tilde town (Nathaniel Smith)
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Q: Why do you have a Brutalist Website?
A: Hand written HTML is easy to write and allows anyone with a basic computer and internet access to put their thoughts and personalities online to share with others. It's a great means of self expression and identity shaping. Unfortunately, that style of web publishing fell out of vogue as more and more companies started to embrace the "web app" model of web development instead of the "web site" idea. Truly, I'm happy that my bank does not use hand-written HTML and CGI-bin, but I'm sad that for a lot of web users their self expression consists of Facebook bios. I think web apps have their place in the world of commerce but that people should not feel ashamed if they don't want to combine megabytes of javascript and css to their framework-powered dynamic blog just to put their thoughts online. People shouldn't also be forced to use corporate-mediated, surveillance-based platforms like Twitter and Facebook just to put some ideas up for others to see. I designed a brutalist web site to show that we can still do wonderful things together on the web without so-called "best practices" that serve corporate interests and slow down even high-end computers.

Q: Who designed the website?
A: I did. I used <table> to organize the columns so it would render nicely in w3m.
Q: Who coded the website?
A: I did. It is HTML5, technically, but I was drawing more on my experience as a teen writing HTML 4.01 than my more recent experience as a professional software developer. The homepage is regenerated every 30 minutes via a cron script that runs some Python. The interactive bits (the guestbook and help desk) post forms to a very simple backend written in Python with Flask.
Q: With what kind of editor?
A: I either SSH'd in and edited the HTML with vim or edited the files over SSHFS using emacs's tramp mode. I use spacemacs.
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http://tilde.town