Hot Page – a graphical site builder(hot.page)
hot.page
Hot Page – a graphical site builder
https://hot.page/
112 comments
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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
Our tendency as programmers is to make it perfect (or bust), take the seeing it getting traction as an indicator that you can often release earlier than you thought.
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!
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?
<3
E.g. Start from zero, or was there a pre-existing CSS kit used as the base?
<3
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
I honestly love the design. It's not half-assed fun, it's balls-to-the-wall extremely fun! I am so burned out on sleek flat UIs for Serious Business. You might as well go ALL in if you're going for the look. Please don't change a thing (but feel free to make it MORE crazy!)
Hey Tim! Just wonder if you were inspired by Hot Glue.
https://hotglue.me
https://hotglue.me
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
Thanks!
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?
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.
Think about providing your solution as a standalone/offline desktop app as well (I guess Electron-based).
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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..
It sounds like you went down the rabbit hole...
That down down down scroll affect was really cool, thanks for pointing to it
agreed!
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!)
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!)
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.
Love the aesthetic they're using here. Reminds me of another project in this same vein https://mmm.page/
Inspired by Hotglue[1], the opensource content manipulation system thats also self-hostable (duh)?
[1]https://hotglue.me/
[1]https://hotglue.me/
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
Yeah, Hot Page, had no clue Hot Glue exists.... Stop lying.
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.
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.
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
I wrote a blog post reviewing it a couple of months back: https://rafichaudhury.com/site/blog/Freehand-Web
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.
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.
That's great news! Thanks for taking up the project (and reading my post!). I do webdev as a hobby so unfortunately I cannot contribute to the source code as I don't know enough PHP. The responsive safe zone idea is a great one to implement.
Is it possible to password-protect pages as well? I tried to do it by setting an .htaccess rule for the folder I had them in, but wasn't able to get it to work.
Is it possible to password-protect pages as well? I tried to do it by setting an .htaccess rule for the folder I had them in, but wasn't able to get it to work.
I just tested on my copy and got it to work, but I'm on nginx. I'm sure it's possible with Apache though.
I'm assuming you tried putting something like this in your root .htaccess file (the one that you renamed from htaccess-dist on installation)?
If that doesn't help, make an issue on my repo and we can work it out there. Today I added password protected pages as a built-in feature, but it would need much longer in the oven before I could suggest switching an existing site over.
https://github.com/ch-rs/hotglue2
I'm assuming you tried putting something like this in your root .htaccess file (the one that you renamed from htaccess-dist on installation)?
<Directory "/private-page">
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Restricted Area"
AuthUserFile /.htpasswd
Require valid-user
</Directory>
If that doesn't help, make an issue on my repo and we can work it out there. Today I added password protected pages as a built-in feature, but it would need much longer in the oven before I could suggest switching an existing site over.
https://github.com/ch-rs/hotglue2
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...
Anyway, it's sad Hotglue hasn't seen development in the last years, some friends use it for their personal sites...
or HoTMetaL, or HotDog - both of which were html editors in the 90s.
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.
Even if we’re more self ware now and a bit a cynicism and self-deprecation is inevitable, but that’s postmodernism for you.
You have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.
Please enlighten us with your wisdom, then.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
Not my project so can't change anything but I posted this because I got those Geocities vibes too :)
The pricing, bandwidth 5GB for $9 a month? This sounds unreasonably high
This…isn’t S3. Bandwidth is just part of how they’re segmenting.
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.
5 GB is extremely small for what it is.
VPS (even with a super basic CMS ready set up) and managed web hosting with integrated editor are completely different products. If you want to make comparisons,
look at WordPress.com, 1mb.site, Wix, etc.
How so? I can have a preinstalled WordPress with a quality theme such as Astra with Elementor and I am done in less than 5 minutes and $4. It is pure laziness not doing it this way and waste of money/time. Not to mention unreliable as you trust another company not to jack up their price. If a price change happens to a VPS you simply move to another cheap hosting for a $3-5 per month with your own WordPress.
Might sharing the link to vps provider, please?
https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/
https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
OVH also has SoYouStart which is around $2 per month. I also remember getting yearly commitments and under $3 per month deals. You have to subscribe to their email blasts to get these deals but $3-4 per month is average for the industry.
There is also Digital Ocean which is around $4 per month. I've been using them for over a decade. Not even one time down. Sometimes I see deals under $3 per month. https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
OVH also has SoYouStart which is around $2 per month. I also remember getting yearly commitments and under $3 per month deals. You have to subscribe to their email blasts to get these deals but $3-4 per month is average for the industry.
There is also Digital Ocean which is around $4 per month. I've been using them for over a decade. Not even one time down. Sometimes I see deals under $3 per month. https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
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.
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.
“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.
>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?
At the risk of misunderstanding what you're saying, who is "They" in this?
Women, as the GP was assuming that women wouldn’t want to host on a hot.page domain, so I then said they’d prefer Neocities.
Hotmail did ok with their name
Reminded me of one of the early HTML editors, HoTMetaL.
It says you can use custom domains though.
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
Get the "Wamp wamp An error has occured: Internal Server Error" popup.
Love this idea, and the execution, so much though <3
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!
Really cool! Love the demo option to try it out instead of just signing up.
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...
Thanks for the feedback!
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.
Nice work.
The "about" link at the bottom of the home page links to https://hot.page/manifesto which is 404 Not Found.
The "about" link at the bottom of the home page links to https://hot.page/manifesto which is 404 Not Found.
Thanks for flagging!
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)
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.
Is web components available yet? I couldn't find anything around it in the editor.
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?
How does one create web pages like this without using a tool like the above? Would animating html elements with javascript be sufficient?
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).
Great nostalgic design. You’ve built something nice here.
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?
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
https://discord.gg/uSwA2znH
Here's the permanent link (I'm still learning Discord apparently):
https://discord.gg/fdXY9dTFWg
https://discord.gg/fdXY9dTFWg
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.
I’m starting to see this new aesthetic pop up. Anyone know how to define it, or where/why it came from?
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
A good article on Neubrutalism: https://www.designstudiouiux.com/blog/what-is-neubrutalism-w...
Prior Hackernews post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31106892
So helpful! thank you!
Very cool!
> Use The Hottest Code, Like Bootstrap
Made me chuckle
> Use The Hottest Code, Like Bootstrap
Made me chuckle
I am also a Tim and this is great. Geocities for Adults.
i'm truly obsessed with this design. who was the person that designed it?
The great Carlos FAS https://x.com/itscarlosfas
Strange but lovely design
Love the comic design!
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The creator’s Twitter looks sketchy - a couple months old, handful of ChatGPT posts, then this.
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!
Being a clone of Hotglue doesn't help either.
Could also just mean they're shit at social media
this (I know because they're my accounts)
Where’s the AI? Feels like an obvious add-on for something like this. :)
My god man, not everything needs AI.
> 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? ;)
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? ;)
> 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
I don't think so at all, AI generated stuff usually has a certain soulless generic air to it that I don't think would suit this.
Probably completely fine for websites that want/need to look like every other website, like classic site builders, Squarespace etc. or internal business apps, forms and such, but for something that seems a bit targeted at letting people be creative, gen AI would do more harm than good I feel.
I don't think so at all, AI generated stuff usually has a certain soulless generic air to it that I don't think would suit this.
Probably completely fine for websites that want/need to look like every other website, like classic site builders, Squarespace etc. or internal business apps, forms and such, but for something that seems a bit targeted at letting people be creative, gen AI would do more harm than good I feel.
> I don't think so at all, AI generated stuff usually has a certain soulless generic air to it that I don't think would suit this.
I can’t believe I’m forced to defend myself here as I generally agree with the premise that adding AI doesn’t make something better (hence the smiley face in my original post), but FFS the FUD and hyperbole is simply in bad form. LOOK at the examples on the site. TRY the experience. Then come back and try and tell me you can’t generate endless amounts of images just like that what’s shown trivially with AI. You are entitled to your own opinion about AI, but that doesn’t make you factually right.
I can’t believe I’m forced to defend myself here as I generally agree with the premise that adding AI doesn’t make something better (hence the smiley face in my original post), but FFS the FUD and hyperbole is simply in bad form. LOOK at the examples on the site. TRY the experience. Then come back and try and tell me you can’t generate endless amounts of images just like that what’s shown trivially with AI. You are entitled to your own opinion about AI, but that doesn’t make you factually right.
Yeah I'll be honest, I didn't look at the examples in great detail, from the visuals I thought this was more along the lines of hotglue.me, but now that I'm looking at them, some of the examples are indeed pretty generic and could be churned out by AI no problem, I don't doubt it.
I think the disagreement is less on whether it's technically possible to use AI to help with this and more on whether it's a good idea to do that.
I think the disagreement is less on whether it's technically possible to use AI to help with this and more on whether it's a good idea to do that.
> more on whether it's a good idea to do that
If you want to shift goal posts to that, then we are in agreement, adding AI to something without real care in how it works with the experience isn’t a good idea.
If you want to shift goal posts to that, then we are in agreement, adding AI to something without real care in how it works with the experience isn’t a good idea.
No thanks. Leave that slop to Squarespace/Wix. Those are publicly traded companies that will happily add AI stock photo 'integrations' to pump their share price.
There's nothing stopping anybody from using AI tools directly to generate images, and uploading them onto their site on this platform, if they want to.
There's nothing stopping anybody from using AI tools directly to generate images, and uploading them onto their site on this platform, if they want to.
He does have a point though, not everything needs AI.
It only uses all-natural organic intelligence, trained with love by caring people!
No way!
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