About a month and a bit ago, I tooted about my plans to provide free iocaine fronting.

I now have the domain for it (to be revealed later, you'll see why in a bit), I have a Plan™ how to re-use parts of the work I did for an earlier attempt at a similar thing.

What I do not have at the moment, is an idea how its website should look. I want to put up a placeholder until I launch this thing in (hopefully) February.

Some of the tools I want to use are pretty much set in stone: it will be a static site built with Zola, because Zola generally doesn't make me want to hate its guts, and it stays out of my way. Static site, because there's no need for anything more. It will not have open registration, and the self-service portal thingy will be independent of the "project landing page".

Static is fine.

But herein lies the problem: I have no desire to come up with a template. I'm not a designer, I suck at it, and I hate doing it. So once again, I'm looking for a template that doesn't suck.

I like zola.386, but it's unmaintained, and has a number of annoying issues.

boring looks okay-ish, but it's too blog focused, and uses Tailwind, which is a deal breaker.

pico looks nice, has some fun features (callout, timeline, and mermaid all sound something I could use in the longer term)

...and that's about all I could imagine using, looking at the theme list.

Apart from these, I was entertaining the idea of building something based on the Cloudflare Error Page Generator: A simple landing page that looks vaguely like CF's, but the three components would be:

1. AI Companies / Crawlers / Eating the internet
2. A Vengeful Mouse / iocaine / Making them suffer
3. You / Website / Working as intended

Or something along those lines.

During the placeholder era, the second and third would show up as "errors", with the what happened & what can I do blurbs pointing at the middle one.

Once live, the landing page would still show the same. The self service thing would still use a similar setup, but would show you the state of your hosts.

I must admit, I'm kinda liking this last idea. It's simple, recognizable, gets the message accross nicely.

I may run with that.

Hrm. Do I create a new org on my forge for this thing, or do I shove it under iocaine?

If all goes well, at least parts of the tooling would be reusable by others, so it would make sense to put it under the existing iocaine org.

On the other hand, there will be multiple components to it:

• A static website
• The self-service tooling
• A NixOS configuration to use on the host that runs this all.

The latter will be part of my infrastructure.org repo. The website & tooling kinda belong together, I might aswell put them both into a single repo.

And come to think of it... if I'm gonna use a completely custom template, and the main part of it will be something I develop, why not make the static site part of that?

It would no longer be static, but... do I care?

The advantage of a static site is that it doesn't need a service, it can be served directly from the filesystem. But I don't do that. I serve static sites from an S3 bucket, on a remote host.

There's nearly no difference between reverse proxying for the S3 bucket, and reverse proxying for a small service that returns the landing page.

And if it's all part of the same service, I can reuse the template more easily, and I do not need two deployments in the future either.

So, I guess... I'll do a quick hack and reverse proxy to the service.

Now, do I call the service the same as the main domain? Or do I find it another funny name?

@algernon Yes you do.

@liw I'm afraid to ask which question this is an answer to.

Just so I can unblock myself, I might aswell call the repo/project as the domain it will be served from, until I figure out a better name.

Naming things are hard, and I'd like to do something easy, because I have little time at the moment.

I have renamed repos before, I can do it again, and it's gonna be private until I launch it in ~February anyway. Or at least until I'm comfortable sharing the code, and that's not gonna be this year.

Current stack plans for the service: Rust, axum, askama, probably sqlx. I will not need a database for the placeholder, so only the bare minimum.

Not sure about the database crate. I only ever plan to support PostgreSQL. I know I do not need, nor want an ORM. But something typesafe and Postgres-aware would be nice.

But that's a topic for the holidays.

@algernon I have been through a few themes, and finally gave up and made my own super lean CSS under 300 Bytes I can include in the header.

Basically the same trip I took through static site generators, until I gave up and made my own perfect one. :-)

@liebach Urgh. I've made at least 4 static site generators, all more perfect than the previous. I do not wish to make one again. :)

So, I "only" need to worry about themes! But most of them are very "professional" and stuff. I don't want professional. I want janky, or silly, or well... anything but professional.

Usable, not something that makes one's eyes bleed, but... y'know, unexpected! Like zola.386. I used to love that aesthetic, Turbo Vision was amazing.

But building it myself? Mmmngh... nah. Need something to base my theme upon.

@algernon @liebach Have you tried sugar.css? It's pretty minimal but customizable.

https://sugar-css.com/

@buherator @liebach I have it bookmarked, but no, I haven't tried it. I'm trying hard to avoid having to build a template myself. O:)

@algernon You mean the HTML parts? I had a similar problem but IME if the CSS is good HTML is very basic, e.g. this is what I have around sugar.css:

https://github.com/v-p-b/sugardocy/blob/main/sugar-template.html

@buherator Yep, I meant the HTML parts. I know I don't need much, but... I still need something, and I'd need to come up with something, and... my brain goes "nooope, we ain't doing that".

So I prefer to outsource this task, and borrow a template that's weird enough for my tastes, and adjust it, rather than building something from scratch.

Not because building something from scratch is hard, but because I don't like building (html) templates from scratch.

I mean, I'd rather spend days agonizing over finding a good base, than spend ~30 minutes writing one from scratch, because days of frustration somehow feels less taxing than 30 minutes of concentrated pain.

Perhaps something along these lines.

@algernon
needs an arrow going over the cloud's head, from AI straight to You

I need to clean up the template and the CSS a little, and then I can deploy it.

That'll also reveal the domain and the WIP project name.

I also need to make a few things in the template dynamic, while I'm there, like the date, and the title & error code (so I can serve 404s and similar with the same template).

@wolf480pl Not sure I have the chops to add that. But I can dim the middle one to indicate it's not just not working, but it isn't there in the first place.

@algernon
hear me out:

a div with a solid top border, position: absolute

and a paragraph at the end of it, containing a Wingdings arrow head character

@wolf480pl Hm. That could work. I'll see what I can do!

@algernon
(not curved, but it'd go well with the greyed out cloud)
(also half-joking)

I'm liking Askama so far. I think this will be my go-to templating thing whenever I can get away with compile-time templates.