My brother runs a movie web site in Chinese, that has some traffic. He's a writer, not a developer, but he learned some basic HTML some 15 years ago and has been publishing articles in raw HTML files since then.
The site is as web 1.0 as it can get, and he wants to modernize it. I'm a developer.
My side project currently is to help with this. It's actually fun to work on.
There's no breakthroughs or interesting science/engineering problems being solved. It's just a mix of things that make it fun. Everything from picking a proper CMS with a list of interesting requirements (easy to use, as attack-proof as possible [i.e. not Wordpress], as few moving pieces as possible but easy content authoring), converting old pages from HTML to some markdown format for future-proofing, making sure old URLs work and redirect to new URLs with better SEO formats, converting old Chinese encoding (Big5!) to Unicode, responsive design of pages/mobile focus, adding AMP and FB Instant Articles features, and so on. It's a mixture of building a CMS in 2017 and rethinking how a modern content site should be.
The site is as web 1.0 as it can get, and he wants to modernize it. I'm a developer.
My side project currently is to help with this. It's actually fun to work on.
There's no breakthroughs or interesting science/engineering problems being solved. It's just a mix of things that make it fun. Everything from picking a proper CMS with a list of interesting requirements (easy to use, as attack-proof as possible [i.e. not Wordpress], as few moving pieces as possible but easy content authoring), converting old pages from HTML to some markdown format for future-proofing, making sure old URLs work and redirect to new URLs with better SEO formats, converting old Chinese encoding (Big5!) to Unicode, responsive design of pages/mobile focus, adding AMP and FB Instant Articles features, and so on. It's a mixture of building a CMS in 2017 and rethinking how a modern content site should be.