Kiki – a tiny homepage construction kit with a small footprint

6/4/2026 at 6:40:33 PM

The best part of the no-build, small-footprint approach is longevity: no dependency rot, nothing to maintain, and it'll still open and run in ten years. We've half-forgotten that "view source and hack it" is how a lot of us learned the web in the first place. Good to see tools that lean back into that.

by aleksandre_dev

6/5/2026 at 6:57:56 AM

Maybe I'm not reading this right, but it has its own markup language called "Bug". This is the opposite of no-rot. If it's using technologies you've never heard of before, who is going to be around to maintain them in 10 years?

by hdjrudni

6/6/2026 at 11:55:54 AM

[flagged]

by aleksandre_dev

6/4/2026 at 2:46:29 PM

> kiki was built around the idea that the web took a wrong turn a couple of decades ago. HTML was supposed to be simple and straightforward

Hear, hear. We need more of this kind of courage to start over from first principles.

by lioeters

6/4/2026 at 3:36:30 PM

> kiki is shareware.

Now that is a blast from the past.

Is much else distributed that way these days?

by dspillett

6/4/2026 at 8:18:19 PM

A fair amount of software follows the model but does not use the term, everytime I go on the play store to look for an app I encounter many that offer a free version with limited features.

by ofalkaed

6/4/2026 at 8:34:33 PM

The term doesn't make much sense anymore because we don't share software, we just download it from the source. The business model makes more sense than ever, though.

by InsideOutSanta

6/4/2026 at 9:22:46 PM

Most of the shareware I got was downloaded from BBSes and the internet and even these central repositories that are the norm now are nothing new, in the 80s I went to a local BBS that was dedicated to shareware and in the 90s a handful of sites, and there was always the developer's site for the direct download but often they just linked you to one of the big repositories. The only shareware I can remember getting physically was the stuff that came on a disk/cd with some magazine I bought just for the CD filled with shareware. I miss those CDs.

For as long as I can remember shareware was more than the physical sharing, it was the model of a free version that you could share and a paid version and sometimes both versions were the same and it was just requested that you pay if you can (buy me a coffee). Some of this shareware was even adware, I remember getting some drawing program that had a popup every 15 minutes advertising the author's programs, it would go away if you paid; my first "hack" was realizing that I could start the program and then turn the computers date back a day giving me 24 hours and 15 minutes before the popup appeared, after a couple weeks my mom tasked me with fixing the computer, she was having to reset the date every couple days for some reason.

Edit: deleted a comment about source code, realize I misread your post. Should try to fix a couple of those sentences as well, my language skills tend to fall apart when I get nostalgic and I find it very difficult to restructure the thought, I lose the nostalgia.

by ofalkaed

6/5/2026 at 9:21:40 PM

I guess you can think of torrents as sharing. The modern shareware

by culi

6/4/2026 at 4:00:43 PM

Would love to know myself. I haven't seen the term used in 20+ years.

by vga256

6/4/2026 at 6:41:14 PM

Not enough reading of Hacker News, young grasshopper! (-:

Used several times within the last month alone.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375691

by JdeBP

6/4/2026 at 7:53:07 PM

I meant more as an active use-term for software licensing that kiki uses (and in the sense of the OP's question), not in its historical sense that it is used by writers now.

by vga256

6/4/2026 at 7:31:51 PM

Commander Keen! Duke Nukem! Leisure Suit Larry! Scorched Earth! Lemmings!

Happy times

by NuclearPM

6/4/2026 at 2:45:27 PM

This is a tangent to this post, but...

I happen to have a cat named Kiki who looks rather like the mascot for this project. Her health is failing, now. I just spent the night on my living room floor next to her. I'll, likely have to put her down, today.

I might use this project to make a memorial page for her.

https://ibb.co/7dRCnWrp https://ibb.co/1GWwDKLY

by hypersoar

6/4/2026 at 2:54:10 PM

Oh geez -- we went recently through this with our tuxedo, who sadly passed a few years ago. I am glad you'll be able to give her the peace she needs.

The kiki this software is named after, is an extremely rambunctious rotten kitten whom we adopted after our tuxedo passed away.

https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/115742268356907140

:)

by vga256

6/6/2026 at 2:26:29 PM

That sucks, sorry about Kiki. Nothing sucks more than losing a cat.

by nosioptar

6/4/2026 at 3:29:01 PM

I'm sorry you're dealing with this. I had an orange tabby also named Kiki for most of my childhood through early adulthood, 16 years. He suffered from kidney failure and it was a sad day when we had to put him down.

May you have peace during this time.

by sphars

6/4/2026 at 2:53:36 PM

I’m sorry you’re going through this. She’s very cute.

Dedicating a project to her sounds like a great idea.

If you use Reddit, I can also highly recommend the r/petloss subreddit for a bit of “group therapy”. It was very helpful for me a couple years ago.

by blanched

6/4/2026 at 7:11:02 PM

I'm sorry to hear about Kiki. She's very beautiful, thanks for sharing.

She reminds me of my tuxedo cat Bob who recently passed. I remember laying down all night in the comfort room before he had to be put down and sobbing knowing how much pain he was in. It's really hard.

I think a memorial site is a lovely idea, I created one for my cat as well: https://bob.duchastel.com

by simonduchastel

6/5/2026 at 3:23:21 AM

May her passing be a gentle one.

For what it's worth, a random person on the internet just shed a tear for the both of you.

by archonis

6/4/2026 at 2:56:11 PM

Wishing you peace during this time — and thank you for cherishing Kiki as much as you have. A memorial page is a nice way to honor her.

by chalupa-supreme

6/4/2026 at 2:54:08 PM

I'm so sorry. Sending you and Kiki love today.

by cyanureworld

6/4/2026 at 8:56:35 PM

i'm so sorry. i went through that with one of my own recently. please make sure she knows she is loved.

by vyr

6/4/2026 at 6:25:57 PM

Oh man. That really stinks. Losing a pet is hard. Hang in there.

by astrochicken

6/4/2026 at 1:27:29 PM

Should have been written with bouba philosophy.

by smusamashah

6/4/2026 at 12:51:33 PM

Kiki's themes can be edited to suit one's personal tastes. The theme .css files are about 120 lines long.

by unkeptbarista

6/4/2026 at 9:16:16 PM

Hello, neat project. I am also from Edmonton area. I wonder if we have talked previously, in the the late 90s I ran a local BBS system with my colleague.

by markandrewj

6/5/2026 at 12:17:43 AM

I very possibly would have dialed into your BBS in the late 90s :)

403 had some great local boards, of both the public domain and piratey kind!

by vga256

6/4/2026 at 12:43:31 PM

I wish we could get back to a “mom and pop” software market. Itch.io feels like it’s doing a lot of work for indie software that used to just be everywhere and easy to stumble onto.

by moffers

6/4/2026 at 2:02:46 PM

If selling software for money wasn’t such a pain in the arse I would put stuff on my website rather than itch.io

It took me two weeks, plus sending IDs, incorporating an ltd, to get a license to sell software with Paddle. With itch I just need a paypal/stripe account.

by sph

6/4/2026 at 2:32:04 PM

I am going through this right now! I am provisionally approved and still waiting. Even worse I am going through SMS phone number verification with SMTP2GO.

Apparently if you wanna send automated texts in America, you need a real phone number. And to not get immediately blocked, you need to fill out a form that goes to the major carriers for approval (like AT&T). And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.

by Lord_Zero

6/4/2026 at 7:53:47 PM

> And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.

In defense of Paddle (I use them for my own livelihood), they're on the hook for remitting sales taxes to ALL the governments where your customers might reside. They also manage customer disputes, chargebacks, refunds etc. I always redirect support emails to Paddle.net [0] which does the trick 99% of the time.

Stripe or PayPal are nothing like that. They're just payment platforms.

Since Paddle takes on so much liability, it seems reasonable to ask for a lot of initial paperwork from its sellers.

[0] https://paddle.net

by abnercoimbre

6/4/2026 at 3:57:04 PM

Yep, it's called 10DLC. My teams work on telephony integrations, and for the devs to even test that outbound SMS is working, we need to go through this process with every provider we integrate. Massive pain, indeed.

by rpdillon

6/4/2026 at 2:45:08 PM

If you accept cryptocurrency you don’t need to do any of this, and not even deal with PayPal (who WILL rob you without a second thought, as has been well documented on the internet for MULTIPLE decades at this point).

by sneak

6/4/2026 at 5:21:25 PM

I would like to (Bitcoin Lightning only, with a healthy convenience discount) but I'd have to move off Hetzner for my servers because they are really against crypto in a very vague way, and again, that's a lot more work than just using itch.io

by sph

6/4/2026 at 2:30:04 PM

"It's built so that if something looks wrong, you can change it yourself without spending hours reading tutorials and watching coding videos"

Does anyone do this? Every none coder I know just has llms build everything for them - can't imagine why they'd be looking up coding tutorials for a homepage.

by binary0010

6/5/2026 at 1:40:05 AM

Sometimes we build things for the way it should be, rather than the way it is.

by mapontosevenths

6/4/2026 at 5:15:57 PM

That must be the first time in a very long time that I've seen something claim to support PHP 4.

by TazeTSchnitzel

6/4/2026 at 4:09:01 PM

PHP was and still is the best.

by dallen33

6/4/2026 at 9:21:31 PM

I dunno, PHP seems to have a lot of foot-guns.

include $_GET[...], register_globals, magic quotes, extract($_REQUEST), weak comparisons, loose typing, eval, risky file upload defaults/patterns, preg_replace /e, dangerous deserialization gadget chains, path traversal into includes, and the whole "URLs can be file paths" abstraction...

PHP is basically "RCE-as-a-Service" as far as I'm concerned. Allowing a URL in any function that wanted a file path was an absolutely bone-headed design choice. They made `curl | php` a language feature.

by Sohcahtoa82

6/6/2026 at 3:30:30 PM

Like everything it depends on your goals. As a novice developer PHP is wonderful. Everything you see as an obvious security failing is exactly what made it great to a new dev back when most of that was still allowed by default.

by mapontosevenths

6/4/2026 at 1:25:36 PM

Reminds me of a time when my homepage (before lj blog) was using cmsimple. BTW, c still exists. Not sure if it is still "simple" tho.

https://www.cmsimple.org/en/

by theragra

6/4/2026 at 2:39:25 PM

> c still exists

C and Go are two languages I feel like if you learn them, you can come back years later and if your memory is still good, you could get back up to speed pretty darn quickly. Every few years I go back to Go and try to build web apps using only the standard libraries, and I always find myself very quickly picking up all the concepts.

by giancarlostoro

6/4/2026 at 3:54:31 PM

For some reason, Java has the same feeling. Professionally I do both embedded and statistical computing, and Java's been nearly anathema to this. But every 5 years I patch a hobby project I did once in college, and it comes right back (and with JVM hot reloading too.) It gives me the engineering warm and fuzzies.

by nxobject

6/4/2026 at 6:31:36 PM

Oh ! i cannot see myself doing php again, loved the language and have some good memories too but that me was 10 years ago

by xydac

6/4/2026 at 7:13:09 PM

that font color is impossible to read on the black background

I'm guessing this is made for a specific audience who dig this type of UI

by zuzululu

6/6/2026 at 2:53:50 PM

It's not impossible for me to read, but it is uncomfortable enough that it'd give me a headache if I tried to read it.

by nosioptar

6/4/2026 at 7:19:58 PM

Really? I can read it just fine. It’s probably your monitor brightness settings, which is still a design flaw on their part regardless

by ganelonhb

6/4/2026 at 12:20:34 PM

[flagged]

by brettermeier

6/4/2026 at 12:49:49 PM

Idk man, I think it's pretty charming even if it's not exactly the design choice I'd have gone with.

by Hugsbox

6/4/2026 at 12:31:40 PM

1. There is a link to a demo website, which is in fact in similar style.

2. I don't think the website is _nearly unreadable_.

3. Pretty rude remark.

by shlewis

6/4/2026 at 12:46:33 PM

> 2. I don't think the website is _nearly unreadable_.

For me personally, the color scheme is uncomfortable to read. Dark text on a dark background

by KomoD

6/4/2026 at 1:34:46 PM

It's the decades-old problem of blue on black, which has led to interminable discussions of which exact tint of blue should be ECMA-45 blue on a terminal. Pick one, it has poor contrast with a black background. Pick another, it has poor contrast with a white background.

* https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#dont_like_...

by JdeBP

6/4/2026 at 1:56:01 PM

So, pick two? One for each background?

by hananova

6/4/2026 at 2:07:28 PM

There is only one 'blue', colour number 4, in ECMA-45.

by JdeBP

6/4/2026 at 4:43:42 PM

A terminal emulator could choose to display different foreground blues, depending on the background colour.

by masfuerte

6/4/2026 at 12:51:17 PM

try the demo. it’s an entirely different style, which shows how versatile the tool is

by varun_ch

6/4/2026 at 1:13:11 PM

It still doesn't reflect the design philosophy at all, though. A wacky approximation of early MacOS that offers nonfunctional UI affordances doesn't fit my bill of No obscurantist programming languages and styles, or simple, maintainable software akin to machines that need to work under all circumstances in the far north.

I was also a little disappointed with the philosophy's goals in general, which seem to be mostly the personal preferences of a lone-wolf style open source developer, not a universal approach to software design.

by 9dev

6/4/2026 at 1:55:43 PM

When you describe my programming and design philosophy as "the personal preferences of a lone-wolf style open source developer, not a universal approach to software design", I consider that the absolute best compliment I could have ever hoped for!

A "universal" approach to software design is the problem I am addressing, not the solution. Coming up with your own philosophy of design and implementation that works for you, and hopefully works for others, is how we get better software.

by vga256

6/4/2026 at 2:10:25 PM

I'm not arguing with that, I think; I agree with your general sentiment and apparently read many of the same books you read as well. Yet I still believe there's value in a shared understanding of what quality software is, and what ideals to strive for in its conception.

by 9dev

6/4/2026 at 1:45:51 PM

> I was also a little disappointed with the philosophy's goals in general, which seem to be mostly the personal preferences of a lone-wolf style open source developer, not a universal approach to software design.

How would a universal approach to software design be in any way appropriate for this?

by mcphage

6/4/2026 at 2:07:15 PM

I like the general concept of software that treats its users as responsible adults, in the sense of not restricting them in how they can use the software; the analogy to machines that must work in remote areas with an extreme climate and no connection to the outside world is an apt one. Rejecting complexity in favour of maintainability, allowing to reach into and modify if necessary, those things I feel could be sharpened into proper, and universal guiding principles.

by 9dev

6/4/2026 at 1:38:29 PM

HN Guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. [...] Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative. [...] Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

by elicash

6/4/2026 at 2:38:11 PM

Troll trots out the old "You should only be allowed the web site aesthetic I approve of and anyone who doesn't agree with me is stupid!" and is shocked that not everyone on HN appreciates their insightful genius.

by kjs3

6/4/2026 at 2:40:38 PM

Some things are a standard, and thats a good thing... Line lenghts discussed here for example: https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

by brettermeier

6/5/2026 at 12:53:27 AM

Sorry...I'm too busy laughing at the idea of "there is one canonical 'standard' for anything in web UX that everyone agrees with" to google up one (or a dozen) websites that disagree with the undoubtedly fine folks at the Baymard Institute.

by kjs3

6/4/2026 at 1:16:51 PM

idk, the demo thingy looks great.

https://tomotama.com/kikidemo/

by Gualdrapo

6/4/2026 at 1:54:53 PM

Obviously we have different monitors, but on mine the geneva-9 font doesn't render properly in the subpixels causing alternate green and purple, the underlines don't line up to the beginning of the words, and the whole thing stretches across the window the same way.

by projektfu

6/4/2026 at 4:38:34 PM

Could use some more attention to responsive layout though - too nav links aligned left flow into and overlap with top nav links aligned right. I’m on my phone right now so I can check but flex or plain old float could’ve solved that.

by mock-possum

6/4/2026 at 2:15:31 PM

I prefer text over the whole width compared to websites that put all their content in the left 80 columns of the screen, taking up about a quarter of my screen width

by voidUpdate

6/4/2026 at 2:34:32 PM

Why does my eye need to move more than it needs to?

by handfuloflight

6/4/2026 at 2:41:54 PM

Why does my screen need to be used less than it needs to? If you're only going to use 1/4 of my screen for your content, you could at least put a cute cat picture in the rest of it or something

by voidUpdate

6/4/2026 at 2:49:43 PM

Whitespace is for breathing.

by handfuloflight

6/4/2026 at 2:53:24 PM

That's a hell of a lot of breathing. I don't have that much lung capacity

by voidUpdate

6/4/2026 at 1:09:23 PM

It is for sure readable, why so dramatic?

by tquinn35

6/4/2026 at 1:18:23 PM

My vision isn’t great and I do find it more difficult to read comfortably than most sites. I haven’t checked the actual contrast ratio, but for this particular font and size the text color feels like it’s lacking strong contrast against the background. The tabs at the top are even more difficult to read comfortably than.

But I understand that sites that look this way are not made for maximum legibility, but as an in-group signifier.

by nkrisc

6/4/2026 at 1:21:06 PM

The text flows over the whole width is one point, the paddings and margins is another one. Sure, you can read this if you really want, but it's painful.

by brettermeier

6/4/2026 at 1:47:32 PM

I would like to introduce a wild concept -- browser window is resizable.

by neoromantique

6/4/2026 at 2:22:31 PM

Do you think I will resize my browser window just because you fucked up your layout? No, I will leave.

by brettermeier

6/4/2026 at 3:12:18 PM

sure, but I prefer this layout to majority of big tech today.

Gives me flexibility and choice and does not punish me with 600px wide content box because majority of users have trouble grasping the concept of window management.

by neoromantique

6/4/2026 at 3:25:36 PM

Fair enough, I'd say for niche content it may be okay, but for targeting broader audiences I'd guess you lose many readers with that readability on fullscreen browser windows (what most people will have in front of them while surfing I guess).

by brettermeier

6/4/2026 at 1:52:48 PM

if you move your mouse to the edge of your browser window it turns into a little bidiretional arrow, if you click then drag you can make your window more narrow until it suits your desired reading preference

by micromacrofoot

6/4/2026 at 2:44:48 PM

The design philosophy says you should be able to repair your own tools, but this is closed source proprietary software.

Cute page, but does not walk the walk.

by sneak

6/4/2026 at 9:20:00 PM

I'm not going to blame you _too_ much, since I had similar suspicion, but you could have (as I did) just downloaded the .zip file and examined the contents. In the shareware version, some things are probably missing (I think not all themes are there), but otherwise it's just a bunch of PHP files, no obfuscation or anything. The markup language is configured in a text file, and the parser for that file is just next to it. The configuration is used for configuring the markup parser, which is also present. And so on. It's not open-source only if your definition of OSS is "has to have a Github page".

by klibertp

6/5/2026 at 2:57:00 PM

Just because you can see the source code does not make it open source. Shareware software is proprietary software.

Open source means free software, which is a license that allows unrestricted use of the source code. Shareware isn’t free (as in speech OR as in beer) software.

The definition of OSS is well defined, and isn’t my definition. This is why there is a term called “OSI-approved license”.

by sneak

6/6/2026 at 1:57:06 PM

It's not open source but you can repair it yourself. So it does walk the walk.

by okkdev

6/4/2026 at 5:44:43 PM

It's not closed source.

by nosrepa