I know a fair number of non-technical folks that hate the idea of trusting Google or Apple with their data. It's part of a generalized backlash to big tech corps that will only increase as their size and power over our lives continues to grow unchecked. Godspeed GrapheneOS
Hey, I'm Tim, a senior fullstack developer from New York, now based in Mexico. I have more than 12 YoE on all kinds of web apps as well as mobile and server environments. I love backend and APIs, but I have a passion for pixel-perfect UIs and frontend magic. I have built many of my own projects from start to finish so I have learned a lot about good UX/UI, can choose the best technologies for the job, spot problems before they arrive and write solid tests. My prior career in journalism made me a great communicator and writer. I also enjoy devops and managing servers using Linux, Docker and Kubernetes. I have built many apps on AWS and Google Cloud, including using Terraform for infra and Github Actions for CI/CD.
Right now, I have a side hustle bootstrapping Hot Page (https://hot.page) and releasing native HTML web components as part of my open source project HotFX (https://fx.hot.page).
Hey, I'm Tim, a senior fullstack developer from New York, now based in Mexico. I have more than 12 YoE on all kinds of web apps as well as mobile and server environments. I love backend and APIs, but I have a passion for pixel-perfect UIs and frontend magic. I have built many of my own projects from start to finish so I have learned a lot about good UX/UI, can choose the best technologies for the job, spot problems before they arrive and write solid tests. My prior career in journalism made me a great communicator and writer. I also enjoy devops and managing servers using Linux, Docker and Kubernetes. I have built many apps on AWS and Google Cloud, including using Terraform for infra and Github Actions for CI/CD.
Right now, I have a side hustle bootstrapping Hot Page (https://hot.page) and releasing native HTML web components as part of my open source project HotFX (https://fx.hot.page).
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
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!
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!
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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