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Robin Whittleton
Personal blog · robinwhittleton.com · on HN as robin_realawebdesign
Robin Whittleton's personal blog at robinwhittleton.com covers web and design. Since 2018, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
A personal website that HN readers link in threads about personal sites and Larry Wall's home page. The comments say nothing about the writing itself, only that the site exists.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
I moved to Runbox from GMail earlier this year after the AMP-in-mail debacle. I wrote up my criteria and a bunch of different suppliers[1] and Runbox was the pick. I’ve been mostly happy with them, although their uptime hasn’t been brilliant recently. [1] https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/
Comment linking /2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/
on “Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?”Submitted Your EU ecommerce site legally requires a dark mode by the 28th June 2025 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI’ve spent the year producing and proofing a bunch more PD books for Standard Ebooks.[1] I keep the full set of books I’ve produced on my site[2]; highlights for me from this year were: The Little Demon by Fyodor Sologub https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fyodor-sologub/the-little-... The Awakening by Kate Chopin https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/kate-chopin/the-awakening Wilfred Owen’s poetry https://standardebooks.…
Comment linking /books/
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?”Submitted Adventures in Python optimisation as a story · 2 points
HN discussionKagi and Soverin for me. I bailed from GMail after the AMP-in-mail proposal,[1] and EU hosting was a bonus; ended up blogging about my choice back in 2018.[2] If there was a good EU equivalent to Kagi I’d be definitely interested. [1] https://blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-gmai... [2] https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/
Comment linking /2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/
on “Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)”Submitted Dropping G Suite as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://www.robinwhittleton.com ? cool
Comment linking /
on “Larry Wall's Very Own Home Page”Submitted Reading the Hyphen-Minus as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAMP in email was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me when it was first announced. I ended up completely closing my paid GApps account and migrating my email over to RunBox instead; I also as much as possible reduced my use of Google properties (basically everything that’s not YouTube) and started blocking all Google cookies outright outside of a container tab for YouTube. If anyone’s interested I wrote up h…
Comment linking /2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/
on “AMP for email is bad”I produce books[1] for Standard Ebooks.[2] I’ve got a fifty-long list of books-to-do-at some point, so grabbing transcriptions from Gutenberg and scans from archive.org for each would keep me busy for a long time, presumably long enough for the internet to heal whatever state it’s got itself into. [1] https://www.robinwhittleton.com/books/ [2] https://standardebooks.org/
Comment linking /books/
on “Ask HN: What would you preserve if the internet were to go down tomorrow?”I asked myself the same question a while ago and wrote up the options then.[1] I used Runbox[2] for a while, but ended up switching to Soverin[3] and have been mostly happy with them. You certainly don’t get the spam filtering that the big companies have, but generally life is good. [1] https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/ [2] https://runbox.com/ [3] https://soverin.net/
Comment linking /2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/
on “Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns”I closed my G Suite account today because of Google’s announcement of AMP for Email. Luckily I didn’t have a huge Google presence in the first place beyond email which is easily IMAPed over to another server. Takeout allowed me to extract the rest: my docs as ODF, YouTube subs as RSS and contacts as ICS. If anyone’s interested I wrote up my investigation into potential replacement mail services: http://www.robinwhit…
Comment linking /2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/
on “AMP: the missing controversy”Yep! Glad you’re enjoying it. Here are my share of the SE productions: https://www.robinwhittleton.com/books/ Biggest so far (and biggest on SE at 1.2m words) has been Samuel Pepys’ Diary: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-pepys/the-diary
Comment linking /books/
on “Arabian Nights”Depends what you’re doing. The majority of the site I work on for my day job is statically rendered and theoretically works without JS, but large parts (including any ecom functionality and profiles) fail. Would it be worth making them more reliable by falling back if JS fails? Possibly, but that’s difficult sometimes to argue for in today’s environment of features-first from product, and developer-experience-first…
Comment linking /2016/09/19/why-we-use-progressive-enhancement-to-build-gov-uk/
on “Create No-JavaScript friendly sites”I moved to Runbox a week ago and am happy (so far at least). Before I switched from Gmail I worked out what my requirements were and evaluated a few services, wrote up my findings at http://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/ . Fastmail is the obvious competitor, but I wanted a mail service that didn’t have servers in the US (Fastmail have US and Amsterdam, but replicate across then instead of letti…
Comment linking /2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/
on “Ask HN: What do you use instead of Gmail?”https://jrock.us/ https://jgc.org/ http://kaledavis.com/ https://aegir.sexy/ https://www.gwern.net/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/ https://danwin.com/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/ https://www.magic.do/ https://edweissman.com/ https://jakeseliger.com/ http://www.fogus.me/ https://www.stavros.io/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/ https://minimaxir.com/ https://www.robinwhittleton.com/ https://ciexinc.com/ https://rongarret.info…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite personal sites?”It’s the company blog and I wrote this on their time, so they get to pick I guess – I’ve already mirrored it on my own site: https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2026/01/12/design-systems-an...
Comment linking /2026/01/12/design-systems-and-shareable-browser-support/
on “Design systems and shareable browser support”