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>It was easy enough to make a website that anyone could. There were services to build a page (Geocities, Angelfire), and if you wanted a bit more control you co

>It was easy enough to make a website that anyone could. There were services to build a page (Geocities, Angelfire), and if you wanted a bit more control you could host something on a shared server as simply as FTP'ing some HTML files to a remote directory. Just for what it's worth, this web still exists! Free hosting sites are still around, as is (S)FTP and plain ol' HTML. Just a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a python script that generates + uploads webpages to help my wife with her work using nothing more than print() statements and an SFTP command.

onion2k 5y ago
Just for what it's worth, this web still exists! I wrote a python script that generates + uploads webpages... This is the problem in a nutshell. I'm aware that it still exists technically, but my own experience mean that as soon as I start I think "I'll be doing this more than once, I'll automate it!" and I dive in to a thorny bush of build scripts and dependencies and questions like "How will I notify myself if the script fails?" which takes a lot of the fun away. My expectations of what a website is, and how it should work, and my awareness of the pitfalls of the Old Ways means I can't really go back to how it was before. I don't want to. I miss the good bits, but I know there were lots of bad bits as well.