The fact that it already has categories for most hobbies but absolutely nothing for cars, motorbikes, or any mechanical engineering-related topic, makes me sad. I know it's not their fault - young people simply don't care anymore.
Go make an account and add your own links =)
With the rise of these retro-looking websites, I feel it's possible again to start using a browser from the '90s. Someone should make a static-site social media platform for full compatibility.
This is totally doable! It can be done with static sites + rss (and optionally email).
For example, I do this with my website. I receive comments via email (with the sender’s addresses hashed). Each page/comment-list/comment has its own rss feed that people can “subscribe” to. This allows you to get notified when someone responds to a comment you left, or comments on a page. But all notifications are opt-in and require no login because your rss reader is fetching the updates.
Since I’m the moderator of my site, I subscribe to the “all-comments” feed and get notified upon every submission. I then go review the comment and then the site rebuilds. There’s no logins or sign ups. Commenting is just pushing and notifications just pulling.
example https://spenc.es/updates/posts/4513EBDF/
I plan on open sourcing the commenting aspect of this (it’s called https://r3ply.com) so this doesn’t have to be reinvented for each website, but comments are just one part of the whole system:
The web is the platform. RSS provides notifications (pull). Emailing provides a way to post (push) - and moderate - content. Links are for sharing and are always static (never change or break).
The one missing thing is like a “pending comments” cache, for when you occasionally get HN like traffic and need comments to be temporarily displayed immediately. I’m building this now but it’s really optional and would be the only thing in this system that even requires JS or SSR.
Not so much. While a lot of these websites use classic approaches (handcrafted HTML/CSS, server-side includes, etc.) and aesthetics, the actual versions of those technologies used are often rather modern. For example, TFA looks like a page I'd have browsed in IE5 as a kid, but if you look at the markup, it's using HTML5 tags and Flexbox (which became a W3C WR in 2017), while a period site would have used an HTML table to get the same effect. Of course, you wouldn't want to do it that way nowadays, because it wouldn't be responsive or mobile-friendly.
(I don't think this detracts from such sites, to be clear; they're adopting new technologies where they provide practical benefits to the reader because many indieweb proponents are pushing it as a progressive, rather than reactionary, praxis.)
> For example, TFA looks like a page I'd have browsed in IE5 as a kid, but if you look at the markup, it's using HTML5 tags and Flexbox (which became a W3C WR in 2017), while a period site would have used an HTML table to get the same effect.
Are they going out of their way to recreate an aesthetic that was originally the easiest thing to create given the language specs of the past, or is there something about this look and feel that is so fundamental to the idea of making websites that basically anything that looks like any era or variety of HTML will converge on it?
I think the layout as such (the grid of categories) isn't particularly dated, though a modern site would style them as tiles. The centered text can feel a little dated, but the biggest thing making it feel old is that it uses the default browser styles for a lot of page elements, particularly the font.
I'm happy they didn't choose to go full authentic with quirks mode and table-based layouts, because Firefox has some truly ancient bugs in nested table rendering... that'll never get fixed, because... no one uses them anymore!
I think it’s the former. Many of these retro layouts are pretty terrible. They existed because they were the best at the time, but using modern HTML features to recreate bad layouts from the last is just missing the point completely.
They’re making their own point. This is a document as a piece of expression and communication, not pure utility.
I made a twitter clone in PHP during the 00s, but sadly I don't have the code anymore... Although it should be pretty easy to replicate.
I loaded up Windows 98SE SP2 in a VM and tried to use it to browse the modern web but it was basically impossible since it only supported HTTP/1.1 websites. I was only able to find maybe 3-4 websites that still supported it and load.
I would expect your main problem to be SSL/TLS. As far as I know, even modern web servers have no problem serving content to HTTP/1.0 clients.
In theory, yes, although there are some fairly big stones falling in the avalanche of turning off HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 at the server end.
In practice, it's going to be tricky to know without measurement; and the shifting of the default at the client end to from 0.9 and 1.0 to 1.1 began back in 2010. Asking the people who run robots for statistics will not help. Almost no good actor robots are using 0.9 and 1.0 now, and 0.9 and 1.0 traffic dropped off a cliff in the 2010s falling to 0% (to apparently 1 decimal place) by 2021 as measured by the Web Almanac.
* https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2021/http
If a modern HTTP server stopped serving 0.9 and 1.0, or even just had a problem doing so to decades-old pre-1.1 client softwares, very few people would know. Almost 0% of HTTP client traffic would be affected.
And, indeed, http://url.town/ is one of the very places that has already turned 0.9 off. It does not speak it, and returns a 1.1 error response. And no-one in this thread (apart from edm0nd) knew.
I tried old macOS ... sorry, Mac OS ... and yeah the main problem was SSL/TLS. HTTP/1.0 was fine but the SSL crypto algorithm negotiation never went through.
Try Retrozilla
https://portal.mozz.us/gopher/gopher.somnolescent.net/9/w2kr...
with these NEW values in about:config set to true:
security.ssl3.ecdhe_ecdsa_aes_128_gcm_sha256
security.ssl3.ecdhe_rsa_aes_128_gcm_sha256
security.ssl3.ecdh_ecdsa_rc4_128_sha
security.ssl3.ecdh_rsa_rc4_128_sha
security.ssl3.ecdhe_ecdsa_rc4_128_sha
security.ssl3.ecdhe_rsa_rc4_128_sha
security.ssl3.rsa_rc4_128_md5
security.ssl3.rsa_rc4_128_sha> Someone should make a static-site social media platform for full compatibility.
What do you mean by that? Especially the "social" part?
The biggest issue there is that regardless of how your old your html elements, the old browsers only supported SSL 2/3, at best, and likely nothing at all, meaning you can't connect to basically any website.
> Someone should make a static-site social media platform for full compatibility.
Isn't that https://subreply.com/ ?
This is cute, but I absolutely do not care about buying a omg.lol URL for $20/yr, and I'm not trying to be a hater because the concept is fine, but anybody who falls into this same boat should know this is explicitly "not for them"
Just to be clear, $20/year is roughly one Starbucks drink per fiscal quarter.
This :D
X is just one cappuccino, Y is just 3.5 bagels, Z costs not more than a pint, A costs almost as much as a nice meal … and so on. God's sake! :)
Are you suggesting the market for omg.lol URLs intersects with the people who like to buy burnt coffee?
I only find it curious that there is just no limit to how cheap people on hackernews can be, despite being supposedly higher income earners.
Even if it was $10/year, people would still cry foul.
I don't think pointing out "this is a web directory full of links submitted by people willing to spend $20/yr" is being cheap, per se, the same way I don't think paying to be "verified" on Twitter means your content is worth paying attention to
There was a time where "willing to pay for access" was a decent spam control mechanism, but that was long ago
Agree. Recently I’ve noticed the complaints with paying for Kagi search [0]. HN loves to moan about how bad Google is but paying $10 ($5 if you want a tiny plan) is apparently too much for something as critical as search?
As you say, those coffees seem to keep on selling…
Everyone wants a Starbucks coffee per month from you. Even if you're on FAANG compensation, there's a finite number of coffees you can afford to pay for.
Remember url.city? https://web.archive.org/web/20141122194515/https://dir.yahoo...
Having studied, and attempted to build, a few taxonomies / information hierarchies myself (a fraught endeavour, perhaps information is not in fact hierarchical? (Blasphemy!!!)), I'm wondering how stable the present organisational schema will prove, and how future migrations might be handled.
(Whether for this or comparable projects.)
Clay Shirky's essay from 2005: Ontology is overrrated (centred on Yahoo!'s directory of links, oddly enough)
https://web.archive.org/web/20191117161738/http://shirky.com...
Unexpectedly related to the problem of perfect classification is McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. It shows that human mind is a duet where each part exhibits a different mode of attending to reality: one seeks patterns and classifies, while the other experiences reality as indivisible whole. The former is impossible to do “correctly”[0]; the latter is impossible to communicate.
(As a bit of meta, one would notice how in making this argument it itself has to use the classifying approach, but that does not defeat the point and is rather more of a pre-requisite for communicating it.)
Notably, the classifying mode was shown in other animals (as this is common to probably every creature with two eyes and a brain) to engage when seeking food or interacting with friendly creatures. This highlights its ultimate purposes—consumption and communication, not truth.
In a healthy human both parts act in tandem by selectively inhibiting each other; I believe in later sections he goes a bit into the dangers of over-prioritizing exclusively the classifying part all the time.
Due to the unattainability of comprehensive and lossless classification, presenting information in ways that allows for coexistence of different competing taxonomies (e.g., tagging) is perhaps a worthy compromise: it still serves the communication requirement, but without locking into a local optimum.
[0] I don’t recall off the top of my head exactly how Iain gets there (there is plenty of material), but similar arguments were made elsewhere—e.g., Clay Shirky’s points about the inherent lossiness of any ontology and the impossible requirement to be capable of mind reading and fortune telling, or I personally would extrapolate a point from the incompleteness theorem: we cannot pick apart and formally classify a system which we ourselves are part of in a way that is complete and provably correct.
Yes, the seeming hierarchy in information is bit shallow. Yahoo, Altavista and others tried this and it became unmanageable soon. Google realized that keywords and page-raking is the way to go. I think keywords are sort of same as a dimensions in multi-dimensional embeddings.
Information, is basically is about relating something to other known things. A closer relation is being interpreted as location proximity in a taxonomy space.
I think something similar was tried on everything2.com back in the day (2000ish).
Logins are built on https://home.omg.lol/ which is an amazing looking community!
What's the selection criteria for being listed on the directory?
I'm not sure either; I know a couple of websites which fit perfectly
Someone wants to add it enough to click the button that adds the site. Sometimes you need to REALLY want to add it because no category is applicable so you also click the button to add the category.
Kind of like the indieseek.xyz directory. Love to see it.
Neat - I wish it showed how many entries there are for each category. I was disappointed to see a Parenting category, with nothing in it.
This, in the family > activities category, looks excellent though: https://offline.kids
Sadly it's the same for Sci-Fi art. I had a link to submit, but you need to sign up and it's $20. Fair enough if they want to set some minimum barrier for the site to filter out suggestions from every Tom, Dick, and Harry (and Jane?), but I don't feel so investing in this to give them $20 to provide a suggestion.
I clicked it too and was similarly disappointed. If you don't mind pasting it here I'd love to check it out and add it to my web index.
Hehe, we'll make our own url.town, with sci-fi art, and hookers!
https://www.simonstalenhag.se/
^ The link is for the sci-fi art, not the hookers.
Clearly, if you want descendent nodes, you'll be looking for the "Child" or "Leafnode" category ;-)
that hits deep
Just needs a Web Ring (:->