Help me with my new website!

[FlatAssembler]

If you really want to minimize bandwidth, then you could consider the following:
1) Make special downsized thumbnail images (I noticed you used fullsized images for them).
2) Have a single div for your main image window, and just change the src when a thumbnail is clicked, i.e. load each full-sized image only on demand.

OK, I'll do it when I find some time. I think that would take quite a bit more than 250 lines of code.
Do you think it would be a good idea to apply to the Hostinger hosting for 8$/month and 10x as much bandwidth? I can keep the same URLs, and, right now, 8$/month doesn't sound too much (I pay more than that for my mobile phone right now). Though every dollar is good if I somehow end up homeless, and I can't really know what will happen to me (I don't know enough programming to make money with that, and I could have never guessed both my parents would have become unemployed and that my mother would have ended up in jail for an entire year).
Hosting claims to be up 99.9% percent of the time, but I have a feeling that's a very misleading statement. The servers of 000webhost are "up" 99% of the time (in the sense that they can be PING-ed), but it quite often happens that they don't let me log in and update my site, or claim the disk is full (even though I've used only 7MB out of 1000MB given to me with free hosting). Is the same true for other web-hosting services who claim high uptime?

why do you build your slideshow divs directly in javascript, rather than in server-side markup?

And what would be the advantages of building it in PHP? I can see an obvious disadvantage right now, I can debug JavaScript using the Safari Developer Tools, but I don't know how to debug PHP.

Never forget that advice even if ego hurting, it's an opportunity of learning.

OK, but if you had been trying to learn how to program for 5 years, then you shared some of your work and most of the responses you got were the likes of "Everything you made sucks and it can't be easily fixed.", would you take those responses seriously (whatever "seriously" meant in this context)?

By the way, do you know to improve the Search Engine Ranking of that web-page about me selling my house? The Bing Developer Tools claim it has no SEO violations and that it's mobile friendly (whatever that meant, they also claim my homepage is mobile friendly), yet neither Google nor Bing show it when you search for houses in Donji Miholjac (and I've resubmitted my sitemap both to Google and to Bing).

[T0 Th3 M4X]

If you really want to minimize bandwidth, then you could consider the following:
1) Make special downsized thumbnail images (I noticed you used fullsized images for them).
2) Have a single div for your main image window, and just change the src when a thumbnail is clicked, i.e. load each full-sized image only on demand.

OK, I'll do it when I find some time. I think that would take quite a bit more than 250 lines of code.
Do you think it would be a good idea to apply to the Hostinger hosting for 8$/month and 10x as much bandwidth? I can keep the same URLs, and, right now, 8$/month doesn't sound too much (I pay more than that for my mobile phone right now). Though every dollar is good if I somehow end up homeless, and I can't really know what will happen to me (I don't know enough programming to make money with that, and I could have never guessed both my parents would have become unemployed and that my mother would have ended up in jail for an entire year).
Hosting claims to be up 99.9% percent of the time, but I have a feeling that's a very misleading statement. The servers of 000webhost are "up" 99% of the time (in the sense that they can be PING-ed), but it quite often happens that they don't let me log in and update my site, or claim the disk is full (even though I've used only 7MB out of 1000MB given to me with free hosting). Is the same true for other web-hosting services who claim high uptime?

why do you build your slideshow divs directly in javascript, rather than in server-side markup?

And what would be the advantages of building it in PHP? I can see an obvious disadvantage right now, I can debug JavaScript using the Safari Developer Tools, but I don't know how to debug PHP.

Never forget that advice even if ego hurting, it's an opportunity of learning.

OK, but if you had been trying to learn how to program for 5 years, then you shared some of your work and most of the responses you got were the likes of "Everything you made sucks and it can't be easily fixed.", would you take those responses seriously (whatever "seriously" meant in this context)?

By the way, do you know to improve the Search Engine Ranking of that web-page about me selling my house? The Bing Developer Tools claim it has no SEO violations and that it's mobile friendly (whatever that meant, they also claim my homepage is mobile friendly), yet neither Google nor Bing show it when you search for houses in Donji Miholjac (and I've resubmitted my sitemap both to Google and to Bing).

Search rank is determined by things like load times, traffic, bounce rate, and relevancy of content.  Understanding tags and how to apply them to things can also help, but that kinda falls under relevancy.  The bandwidth wouldn't be a necessity based on what you're doing, so your best bet would be to have your website on a shared server.

[bennyboy]

Do you think it would be a good idea to apply to the Hostinger hosting for 8$/month and 10x as much bandwidth? I can keep the same URLs, and, right now, 8$/month doesn't sound too much (I pay more than that for my mobile phone right now). Though every dollar is good if I somehow end up homeless, and I can't really know what will happen to me (I don't know enough programming to make money with that, and I could have never guessed both my parents would have become unemployed and that my mother would have ended up in jail for an entire year).

I pay big money for an Azure VM now, but I played around with shared hosting for several year. They are pretty much all crap. For you, I would imagine that region might be an issue is well-- ideally you'd like something hosted in your part of the world.

One option is to find a local small company in your area. Google showed a few cheap shared hosting companies in Croatia.
https://www.google.co.kr/search?q=dedica...e&ie=UTF-8

You might want to seriously consider that some of the big dogs now offer free hosting in various terms, for example:

https://www.infoworld.com/article/317978...-best.html

I haven't tried it, but Azure VM has a free version for developers publishing web apps. Search the page for "F1" option, which is very low-level but I'll bet it's still going to be better than a cheap shared host. It seems to me that it is pretty much designed for someone like you, who needs a sandbox to play around and learn how to develop apps.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricin...e/windows/

Is the same true for other web-hosting services who claim high uptime?

Absolutely. I dealt with hostgator, A2, and a couple others. I even paid for higher tiers of more elite service. They were total crap.

And what would be the advantages of building it in PHP? I can see an obvious disadvantage right now, I can debug JavaScript using the Safari Developer Tools, but I don't know how to debug PHP.

Server-side builds have the following advantages, among others
-can access a private database easily
-save processing power of users
-hide more of the logic behind your site so that people can't reverse-engineer your efforts

So for example with your assembler, all the client can see is the final result; they won't be able to read (or just easily copy) your algorithms.

That being said, I know a lot of systems are going more client-side these days-- lots of async AJAX calls to load parts of pages, and so on. I'm not criticizing, I was just curious why you did it that way.

[T0 Th3 M4X]

Do you think it would be a good idea to apply to the Hostinger hosting for 8$/month and 10x as much bandwidth? I can keep the same URLs, and, right now, 8$/month doesn't sound too much (I pay more than that for my mobile phone right now). Though every dollar is good if I somehow end up homeless, and I can't really know what will happen to me (I don't know enough programming to make money with that, and I could have never guessed both my parents would have become unemployed and that my mother would have ended up in jail for an entire year).

I pay big money for an Azure VM now, but I played around with shared hosting for several year.  They are pretty much all crap.  For you, I would imagine that region might be an issue is well-- ideally you'd like something hosted in your part of the world.

If possible, I recommend finding a small company in your country that does shared hosting.  I did that in Korea, and it still wasn't great, but it was 1000x better than hostgator or any of those super-big sites.  googling "shared hosting in croatia" gave enough results for you to try I think.

Is the same true for other web-hosting services who claim high uptime?

Absolutely.  I dealt with hostgator, A2, and a couple others.  I even paid for higher tiers of more elite service.  They were total crap.

And what would be the advantages of building it in PHP? I can see an obvious disadvantage right now, I can debug JavaScript using the Safari Developer Tools, but I don't know how to debug PHP.

Server-side builds have the following advantages, among others
-can access a private database easily
-save processing power of users
-hide more of the logic behind your site so that people can't reverse-engineer your efforts

So for example with your assembler, all the client can see is the final result; they won't be able to read (or just easily copy) your algorithms.

That being said, I know a lot of systems are going more client-side these days-- lots of async AJAX calls to load parts of pages, and so on.  I'm not criticizing, I was just curious why you did it that way.

He can just use a CDN if he wants it faster, but the pages he's creating don't require high resources and the traffic won't be heavy enough to matter.

[LastPoet]

OK, but if you had been trying to learn how to program for 5 years, then you shared some of your work and most of the responses you got were the likes of "Everything you made sucks and it can't be easily fixed.", would you take those responses seriously (whatever "seriously" meant in this context)?

By the way, do you know to improve the Search Engine Ranking of that web-page about me selling my house? The Bing Developer Tools claim it has no SEO violations and that it's mobile friendly (whatever that meant, they also claim my homepage is mobile friendly), yet neither Google nor Bing show it when you search for houses in Donji Miholjac (and I've resubmitted my sitemap both to Google and to Bing).

I got a commodore 64k. At 10 because I had good grades. I could also put both my hands inside a cow to pull out a calf in my day 64 K ram. I love my dad.

[bennyboy]

He can just use a CDN if he wants it faster, but the pages he's creating don't require high resources and the traffic won't be heavy enough to matter.

Well the problem as he's described it is that his country has quite poor internet performance. I personally think that the page he just linked is almost finished-- maybe he can add headers or footers or some kind of navigation system, but overall the page seems to work great.

If he's thinking of paying $8/month, and since he's interested in learning as much as he can, I'd personally recommend he try a free-tier Microsoft VM, just because I'm an Azure fanboy. Having an Azure VM, I'm extremely happy with the performance-- I'm kind of thinking that free with MS or Google will be better than $8 with Hostgator or the like.

Also, they are not exclusive-- he can try a few free offers (MS offers about $200 credit for new accounts) and get some hands-on experience with more than his current super-crappy free shared host.

---

I got a commodore 64k. At 10 because I had good grades. I could also put both my hands inside a cow to pull out a calf in my day 64 K ram. I love my dad.

Haha that reminds me of a story. I had a Radio Shack Color Computer, and when almost all my friends had C-64s, I bought a memory kit to hard-upgrade my comp to 512Kb RAM. I had to cut jumpers, pry out chips, and so on-- it wasn't plug-and-play like today's RAM.

When I told all those C-64 guys I now had 512Kb ram, I expected jealousy. Instead I was greeted with laughter-- they openly mocked me, saying that such a huge amount of RAM wasn't even possible, and calling me a big, fat liar.

Of course, I could do only two things with all that high-powered sexiness: use it as a RAM drive, which meant loading about 3 floppy disks worth of content and hoping to God I didn't get a power spike, or use it for sound editing. With 512KB I was able to make about THIRTY seconds of edited sounds. . . samples at different pitches, reverb, etc. Basically, I was the real-life, twelve year-old version of this:

[T0 Th3 M4X]

He can just use a CDN if he wants it faster, but the pages he's creating don't require high resources and the traffic won't be heavy enough to matter.

Well the problem as he's described it is that his country has quite poor internet performance.  I personally think that the page he just linked is almost finished-- maybe he can add headers or footers or some kind of navigation system, but overall the page seems to work great.

If he's thinking of paying $8/month, and since he's interested in learning as much as he can, I'd personally recommend he try a free-tier Microsoft VM, just because I'm an Azure fanboy.  Having an Azure VM, I'm extremely happy with the performance-- I'm kind of thinking that free with MS or Google will be better than $8 with Hostgator or the like.

Also, they are not exclusive-- he can try a few free offers (MS offers about $200 credit for new accounts) and get some hands-on experience with more than his current super-crappy free shared host.

---

That's why I recommended a CDN.  Maybe look at something like Cloudflare. I used them when I was on a share server and they were exceptionally good.  Now I'm on a fast VPS server, which is why I don't use them anymore.  Can't say I know much about Azure VMs.

[LastPoet]

Haha that reminds me of a story.  I had a Radio Shack Color Computer, and when almost all my friends had C-64s, I bought a memory kit to hard-upgrade my comp to 512Kb RAM.  I had to cut jumpers, pry out chips, and so on-- it wasn't plug-and-play like today's RAM.

When I told all those C-64 guys I now had 512Kb ram, I expected jealousy.  Instead I was greeted with laughter-- they openly mocked me, saying that such a huge amount of RAM wasn't even possible, and calling me a big, fat liar.

Of course, I could do only two things with all that high-powered sexiness: use it as a RAM drive, which meant loading about 3 floppy disks worth of content and hoping to God I didn't get a power spike, or use it for sound editing.  With 512KB I was able to make about THIRTY seconds of edited sounds. . . samples at different pitches, reverb, etc.  Basically, I was the real-life, twelve year-old version of this:

Old times when one wrote a program then save it to a tape. It was... different.

The other day, my nephew was complaing about the load time of Empire:total war.

I felt old.

[bennyboy]

That's why I recommended a CDN.  Maybe look at something like Cloudflare. I used them when I was on a share server and they were exceptionally good.  Now I'm on a fast VPS server, which is why I don't use them anymore.  Can't say I know much about Azure VMs.

VM is "virtual machine" and Azure is the Microsoft cloud architecture. The nice thing about a VM running Windows Server is that you have 100% access to everything you would on a physical box, no limitations, and you get a Windows Desktop GUI so you can browse through your folders, edit stuff etc.

The downside is that as you scale up your Azure technology, the cost scales pretty fast. It's for sure not the cheapest available solution. The upside is that you can arbitrarily add / remove VMs, storage, security, AI modules, analytics, or about a million other things on a per-hour basis. And it all just works. This is something that you just don't get with shared hosting or with some startup running physical boxes in their basement.

"Free" sounds pretty good, though, so I'm quite curious about the F1 tier.

[KevinM1]

OK, but if you had been trying to learn how to program for 5 years, then you shared some of your work and most of the responses you got were the likes of "Everything you made sucks and it can't be easily fixed.", would you take those responses seriously (whatever "seriously" meant in this context)?

Why wouldn't you take those responses seriously? Between benny, myself, and no doubt others, we have years of experience in programming for the web. Like I originally thought, you wanted a pat on the back instead of actual critique, and got defensive when you didn't get it. And, really, do you think that any random person visiting your site will care about whatever personal struggle you went through to create it? No, they're only going to care about whether or not your site is structured well enough and appealing enough to look at so they don't immediately close the tab and move on.

The real world is results-driven. It may suck, it may feel unfair, but it's the reality of the situation.

And, keep in mind, if any of us wanted you to fail, do you think we'd (repeatedly) offer suggestions for improvement? Of course not. If we wanted you to fail, well, we'd simply let you continue the way you were going because you were doing just fine in that department without us. No, what we're doing is trying to toughen you up. If you think we're rough, how do you think a potential employer would react? Or a potential investor? Do you honestly think they'd invest in you (salary + benefits) for work that - 100% no joke - looks like it comes from the late 90s/early 2000s? Do you think that they'd care that you had been trying to learn to program for 5 years? Fuck no. They'd take one look at your site, and then never contact you again.

If you can't handle the snarky suggestions from people online, how the hell are you going to handle life? School is a safe place, but outside of it you're on your own, and no one is obligated to be nice to you. And the reality is that there are people your age (and younger) pumping out better work on a regular basis. And if you're interested in programming for the web, those people are your direct competition. They're going to be applying for the same jobs you will.

Now, credit where credit's due: your compiler/whatever page is a hell of a lot better than your main site. And while I haven't seen your house listing page thanks to your shitty host, apparently that's better, too. But, it's taken over a year to get to that point because you've fought us every step of the way.

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Regarding hosts, Linode has a $5/month VPS option (https://www.linode.com/pricing). I'm sure Digital Ocean offers something similar.