Apples Annie 🎄@chriscoyier No build, I'm already mostly there.
mcgrew@chriscoyier html, css, js. No frameworks. PHP/Python for the backend if needed.
I still do it that way on personal projects.
@chriscoyier oh and of course vim for editing it all.
The Doctor@chriscoyier I just miss people visiting sites for fun.
Michel Bozgounov 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@chriscoyier Start with an XHTML 1.0 index.html file, link a screen.css file which will in turn point to a master.css file. Create the basic HTML structure then start styling everything and work on the layout. Then troubleshoot all the crazy browsers of the time. And drink plenty of coffee, tea, and water while doing so. Ah, the times!
Amber Weinberg@chriscoyier yea, simple. plain html and css.
ToddZ Ⓥ@chriscoyier
> Is there any particular *way* of building websites that you're nostolgic for?
I actually miss developing with ColdFusion. As a “document web” guy, it made so much sense to add interactivity amid the HTML with CF tags. It was like SuperHTML. ColdFusion took a lot of flak from “real programmers” but damn, it was so easy and powerful.
Mark Gardner@chriscoyier Before everyone became afraid of being publicly shamed for insufficiently #SemanticMarkup, the <TABLE>, <FONT>, and <CENTER> #HTML tags enabled authors to reason about the rendering of a page without having to flip through layers of in-page and external #CSS
Mia (web luddite)@chriscoyier Tried to think of something, but it's all stuff I still do on personal projects. I'm just using eleventy templates instead of php includes, and git/ssh instead of ftp. Those feel like improvements to me.
Maybe I miss CSSEdit helping me navigate CSS files without needing partials.
And I'm nostalgic for skeuomorphic grunge design trends.
@mia Oooh interesting, re: the ftp, can I ask why? was this just a friction point? or something else
@anniegreens Why I prefer git vs ftp? I guess it's basically the same reason I like auto-save? Maybe it's the ADHD, but knowing I can easily roll-back a change feels essential to my mental health. Otherwise I have real high anxiety about breaking things.
@anniegreens I also love collaborating tools, and I hate manually merging things. FTP never felt easier to me - just more fragile. Either one involves similar commands or a GUI with dragged files. Git just keeps the history around, and makes it easier to collaborate.
@mia oh okay, I read that opposite, that you were foregoing git/ssh for ftp, disregard, I thought it sounded like you were going back to a previous habit
@anniegreens Oh sure - edited to clarify the wording. :)
@mia it was probably just my interpretation, sometimes my brain mixes things when I'm tired, and apparently I'm tired!
Adam Argyle@chriscoyier jade, stylus and coffeescript with some sprinkled in jquery
`each fruit in basket`
```
ol
> li
color hotpink
```
noise free, nearly natural language syntax with maximum approachability
@argyleink @chriscoyier I love jade/pug and still use it as my choice HTML templating language. I hate that other templating languages either: are generalized so they don’t know how to compile to HTML (e.g. Nunjucks, Liquid, etc.) or try to look like HTML when they aren’t (e.g. JSX).
Chris Smith@chriscoyier When mobile web was its own thing and people use m. subdomains, I learnt to build sites with WAP and .wml files. That was fun and simple because each page/card had to be tiny.
Mark Conroy@chriscoyier css/JS being able to be easily inspected so juniors could learn from it.
I kinda blogged about it here
https://mark.ie/blog/keepin-it-simple-writing-vanilla-css-and-javascript-only/
Ross Wintle@chriscoyier No. Because in my own projects I’m using static HTML and CSS with a solid templating language (PHP). So I’m actively using all the things that I would be nostalgic for!
Plus I get to use modern web standards, which are great; modern deployments, which are great; modern static hosting, which is great; and modern editors, which are great!
I’m all smiles. 😃
@chriscoyier I preferred when we chose progressive enhancement over complex builds / transpilation.
Stephen B@chriscoyier I big time miss actually crafting a front end - especially around when responsive was kicking off. Testing across screens and devices, challenging ourselves to build for older IE.. basically just anything that's not the current state of plugging in off-the-shelf React components and hooking up to an API.