7 ms·

> but it's easier then ever to build your own website Is it though? When I was 9, I created a site on Angelfire (and loved the fact that the default page was t

by jsgo 7y ago

> but it's easier then ever to build your own website Is it though? When I was 9, I created a site on Angelfire (and loved the fact that the default page was this craptastic html example where you could view source and kind of learn various html tags relating to lists, tables I believe, and various other things as a quick primer for those uneducated in HTML). I also created one on Geocities (different use cases in the end, but more or less I just wanted to see which was better/easier. Ended up with Angelfire as my main one as you could actually "name" your site as opposed to the generic "city"/"street" name-ish thing of Geocities). And if memory serves, there were other hosts that were similarly popular too. One iirc would allow for subdomains instead of the nesting that Angelfire/Geocities does, but if I believe by default they would have big branding somewhere on your page. Tried it, think there was a work around for that one, but I didn't like battling it so didn't retain. Now, sure, I can find a host that I can pay $x to host the HTML that I build outright, but I don't know if kids coming up have the same resources I did as it relates to starting up a free site and having a default page with various HTML elements (too many at this point for a single page to be of value. Would probably have to look something like W3Schools or whatever with a list on the left you could go through). Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Back in 1996 a friend of mine with no computer training put together a simple website in Notepad and uploaded it to free web space provided by her ISP. That doesn't happen today. People bumble along with Wordpress or services like Wix, but the customisation options for non-experts are very limited and generic. Hosting has become much more complicated and confusing, and the web simply doesn't do simple any more. Even a small blog is a moderately complicated project, especially if it uses a build system. And building even a minimal independent commercial site requires very specialised skills and plenty of time. There really isn't anything equivalent to AF/Geo. And even if there were, CSS and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them up by dabbling.
- mikeash 7y ago
  There are still free hosts out there, and the simple HTML of yesteryear still renders fine today.
  - jsgo 7y ago
    > Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice. followed by later: > I just mean organically though. Hate to sound old, but back then, Yahoo was basically a nested index and Google if it was a thing at that point wasn't a commonly known one. Yet Angelfire, Geocities, etc. were easily located because sites hosted on them were shared so heavily and drop the /something/something (edit: from the URL) and it says "hey, you can create your own for free here". > I just did a search for "free website" and there was Wix, Wordpress, Yola, and Weebly. Going to assume those are legit, but the rest of my results (which were way more common than those 4 entries) were offshoots of "[best/top/10] web site builders 2019" or some random other ones that won the SEO game.
- rjsw 7y ago
  My ISP still provides free web space.
- krapp 7y ago
  >Even a small blog is a moderately complicated project, especially if it uses a build system. And building even a minimal independent commercial site requires very specialised skills and plenty of time. Sorry, but when was it common for people to write and host their own blog and commercial sites, and when was this less than moderately complicated? I remember Geocities and other similar sites offering server-side includes and CGI scripting, and of course services like Blogger and Livejournal existed, but I don't think writing your own blogware was ever really a common thing. >And even if there were, CSS and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them up by dabbling. You can still write perfectly simple 90's style HTML and CSS, and vanilla javascript, even in Notepad (although I wouldn't recommend it just because I don't like Notepad.) You're mistaking the bloat and increasing complexity of the enterprise web development environment and tooling with what are still basic components. The web really hasn't changed that much, what's changed is what people put on it.
newen 7y ago
What about Wordpress? When I was trying to build my own site, wordpress popped up multiple times in my searches. When I tried it out, it didn't seem that hard to create your own custom-ish website. I don't think you even write HTML all that much, mostly it's a GUI.
- jsgo 7y ago
  WordPress is probably a fair one. I don't know that I've ever been on a *.wordpress.com site (probably wrapped in a custom domain, but that's going to be oblivious to me. Seen tons using WordPress as in the tool though). Edit: just did a search here for wordpress.com to see if anything shows up from the site itself. There are entries, but everything seems to be a communication of sorts from WordPress to developers (vip.wordpress.com, developer.wordpress.com, etc.) or an article about WordPress.com that is on techcrunch or the like. I'll grant you that Hacker News is probably not the gateway to the Internet for kids coming up now, so that probably doesn't say anything of importance (just figured maybe something that someone hosted there may turn up, but they may be custom domained and at that point, very unlikely someone is going from that site to WordPress.com to start up a site). I just mean organically though. Hate to sound old, but back then, Yahoo was basically a nested index and Google if it was a thing at that point wasn't a commonly known one. Yet Angelfire, Geocities, etc. were easily located because sites hosted on them were shared so heavily and drop the /something/something (edit: from the URL) and it says "hey, you can create your own for free here". I just did a search for "free website" and there was Wix, Wordpress, Yola, and Weebly. Going to assume those are legit, but the rest of my results (which were way more common than those 4 entries) were offshoots of "[best/top/10] web site builders 2019" or some random other ones that won the SEO game.
mikeash 7y ago
I don’t think it’s any harder now than it was then. It’s not like people somehow automatically knew where to get free hosting or how to use it. They’d learn it from friends, or books, or online sources. You can do the same today. The only difference in difficulty is that the resources are much more readily available and there’s far more high quality free software you can use. (Anyone remember paying for an FTP client?) If it seems harder today, it’s only because the newer options are so much easier. Back in the day, if you wanted to put something up for people to read, you figured out web hosting or you didn’t do it. Now, you figure out web hosting or you post it on Medium/Facebook/whatever.
- Raphmedia 7y ago
  Yes and no. I remember as a child, I simply clicked the little "built with Geocities" or "built with [Free Blog provider]" badge at the bottom of the sites I went to and then read what those services were. Created an account, put text and images in the WYSIWYG and saved. There you go, the site was online.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Similarly, I think I got started because AOL added a "feature" of free web host space, and curious about such new features I explored using it. As much as Usenet laments that first part of "Eternal September" when AOL opened up a ton of such features to become a "real" ISP, they also launched a lot of test space for early website design for some of us. (At one point I think I had all 5 screen-names that AOL allowed per account just for website hosting. I was privileged in that no one else in the household ever needed to use AOL much, I suppose in hindsight.) I remember moving stuff to GeoCities and Angelfire and weirder lost cousins like XOOM only when AOL started adding hidden fees for web space (I recall something like they started with a 10MB/screen-name free cap and then dropped to 1MB/screen-name cap), and then it was more important when the cost structure of AOL itself couldn't compete with other ISPs and it was time to move on from AOL dial-up to DSL. It's a shame that "free web space" stopped being a competitive "feature" for ISPs. I like the tilde.town aesthetic of bringing back shared shell space. I sometimes wonder if there were a way to make something like that a "feature" that any kid "already has access to and should explore", but doing that at scale seems tough. Maybe more reason to see if we can do interesting things in decentralized web and decentralized web discovery mechanics as most people's home computers are already more capable than many of the very web servers ISPs used early in the web when free space was a competitive feature (they are just locked behind too many NAT layers and firewalls, for both good and bad reasons).
Japhy_Ryder 7y ago
> And if memory serves, there were other hosts that were similarly popular too. One iirc would allow for subdomains instead of the nesting that Angelfire/Geocities does, but if I believe by default they would have big branding somewhere on your page. Remember ".tk"?
StavrosK 7y ago
The Angelfire of today is Neocities, FWIW: https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ I wonder if they have a "proudly hosted on Neocities" button, 1990s-style.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  You should also mention that their site / code is 100% open source. [1] You could run your own NeoCities if you so desired. [1] - https://github.com/neocities https://github.com/neocities
- kyledrake 7y ago
  Yeah there are a few people have made.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Is Neocities still active? I sent you $100 a few hours ago to support the project and for the supporter status, but I haven't gotten any replies. I also just noticed that the last tweet is from April. I want to support Neocities if it'll ensure a good future, I'd just like to know that I'm supporting a project that still has one.
- krapp 7y ago
  Angelfire is the Angelfire of today, actually. For whatever reason, be it luck, tenacity, or a contract with an eldritch god, they're still around[0]. [0]http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/ http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/

by jsgo 7y ago

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

Back in 1996 a friend of mine with no computer training put together a simple website in Notepad and uploaded it to free web space provided by her ISP. That doesn't happen today. People bumble along with Wordpress or services like Wix, but the customisation options for non-experts are very limited and generic. Hosting has become much more complicated and confusing, and the web simply doesn't do simple any more. Even a small blog is a moderately complicated project, especially if it uses a build system. And building even a minimal independent commercial site requires very specialised skills and plenty of time. There really isn't anything equivalent to AF/Geo. And even if there were, CSS and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them up by dabbling.

mikeash 7y ago
There are still free hosts out there, and the simple HTML of yesteryear still renders fine today.
- jsgo 7y ago
  > Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice. followed by later: > I just mean organically though. Hate to sound old, but back then, Yahoo was basically a nested index and Google if it was a thing at that point wasn't a commonly known one. Yet Angelfire, Geocities, etc. were easily located because sites hosted on them were shared so heavily and drop the /something/something (edit: from the URL) and it says "hey, you can create your own for free here". > I just did a search for "free website" and there was Wix, Wordpress, Yola, and Weebly. Going to assume those are legit, but the rest of my results (which were way more common than those 4 entries) were offshoots of "[best/top/10] web site builders 2019" or some random other ones that won the SEO game.
rjsw 7y ago
My ISP still provides free web space.
krapp 7y ago
>Even a small blog is a moderately complicated project, especially if it uses a build system. And building even a minimal independent commercial site requires very specialised skills and plenty of time. Sorry, but when was it common for people to write and host their own blog and commercial sites, and when was this less than moderately complicated? I remember Geocities and other similar sites offering server-side includes and CGI scripting, and of course services like Blogger and Livejournal existed, but I don't think writing your own blogware was ever really a common thing. >And even if there were, CSS and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them up by dabbling. You can still write perfectly simple 90's style HTML and CSS, and vanilla javascript, even in Notepad (although I wouldn't recommend it just because I don't like Notepad.) You're mistaking the bloat and increasing complexity of the enterprise web development environment and tooling with what are still basic components. The web really hasn't changed that much, what's changed is what people put on it.

newen 7y ago

What about Wordpress? When I was trying to build my own site, wordpress popped up multiple times in my searches. When I tried it out, it didn't seem that hard to create your own custom-ish website. I don't think you even write HTML all that much, mostly it's a GUI.

jsgo 7y ago
WordPress is probably a fair one. I don't know that I've ever been on a *.wordpress.com site (probably wrapped in a custom domain, but that's going to be oblivious to me. Seen tons using WordPress as in the tool though). Edit: just did a search here for wordpress.com to see if anything shows up from the site itself. There are entries, but everything seems to be a communication of sorts from WordPress to developers (vip.wordpress.com, developer.wordpress.com, etc.) or an article about WordPress.com that is on techcrunch or the like. I'll grant you that Hacker News is probably not the gateway to the Internet for kids coming up now, so that probably doesn't say anything of importance (just figured maybe something that someone hosted there may turn up, but they may be custom domained and at that point, very unlikely someone is going from that site to WordPress.com to start up a site). I just mean organically though. Hate to sound old, but back then, Yahoo was basically a nested index and Google if it was a thing at that point wasn't a commonly known one. Yet Angelfire, Geocities, etc. were easily located because sites hosted on them were shared so heavily and drop the /something/something (edit: from the URL) and it says "hey, you can create your own for free here". I just did a search for "free website" and there was Wix, Wordpress, Yola, and Weebly. Going to assume those are legit, but the rest of my results (which were way more common than those 4 entries) were offshoots of "[best/top/10] web site builders 2019" or some random other ones that won the SEO game.

mikeash 7y ago

I don’t think it’s any harder now than it was then. It’s not like people somehow automatically knew where to get free hosting or how to use it. They’d learn it from friends, or books, or online sources. You can do the same today. The only difference in difficulty is that the resources are much more readily available and there’s far more high quality free software you can use. (Anyone remember paying for an FTP client?) If it seems harder today, it’s only because the newer options are so much easier. Back in the day, if you wanted to put something up for people to read, you figured out web hosting or you didn’t do it. Now, you figure out web hosting or you post it on Medium/Facebook/whatever.

Raphmedia 7y ago
Yes and no. I remember as a child, I simply clicked the little "built with Geocities" or "built with [Free Blog provider]" badge at the bottom of the sites I went to and then read what those services were. Created an account, put text and images in the WYSIWYG and saved. There you go, the site was online.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Similarly, I think I got started because AOL added a "feature" of free web host space, and curious about such new features I explored using it. As much as Usenet laments that first part of "Eternal September" when AOL opened up a ton of such features to become a "real" ISP, they also launched a lot of test space for early website design for some of us. (At one point I think I had all 5 screen-names that AOL allowed per account just for website hosting. I was privileged in that no one else in the household ever needed to use AOL much, I suppose in hindsight.) I remember moving stuff to GeoCities and Angelfire and weirder lost cousins like XOOM only when AOL started adding hidden fees for web space (I recall something like they started with a 10MB/screen-name free cap and then dropped to 1MB/screen-name cap), and then it was more important when the cost structure of AOL itself couldn't compete with other ISPs and it was time to move on from AOL dial-up to DSL. It's a shame that "free web space" stopped being a competitive "feature" for ISPs. I like the tilde.town aesthetic of bringing back shared shell space. I sometimes wonder if there were a way to make something like that a "feature" that any kid "already has access to and should explore", but doing that at scale seems tough. Maybe more reason to see if we can do interesting things in decentralized web and decentralized web discovery mechanics as most people's home computers are already more capable than many of the very web servers ISPs used early in the web when free space was a competitive feature (they are just locked behind too many NAT layers and firewalls, for both good and bad reasons).

Japhy_Ryder 7y ago

> And if memory serves, there were other hosts that were similarly popular too. One iirc would allow for subdomains instead of the nesting that Angelfire/Geocities does, but if I believe by default they would have big branding somewhere on your page. Remember ".tk"?

StavrosK 7y ago

The Angelfire of today is Neocities, FWIW: https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ I wonder if they have a "proudly hosted on Neocities" button, 1990s-style.

LinuxBender 7y ago
You should also mention that their site / code is 100% open source. [1] You could run your own NeoCities if you so desired. [1] - https://github.com/neocities https://github.com/neocities
kyledrake 7y ago
Yeah there are a few people have made.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Is Neocities still active? I sent you $100 a few hours ago to support the project and for the supporter status, but I haven't gotten any replies. I also just noticed that the last tweet is from April. I want to support Neocities if it'll ensure a good future, I'd just like to know that I'm supporting a project that still has one.
krapp 7y ago
Angelfire is the Angelfire of today, actually. For whatever reason, be it luck, tenacity, or a contract with an eldritch god, they're still around[0]. [0]http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/ http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/