oldweb-today
neocities
oldweb-today | neocities | |
---|---|---|
22 | 287 | |
234 | 1,287 | |
0.4% | 2.3% | |
4.2 | 9.4 | |
4 months ago | 6 days ago | |
JavaScript | JavaScript | |
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
oldweb-today
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Ask HN: What products other than Obsidian share the file over app philosophy?
There are flat-file CMSes (content management systems) like Grav: https://getgrav.org/
I guess, in some vague/broad sense, config-as-code systems also implement something similar? Maybe even OpenAPI schemas could count to some degree...?
In the old days, the "semantic web" movement was an attempt to make more webpages both human- and machine-readable indefinitely by tagging them with proper schema: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework. Even Google was on board for a while, but I guess it never saw much uptake. As far as I can tell it's basically dead now, both because of non-semantic HTML (everything as a React div), general laziness, and LLMs being able to parse things loosely.
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Side thoughts...
Philosophically, I don't know that capturing raw data alone as files is really sufficient to capture the nuances of any particular experience, or the overall zeitgeist of an era. You can archive Geocities pages, but that doesn't really capture the novelty and indie-ness of that era. Similarly, you can save TikTok videos, but absent the cultural environment that created them (and a faithful recreation of the recommendation algorithm), they wouldn't really show future archaeologists how teenagers today lived.
I worked for a natural history museum for a while, and while we were there, one of the interesting questions (well, to me anyway) was whether our web content was in and of itself worth preserving as a cultural artifact -- both so that future generations can see what exhibits were interesting/apropos for the cultures of our times, but also so they could see how our generation found out about those exhibitions to begin with (who knows what the Web will morph into 50 years later). It wasn't enough to simply save the HTML of our web pages, both because they tie into various other APIs and databases (like zoological collections) and because some were interactive experiences, like games designed to be played with a mouse (before phones were popular), or phone chatbots with some of our specimens. To really capture the experience authentically would've required emulating not just our tech stacks and devices, among other things.
Like for the earlier Geocities example, sure you could just save the old HTML and render it with a modern browser, but that's not the same as something like https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://geocities.com/ , which emulates the whole OS and browser too. And that still isn't the same as having to sit in front of a tiny CRT and wait minutes for everything to download over a 14.4k modem, only to be interrupted when mom had to make a call.
I guess that's a longwinded of critiquing "file over app": It only makes sense for things that are originally files/documents to begin with. Much of our lives now are not flat docs but "experiences" that take much more thought and effort to archive. If the goal is truly to preserve that posterity, it's not enough to just archive their raw data, but to develop ways to record and later emulate entire experiences, both technological and cultural. It ain't easy!
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Ask HN: It's 1997, how do you build a website?
1. Anything that can emulate Windows 95
2. HotDog, Dreamweaver, and/or Frontpage for HTML editing. They each have their strengths & weaknesses and work relatively well together. Normally I'd lay out pages in Dreamweaver or Frontpage and then clean up the HTML with HotDog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotDog. Upload them with BulletproofFTP (http://www.bpftp.com/), an ancient predecessor of Filezilla.
3. Not sure if any of the old hosts are still around. Maybe Neocities.org comes close to the Geocities of old, or else you can get barebones and very cheap but reliable web hosting from https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
Get AOL dialup: https://getonline.aol.com/dialup and a 56k modem off eBay, no cheating with megabit connections.
You can emulate old browsers online: https://oldweb.today/
People generally weren't self-hosting their websites back then because phone lines weren't very reliable, and the dialup modems of the day (like today's cable modems) generally had faster download than upload speeds. After the BBS era, commercial internet hosts started becoming pretty common, but they usually used expensive ISDN or T1 lines.
Apache was still in its infancy then, and Microsoft IIS was common.
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Overall, I don't think the network stack is really THAT far removed from what we have today. The basics of HTTP were pretty fleshed out already (it was more the HTTPS and DNS security extensions that really evolved), along with better compression and parallelization protocols in HTTP2/3. And of there's been a huge amount of backend server optimizations, caching, reverse proxies, etc. But the old network stack would still work today and you can still run a basic barebones http daemon and firewall the same way you could back then, open up port 80, and watch your box get pwned by the bots. Hell, there are probably still zombie bots leftover from that era running on someone's basement PC, just casually scanning the internet day in and day out, waiting for its chance...
What's changed a lot more (IMO) is more the language of the web itself. HTML was very basic then, as was JS and CSS. Making websites without modern CSS, in particular, is very painful... requiring a lot of nested tables, frames (remember those? they're different from iframes!), etc. A lot of the pain was abstracted away to backend scripting languages (Perl, ASP, Coldfusion) or frontend extensions (Java, Shockwave Flash) and people didn't really work in vanilla HTML/JS very often (because they were so weak by then). Plain HTML is for your basic Astro Marmalade site with a bunch of animated gifs and whatever, but probably real ecommerce sites (such as it were) wouldn't be written in plain HTML :)
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SURF THE WEB LIKE IT'S 1999!
I like https://oldweb.today ... actually emulates old OS/browser combinations and proxies stuff from archive.org
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Is there a website that shows chronological versions of websites/apps/aplatforms?
Another option to what you are looking for https://oldweb.today/
- Old Web, Today
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I miss the old Internet
Good news! You can go back in time https://oldweb.today/
- Casual Friday - 🎵 Talking to the moon 🌝 We could talk forever 🎵
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How To See What a Website Used To Look Like In 2019?
https://web.archive.org/ does not have a screenshot from that month. https://oldweb.today doesn't work either because it pulls up a broken version (I tried all of the browsers it allows on the left). I tried looking online for another site to be able to pull an archive but was unsuccessful.
I need to see what gravitytransformation.com/macro-calculator looked like in September of 2019. https://web.archive.org/ does not have a screenshot from that month. https://oldweb.today doesn't work either.
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macOS 8 Running in the Browser
https://oldweb.today/ gives you that experience, using some of the same building blocks.
neocities
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The woman who coined the expression 'Surfing the Internet'
You may really enjoy Neocities [0] it is full if websites that you explore.
[0] https://neocities.org/
- Neocities
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Top 20 Free Static Web Hosting Services in 2024 ⚡️
Thriving creative community. Neocities
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Let's make the indie web easier
I'm surprised no-one's mentioned neocities (https://neocities.org/). It's open source (https://github.com/neocities).
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Neocities – Developers API
Compare the copy on the landing pages and it’s pretty obvious
https://pages.cloudflare.com/
https://neocities.org/
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Is it just me, or is the Internet getting really boring?
If you are curious to find more interesting stuff, start here: – https://mojeek.com/ search engine with own index, totally different results - https://wiby.me/ another search engine, but "old school" kind of web sites. It does not mean that site cannot be new, but it just looks and feels like old school web pages. Funny way is use that "surprise me..." link there to find something - https://peelopaalu.neocities.org/ loooooots of interesting and random strange links to dig deeper on internet than just the sugar coated google-friendly web (aka. ad-friendly commercial web) - https://neocities.org/ the web page where is lots of sites hosted as somebody else already shared this as well there on comments - https://koshka.love/links.html Koshka's web page and its links to find more random stuff. There are interesting opinion texts on his site as well.
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The Small Website Discoverability Crisis
Neocities has taken steps to try to improve small personal web site discoverability, which ends up being like a platform for people making web sites with a hybrid social component https://neocities.org
I like the idea of calling this the small web, I usually go with something like "personal web site" or "home pages" but it's never quite stuck for me. I hope they've added Neocities to the Kagi small web search because there's some pretty incredible sites available for that: https://neocities.org/browse
- Ask HN: What's your go-to webhost in 2023 for simple websites?
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Drag and drop instant web hosting
Similar to neocities, but novel choice to allow the user to upload file(s) as part of the sign up process.
https://neocities.org
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Website Building/Blogging Tool: Static Ultra (Showoff Saturday)
If you'd like some free web space to try it out, I highly recommend Neocities, which provides static reliable website hosting (should say I don't work for them they just happen to be my web host and have been very good).
What are some alternatives?
web-archives - Browser extension for viewing archived and cached versions of web pages, available for Chrome, Edge and Safari
barinsta - Open-source alternative Instagram client on Android. More maintainers needed!
archiveweb.page - A High-Fidelity Web Archiving Extension for Chrome and Chromium based browsers!
pages-gem - A simple Ruby Gem to bootstrap dependencies for setting up and maintaining a local Jekyll environment in sync with GitHub Pages
pygooglenews - If Google News had a Python library
blissue - A blog based on github issues
wrp - Web Rendering Proxy: Use vintage, historical, legacy browsers on modern web
projectm - projectM - Cross-platform Music Visualization Library. Open-source and Milkdrop-compatible.
vaporBoy - Gameboy / Gameboy Color Emulator PWA built with Preact. ⚛️ Powered by wasmBoy. 🎮Themed with VaporWave. 🌴🐬
private-network-access
picotcp.js
Libation - Libation: Liberate your Library