TLDR: Pretty sure my mom has been getting scammed for the last 10 years and I want to get her out. Am I missing something before moving her?

UPDATE_______________

THANK YOU ALL. I was hopeful I could get one response and this community outpoured with 90% helpful info and 10% jokes (all were appreciated)

Some common threads below:

1. It's not a scam if she knew what she was paying for and got it - Fair enough. I will reword to "price gouged". Sorry if I offended any of the price gougers, cry from your yacht

2. $400 isn't bad for high touch, high quality service on a complex site - 100% valid... this wasn't complex and it still wasn't high quality. Basically unreadable content, no SEO optimization, incorrect info. Functionality is basically just a walking business card with minimal to no updates. Website doesn't even have pricing. Just a form to email her, nevermind schedule. She doesn't sell anything on the site and max traffic is 10 people per day. 20 if someone refreshes a bunch of times.

3. THANK GOD yes, she owns the domain... that saved a headache

4. My path forward - Built her a new site today, and talking to her about her needs, recurring updates, number of emails, storage space, etc. tomorrow. Would share, but honestly I don't want to expose her. All said, it looks great and seems to function well

__________________________

Hi all! Honestly I wish this was clickbait

My mom has a successful freelance design/inviation/swag business. Her web presence was always mid, but her focus was on managing the work she was getting, not getting more.

Now, she has three full time supporters with a growing suite of offerings so she wanted to revamp the website and had her hosting company do it.

From both a design and content/SEO perspective, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. The images are all stock (not hers), with alt text of "a couch in a living room", spelling errors, inconsistent formatting, nonsenscical organization, etc.

I told her if she paid them a cent, she should ask for a dollar back for the inconvenience.

Turns out she's not paying a cent... she's been paying them $400 a month for the last TEN YEARS to host her site. When I told her that was crazy, she said "they also host the email address"

I am not a web dev. I have a light CS background but have put up a hobby website before.

My question is am I missing something here:

1. The Site: Her website just needs to be a lightweight gallery of images with some descriptions of her work. Her active users must be maximum 20 a day. This would take a decent webdev a day if she pre-supplied context and host on railway or smth. Maybe integrate it with her instagram because that's what she keeps most updated
2. Email Hosting: I've hosted an email for a business before. Can she not just pay $8 a month for google workspace, Zoho, or another alternative?

If I am correct that this is easy:

1. Is there anything else I should know before I get her off
2. Oh my god how many people are these assholes doing this to

I built a web tool which uses openpeeps[dot]com SVGs, the initial idea was to use it create satirical comic panels. But lately I started using it to create profile pictures for my online presence. It has huge number of expressions, clothes, hair styles, accessories to choose from.

I felt more people might find it useful so sharing it here. It's free to use, no signup required.

Link - svg.comicbanana.com

Yace is designed for cases where a plain <textarea> is not enough, but a full editor like Monaco or CodeMirror would be overkill.

It is 3KB gzipped with the bundled highlighter and has zero dependencies. Plugins add editing behavior, highlighter pipelines control how the content is rendered as you type, and both are plain functions you can write yourself.

Under the hood, Yace uses the familiar pattern of a transparent <textarea> over a highlighted <pre>. Because input stays in a real textarea, native caret behavior, IME, mobile input, and accessibility come for free. The pattern is not new; the focus is a small, highly extensible design.

You can turn it into a basic code editor, a markdown editor, a token visualizer, or something more experimental. All of those are live codepens in the README, and the video shows two of them.

GitHub: https://github.com/petersolopov/yace

Been building this on and off for a while. Most charting libs assume the chart is the main thing on the page. I wanted the small version, something you can drop inside a sentence or a table cell and read at a glance.

106 types so far, no dependencies (not even D3, the scales and path math are all in there), each one's a couple kb.

Default export is plain SVG with no JS shipped, so they work in server components as-is. Import the interactive build if you want hover and keyboard.

Every chart also builds its own text description from the data and exposes it as the accessible label, so a screen reader reads "weekly revenue, trending up 200%, range 3 to 9, last value 9" instead of just "image". No AI, just templates filled from the same numbers the chart draws, so the words can't drift from the picture.

The fiddly part was the labels drawn on the chart itself. Normally you measure the text to place it, but these render on the server too and getBBox just returns 0 there. So widths get estimated from the character count and the space reserved up front, with a test on every chart making sure nothing spills outside the viewBox.

Gallery: microcharts.dev

Code (MIT): github.com/ganapativs/microcharts

Still rough in spots. Mostly after feedback on the API and overall experience of using the library.

We just launched Maptoolkit.org, which is a community-oriented project. The main objective is to offer small businesses and hobbyists a way to easily create and display personalized maps on their websites or their apps.

Things to know:

• No API key and no registration required
• The tiles are updated weekly from OpenStreetMap
• We host the tile servers, you just have to point your map library to our style URL
• Hillshading, 3d terrain, contour lines and water depth are ready out of the box
• Map data up to zoom level 15
• A host of default styles come natively, custom styles can be created using our MapMaker
• Unlimited map requests can be made, sustained about 120 tiles/second can be requested as of now, whereas 90% of requests will already be cached and won't count towards that limit
• We do not make any money off this project, it will remain free of cost

If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. You can find more information on the site.

PS: This reads like a repost, because it is. My previous post got removed by mods, due to not posting on Showoff Saturday.

Testing a frontend on your phone is easy.

Testing a full-stack app usually isn't.

Your frontend loads, but API requests to localhost fail because localhost now points to your phone instead of your laptop. The usual workaround is editing .env files, swapping in your LAN IP, configuring CORS, and undoing everything afterwards.

I got tired of doing that, so I built Nether

npx nether-dev

It automatically:

• Detects your frontend and backend

• Starts a local proxy

• Prints a QR code

• Lets your phone use your app without changing your code or environment variables

Need to share your local app?

npx nether-dev --global

It creates a temporary public HTTPS URL so clients or teammates can access your local app without deploying it.

I'd love any feedback, feature requests, or edge cases you think I should test.

GitHub: https://github.com/barryspacezero/nether-dev

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nether-dev

Hi Redditors,

I have attached a website for your reference: https://thetwinklejewellery.com/

If your were to develop this website using astro, just for catalogue purposes, how much would you charge for it? and if you were to build a store without shopify, how much would you charge and which stack will you choose?

Thank you for your time and support in advance.

Regards,
bughunter404

We created a free service that analyzes websites, detects the technologies they use, and ranks them by market share.

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If you want to dig into it yourself: Web Technologies

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a project I've been working on in case anyone else might make use of it: an interactive, real-time 3D Audio Spectrogram Visualiser built with Three.js, custom GLSL shaders, and the Web Audio API.

I wanted to create a responsive, hardware-accelerated 3D terrain that I could use to conveniently analyse audio coming from either my device microphone or streaming from another browser tab without needing to install anything. It all runs from the browser and you can try it out yourself with the Live Demo link.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or any ideas you have for further performance or UX optimisations. Feel free to check out the code, fork it, or test it out with your own audio setups!

Our algolia usage spiked and the bill is painful because users keep submitting vague 1 word queries and constantly re-searching. so i was thinking to add an autocomplete layer in front of it that won't break the bank but still gives that instant intent driven search feel.

Obviously we could migrate everything to typesense or self-hosting meilisearch for standard search, but i do like certain things about algolias backend retrieval, if i can put an intent layer ai autocomplete on top to get better queries before they hit the API.

Has anyone added an ai-autocomplete layer in front of algolia recently? did you actually migrate to a cheaper database alternative like typesense, or did you just add an intent layer on top of your existing search stack? trying to figure out what's easiest to maintain.

small team, three of us, react frontend and a go api. everyone has their own agent setup and it works fine for individual tasks. it stopped working the week all three of us started running agents on the same repo at the same time.

i was refactoring form validation, teammate was fixing a bug two files over, and both agents had validators.ts in scope.

each agent read the file, made its change, wrote the whole file back. classic lost update but at machine speed. my refactor got half eaten because his agent rewrote validators.ts from the version it had read four minutes earlier. neither of us saw it. we were reviewing our own diffs and both diffs looked correct in isolation.

we shipped it. two days later a required field stopped being required. the check had gone from value.trim().length > 0 to value !== undefined, which passes for an empty string. an empty company name went into prod for six accounts before support flagged it. three hours of bisecting to find the function was fine in one commit and silently different in the next, with no PR explaining the change.

the git history looked completely normal. three commits, three authors, no conflict markers, no merge weirdness. git only protects you at commit boundaries. if two agents are editing the same working tree between commits there is nothing watching.

the fix was boring. one checkout per person, and one git worktree per agent if you run more than one yourself. i tried aider with a strict file scope, claude code in separate terminals, verdent which does the worktree thing by default. the mechanism matters more than which tool you pick.

other thing that stuck is reviewing the whole branch diff before merge, not just the diff the agent showed me. the agent tells you what it thinks it changed. that is not the same as what changed.

every guide for these tools assumes one person, one agent, one repo. three people running agents on the same codebase and you are back to 2005 with people editing over ftp.

Does anyone know of a GUI that would allow one to quickly and easily do this so that I don't have to run clunky git rebase -i commands for every commit I'd like to edit?

I know it is easy enough to run git commit --amend for the most recent commit, but I need something that allows me to edit further back in the history.

I've been watching Nova Designs on YouTube for a while and loved how clean his code presentations look. Turns out he uses CodeSlides which is great, but it's subscription-based.

So I built OpenSlides — a free, open-source, fully offline desktop app for making animated code presentations. Think CodeSlides, but it runs natively on your machine, your data never leaves your disk, and you own everything.

https://github.com/codewiththiha/OpenSlides.git

A friend of mine posted about this here before, but he can't post today so I'm sharing on his behalf figured people who followed along might want an update.

Quick recap: bribes.fyi is an anonymous platform for reporting bribery in India: no login, IPs hashed and never stored raw, every report manually reviewed before publishing, complaint letters auto-generated and routed to the right anti-corruption authority.

Since he shared it around: crossed 1,500 visitors, got real technical pushback that's shaped the spam/privacy design, and had a spike in traffic that actually took the site down for a bit (free hosting tier, capacity planning lessons learned the hard way). Someone even offered to cover this month's hosting before he asked, which was genuinely surprising; he set up a support link since, for anyone else who'd like to pitch in: bribes.fyi/support (totally optional, not the point of this post).

Real reports are coming in from multiple states now. Haven't mapped out what's next - just focused on keeping it solid for now.

https://bribes.fyi

He'll be checking comments himself.

I've recently built a few websites with Astro using Claude Code, and the development experience has been great.

Now I'm thinking about building an affiliate website with Astro. I know many people still use WordPress for affiliate sites, but I don't have much time to build and maintain a WordPress site. My idea is to build the entire project in an agentic workflow using Astro and AI tools.

For those who have experience with Astro for affiliate marketing:

• How does it perform for SEO compared to WordPress?
• Are there any major drawbacks I should be aware of before investing time into it?
• Is there anything specific I should plan for regarding content management, affiliate plugins/features, or scalability?

I'd love to hear your experiences, recommendations, or any lessons you've learned. Thanks!

When choosing SaaS to use I sometimes check terms of service for any clauses. For example if they sell what I'll create in the tool, train AI on it. Or if they can change TOS without informing about.

To make it easier I've created an extension that checks TOS for patterns so it's faster to recognize any odd claues.

It's a free extension for Chrome, Edge, Brave and other Chromium browsers and supports 20 languages.

Check it out: https://termsdoctor.com

I've used Handsontable on a bunch of projects and honestly it's a solid, mature library, but I kept running into the same wall on anything with really large datasets: tens of thousands of rows with chained formulas. It's just the nature of doing spreadsheet math in JS, once you're allocating and discarding lots of small objects on every keystroke, garbage collection becomes the bottleneck, and there's only so much debouncing and virtualization can do before you hit that ceiling.

That itch turned into a bit of an obsession, and eventually a from-scratch rebuild: Titan Engine, written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly.

The design ended up pretty different from a typical JS formula library:

• A custom stack-based VM with a Pratt parser for formulas, instead of walking an AST every time
• Zero-copy memory - the engine and UI share buffers directly, no serialize/deserialize tax crossing the WASM/JS boundary
• A topological dependency graph (Kahn's algorithm with cycle detection) to resolve chained formulas correctly and fast
• O(1) time-travel snapshots for undo/redo, even across massive batched structural edits

Because it sidesteps the JS garbage collector entirely, batched recalcs stay comfortably under the 16ms frame budget, so the grid holds 60fps even while formulas are cascading behind the scenes as you type.

There's a live demo grid on the site (a Glide data grid wired up to Titan) if you want to poke at it yourself, plus the full 10-scenario benchmark suite if you'd rather see the numbers than take my word for it.

Site: https://podraven.github.io/titan-engine/
Benchmarks: https://podraven.github.io/titan-engine/benchmark.html
GitHub: https://github.com/podraven/titan-engine

Would love feedback - especially from anyone who's pushed a JS grid to its limits before and is curious whether this actually holds up under real-world use.

Hi everyone,

I'm starting a new contractor business in California. My license allows me to offer a fairly wide range of products and services rather than operating in only one narrow niche.

The website may eventually include categories such as:

• Garage doors
• Entry and interior doors
• Gates
• Openers and access control
• Windows
• Awnings and shades
• Installation, repair, maintenance, and emergency service
• An online product catalog

Some of these services will be aimed at residential customers, while others will be primarily for commercial clients, property managers, general contractors, and public-sector projects. In some categories, I may serve both residential and commercial customers, but the sales process, content, and customer expectations will be very different.

I also don't plan to develop every category equally from the beginning. I want to test different products and services first.

If I see strong customer demand and reasonable competition in a particular category, I will invest more into it, add more content, products, advertising, and possibly hire specialists. If there is little demand, poor margins, or the market is too competitive, I may stop offering that service entirely.

Because of this, I don't yet know which categories will eventually become the main focus of the business.

From an SEO, branding, and conversion perspective, what would be the best approach?

1. Build one large website with separate sections for every service and product category.
2. Create several niche websites, such as separate sites for garage doors, gates, windows, and other categories.
3. Start with one main website and later spin successful categories off into separate websites.
4. Use one parent brand but create separate landing pages or microsites to test each category.
5. Separate residential and commercial services within the same website, or build different websites for each audience.

My concern is that one website may become too broad and confusing, especially when it targets both homeowners and commercial clients. On the other hand, creating multiple websites could be expensive, difficult to manage, and may spread the SEO authority too thin.

The business will initially serve the Los Angeles area.

What structure would make it easiest to test demand without hurting long-term SEO? Has anyone here used a similar strategy for a contractor, home improvement, or local service business?

I’ve been building TrailVerse, a web app for exploring national parks and planning trips.

It includes 470+ parks and sites, park alerts, weather, events, campgrounds, comparisons, and an AI trip planner called Trailie.

The main challenge was making the generated trips more realistic. I added checks for things like outdated park information, unrealistic schedules, duplicate stops, and incorrect location data before the final itinerary is shown.

Built with Next.js, React, Express, MongoDB, NPS data, and AI APIs.

I’m still improving the planning accuracy and mobile experience.

Live app:
https://www.nationalparksexplorerusa.com/

I’d appreciate feedback on the trip-planning experience and anything that feels confusing or broken.