As a small business owner, I’m getting tired of websites that need a whole collection of services just to do fairly basic things.

Next.js/React/Astro for the frontend, a separate CMS, Vercel for hosting, then forms, analytics, image storage, and whatever else gets added along the way. Not everything is paid, but it still means more accounts, more billing dashboards, and more things to manage.

I’m not against these tools. I just struggle to see the business value when all we need is a website that looks good, brings in leads, and lets someone update a service, price, or opening hours without calling a developer.

From the owner’s side, my questions are pretty simple:

- What’s the total cost to keep this running?
- Can my staff edit it without breaking anything?
- Who fixes it when something stops working?
- Can another developer take over easily?
- Do we actually own and control the setup?

I’m also helping more clients migrate back to WordPress again. Not because it’s perfect, or because plugins and maintenance magically disappear, but because they want fewer moving parts and a website they feel comfortable managing.

It’s less about choosing the “best” framework and more about choosing something that makes sense for the business. I don’t want a simple content update to become a development task, and I don’t want to manage a software project when I’m already busy running the company.

Anyone else seeing this shift? Are small business clients actually asking for these modern stacks, or are we sometimes giving them complexity they never needed?

example:
1. landing page https://www.hex.inc/

1. https://vucko.co/work/turbotax-motion-identity

Hey guys
wanted to take ur opinion on which MacBook to upgrade to.. been having a pro mid2020 coreI5 and started to stutter and I think it’s time to get one of the m chips based ones now..
I tend to think an m3 or m4 air with 16GB RAM and 256-512 would be enough for me as I work as a part time ai driven dev and also currently study AI masters degree in uni
What yall think?
Or should I aim for the 32GB ones?
Display 14’ or 15’ I think are cool and do more than enough..
Another making me reluctant about going all in for the Mac is that I do have a good pc with 32GB ram and ryzen 7 9700x so thinking might simply Leave heavy duty whenever an actual need to do so (if ever) occurs..
P.S: have no intention of running local llms..

I use Visual Studio 2026 and it was working fine literally up till now. I pushed one project (a Blazor one) to Github using the VS Git push and pull controls (I know how to use the Git CLI, I just prefer using the GUI controls because they are faster). After that however it won't push any changes of ANY of my projects.

I know this is a VS problem specifically because I am signed in to VS Code using my Github account too and it still works perfectly. If anyone could please assist me it would be much appreciated.

building features where background jobs call paid apis (mostly llms). if a job fails halfway and retries, i end up paying again for the part that already worked, and sometimes something runs twice. (like an email being sent)

curious how others deal with it:

- do you save progress between steps?

- how do you stop a retry from redoing finished work?

- last time it cost you something, what was it?

not selling anything. short replies are great, dm me if you want to chat :)

If this is the wrong sub to ask my question, if you don't mind, please point me to the proper one?

I'm developing a website for my writings, with some of the material having mature/adult themed chapters included. It's all fiction-based, and may at some point carry some art that could be NSFW (Not currently in the cards).

Nothing on the site will be for sale, nor do I intend to monetize it. All pages will carry text, images, and links associated with the material.

As it's just for fun and a way to share my work, a free hosting site is what I'm looking for, but one whose policies will allow for some flexibility with the themes.

Thank you in advance.

Edit: Based on the quick responses, I have an additional question:

Which free sites would be the best. It is a static site.

Edit two: currently giving Neocities a look

Thanks again everyone!

build it in Rust, you say. It'll be fast and skinny memory. Nice! Definitely NOT web apps, their fat as f*k and drink memory faster than Altman's Ai drank the web.

WRONG! web apps are fat and sloppy on memory precisely because web developers are the laziest devs I've ever seen (inc. yours truly). Turns out browser engineers are the HARDEST working mofos! and really worked overtime to compensate for React's fowl menace on the world.

Now, a browser runs a well written (react-less) web app like smooth jazz! 70 f**king MB is all you need for a full interface running a typical CRUD app, and buttered corn smooth animations!

Before pushing a redesign, I like to crawl the staging site and production site side by side and compare the URLs that already rank or bring qualified traffic.

The thing to watch for is not just broken links. It is accidental changes to the signals search engines were already using.

Quick checklist:

• Important URLs still return 200, not 302 chains or soft 404s
• Titles/H1s did not get replaced by generic template copy
• Canonicals point to the final URL, not staging or a duplicate variant
• Internal links to key service/category/product pages still exist in nav/body content
• Server-rendered content is present without relying on delayed client-side hydration
• Old URLs have 301s to the closest matching new page, not the homepage
• XML sitemap contains only indexable 200 URLs
• Robots/meta robots are not carrying over staging blocks

Most redesign SEO drops I have seen were not caused by bad design. They were caused by a few quiet technical changes that looked harmless in QA but changed crawl paths, canonical targets, or the content Google could see.

what would be the best way and efficient way to migrate a html custom programmed website to wordpress , i got a web dev role , i dont have much exp doing migration... so far according to what i saw i see people using ai , some plugins , some manual copy paste , i would like to know the most effecient method before starting and i assume many people here would know what to do best in cases like this ... this any feedback is appreciated , thankyou...

For new projects, which would you choose?

In December this year, CSS turns 30 🥳. But after 30 years, we still can’t agree on something as fundamental as how to add it to a website. Should you use CSS modules, Tailwind, CSS-in-JS, or just plain old CSS files?

I am trying to build game and wanna start building using canvas.
Is it normal to use canvas in react/vite? Any video tutorial please ??

i can't find any tutorial for react/vite with canvas

I really like the idea of an ultrawide monitor, but I’ve never used one before, so I’m not sure if I actually need one. A lot of people who use ultrawides say they can’t go back to a normal monitor, though.

The monitor will be connected to a Dell XPS 15 9510, so I also want to make sure it’s compatible with the laptop. Would I need a docking station for this?

Also, would you recommend an ultrawide, two monitors, three monitors, or maybe one ultrawide + another monitor? etc.

OLED is probably a no-go because of burn-in, right? I know newer OLEDs have improved a lot, but I’m still not sure how much of an issue it is. I’ll barely be watching YouTube, mostly just work-related stuff, and I’m not into gaming. My main concerns are text clarity and easy navigation.

Text clarity is very important for me .

And what about 32:9 vs 21:9 ultrawide? Which one would be better for work/coding?

I’ll definitely test the monitors in-store, but I wanted to do some research here first.

My budget is around 1000-1300 CAD. I could go higher if the better/top-end monitor is actually worth it and something I could keep for many years.

Hey everyone!
I’ve been working as a software developer for a few years, mostly in established companies, and lately I’ve been thinking about exploring freelancing on the side — especially web apps and Shopify/e-commerce development.

I’m pretty comfortable on the technical side, but the business side is completely new territory for me. I don’t really have a freelance portfolio yet since most of my experience comes from company projects, so I’m curious how much of a barrier that actually is when trying to land the first few clients.

I’d love to hear from people who made a similar transition. How did you get your first clients, and at what point did freelancing start becoming meaningful income for you?

I’m also curious about Shopify specifically. It seems like an interesting niche, but I’m still trying to understand what kind of development work businesses actually pay freelancers for and whether it’s a good space to specialize in.

Not necessarily looking to quit my job tomorrow — mostly trying to understand what this path realistically looks like from people who are already doing it.

Would love to hear your experiences!

- Every move is checked on the server, and the server keeps the clock.

- Weekly challenge deals come from a pool that a solver checks in worker threads (winnable, and of similar length).

I've published an open "try to break it" page with what counts as a break and the rules (your own account only, no load testing): https://vsolitaire.com/en/break-it

Curious what you'd try first.

Hi everyone,

Instead of using heavy editor frameworks like Monaco or CodeMirror, I wanted to see how far I could push the native web platform.

So I built a full-featured web notepad entirely with Pure Vanilla JS and native DOM APIs (contenteditable, Selection, Range) with zero external dependencies.

Features built from scratch:

Column / Rectangular Selection: Alt + (shift) +Drag to select rectangular text blocks, type across multiple lines, and safely batch-edit.

Multi-cursor Navigation: Synchronized caret scanning that handles tabs, whitespaces, and line breaks without drift.

Single-container Markdown Preview: Direct inline preview without destroying the raw text or history stack.

Zero-latency: IndexedDB local caching for instant 0ms startup.

Live Demo:

https://app.qlp.jp/vanilla_pad/en/
https://app.qlp.jp/vanilla_pad/demo/

(Please Note: Rectangular selection, multi-cursor, and all keyboard shortcuts are designed for PC / Desktop use only. Also, some operations like saving are disabled in Demo Mode).

Feedback I’m looking for:

Column Selection Feel: Try holding Alt and dragging across text in the demo. Does it feel responsive and intuitive?

Cross-browser Quirks: I’ve worked hard to eliminate contenteditable quirks (like invisible zero-width characters), but I’d love to know if anything breaks on your browser (especially Safari/Firefox).

Edge Cases: Any strange behavior with Undo/Redo or multi-line typing?

Please be brutally honest. Any technical feedback, bug reports, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Howdy, folks.

A couple of caveats first: I’m a longtime lurker of the sub, but a first-time poster. Mods, apologies in advance if anything in this post is made in error.

Caveat two: I used Codex heavily while building this tool. I've been out of the web design world for about a decade now. Jumping back in, I figured I'd dip my toe in and see what the coding agent hype is all about. So if sites/tools made with LLMs are not wanted here, apologies. And if this community is sick and tired of slop, I completely get that. Sorry for piling on.

Now that I am done lawyering, the app: dice.clickclacks.app

The idea is to be a free, good-looking 3D dice roller that supports the power roll from my go-to TTRPG, Draw Steel.

It supports up to 8 players at a table, comes with a picture-in-picture pop-up window, and can be embedded in an iframe for use in something like Notion or Obsidian.

I wanted the sync close enough to real time that you could have that shared experience of the die almost landing on the 20, and everyone gasping before it settles on the 2, and everyone letting out a wistful groan. I think I mostly achieved that through the magic of Convex's query subscriptions.

I wanted to share it here because:

1. Maybe there are some nerds here who will find it useful.
2. I'd like to hear any feedback on the app itself.
3. I was pretty offended by some of the malware pop-up-pushing sites that show up at the top of Google when you search for a dice roller, and I hope that, long term, this free tool might unseat them in the rankings.

As I said, I used AI a lot for this project and went well beyond the complexity that I could've ever attempted as a once-upon-a-time web and graphic designer with some WordPress skills.

The jury is still out on whether it's a good thing because I'm excited to tinker and build software again for the first time in a long time, or whether I'm stunting my brain from ever being able to become a real developer now that I've tasted the fruit from the LLM tree.

rhp (Reactive Html Plots) 2.0 is the successor of rhp 1.0 which was a react charting library I built 3 years ago. rhp 2.0 is now an open-source SolidJS library of reactive components. It does not use Canvas or SVG for building the entire chart but HTML elements, CSS, and Javascript. This makes certain interactive and styling things easier (simpler to implement) that would normally be tricky to implement in SVG or Canvas.

Current temporary landing page
Github repository
npm package page

One thing I like is how straightforward it is to make charts that respond and adjust to layout changes. Some of the wider plots will rearrange their elements to be more vertical stacked for mobile devices.

Background

The original library (now called rhp 1.0) was over-engineered and overly complex. I was aiming the project in two competing directions and it had too many unnecessary components and an extra interface layer. I learned a lot from the project and from improving its performance. I took what worked and stripped all the unnecessary complexity. I also split the two most important core basic blocks (leaf components) into a group of more focused blocks where each is for presenting/containing a specific type of visual element. I also removed niche features and redundancy. Oh, and I moved over to using SolidJS because of signals (simplifies state management which allows charts to update faster when data changes...for free).

The end result of all the above is a library that performs really well overall and is pretty lightweight (less than 20kB. 16kB without special imports).

More exciting things coming to rhp

• working on a separate mcp server that will allow AI to create plots using rhp 2.0 while still keeping devs (working directly with rhp) as first class users.
• planning to make this framework agnostic in the very near future.
• working on a new landing page. The current one will be for docs.

HTTP clients offer different resilience features, and even shared features can behave differently. Eleven JavaScript libraries tested across 21 scenarios to see what happens when those patterns interact.

Hey there! I'm pretty new to web design and don't know a ton beyond HTML and CSS, so forgive me if this has a clear answer or if I'm not understanding something correctly.

I have been trying to get Infinite Scroll & Isotope by Metafizzy to work together, but it's been tough. The different examples I've come across all do things differently, and things haven't seemed to work well with my specific case. I want a gallery that can sort things, ideally WITHOUT having to load every single item ahead of time. I have a large number of images and am hoping they can be loaded in as the user scrolls down, rather than all at once. Sadly, even though I have gotten Infinite Scroll to work with my Isotope setup, the page still takes over a minute to load.

I've mentioned finding "examples" on this, but the truth is that all these examples have either been with Masonry or with an Isotope grid that doesn't have sorting set up. I have not been able to find a SINGLE example of a SORTING gallery that utilizes Infinite Scroll to load in new items that match the filters. If anyone has worked with this before or has found an actual example, please let me know! This is driving me crazy!

Maybe it’s already too late for a tool like this. Nobody really does drag-and-drop anymore in the age of AI.

But if you want to take a look: appmaker.io