271–280 of 335 posts
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1. Download the internets. 2. git the diffs. Privacy comes because if everyone has the internet in their local cache (lol), then external servers can't say what YOU are REALLY looking at.
Best of luck trying to scale git. Microsoft took 3 years and they didn't add Office and Windows to it. And they nearly rewrote their own version of git.
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Not specifically directed at you, but sort of directed at you: I wish everyone who pined for the 25-years-ago days of mostly text pages would, instead of pining, just go out there and produce that content they want to see. Instead of pining, start writing. Hosting is cheap or free, browsers still parse simple HTML, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating a return to that simpler form.
It's impossible to produce that content because the culture was very different. For one, it was largely un-monetised. There were no banner ads, no ad trackers, no giant shopping sites, no market-driven content design. But many ISPs offered free web space, and HTML 1.0 was so simple almost anyone could hack together a basic site with a plain vanilla text editor. So people did. For fun. Lots and lots of them. It looked…
What? It's not at all impossible. Get a server, put whatever you want on it. No one is going to force you to monetize or market anything, or use a Node.js backend with AWS and React, or whatever the kids are doing these days. Basic HTML in a plain text editor still works just fine.
I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.
I remember browsing the internet was much more of a networked thing. If you want to know what it was like you could take a look at Wikipedia, where you still can get lost in a never ending deeper web of links. However WikiPedia is a very cleaned up version of the early web. It lacks animated .gifs for sure. But the difference with Wikipedia was that people would maintain a Links section full of interesting stuff and…
Google could fix this btw -- it's not that hard to identify artificial link clusters (sites that have an unusually high number of inbound links) and dead zones (sites that have an unusually low number of inbound links) ... but to do so would not be profitable in the slightest.
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Not specifically directed at you, but sort of directed at you: I wish everyone who pined for the 25-years-ago days of mostly text pages would, instead of pining, just go out there and produce that content they want to see. Instead of pining, start writing. Hosting is cheap or free, browsers still parse simple HTML, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating a return to that simpler form.
It's impossible to produce that content because the culture was very different. For one, it was largely un-monetised. There were no banner ads, no ad trackers, no giant shopping sites, no market-driven content design. But many ISPs offered free web space, and HTML 1.0 was so simple almost anyone could hack together a basic site with a plain vanilla text editor. So people did. For fun. Lots and lots of them. It looked…
There were, however, tons of animated 'under construction' banners, which gave the same 'visual noise' problem.
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God I miss when the web was designed for people who could read.
I don't miss flash intos though. Or frames. Good thing they were usually optional.
I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.
Is it richer and deeper now? Maybe at the fringes, but I feel that the internet today, with my emphasis being on the "inter" (different) "net" (networks) part of it, is far less deeper or richer than before. What we basically have reduced to are a bunch of siloed netowrks such as Facebook. When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of results from a variety of sites I had never heard about.…
...and if you actually try to search for more obscure/"fringe" subjects/phrases with Google, you either get no results (despite knowing that there are still active sites with those phrases), or it starts thinking you're a bot sending "automated queries" and blocking you for a while (not even giving you the option of completing a CAPTCHA.)
The first time that happened to me, which was within this year, was my realisation that Google had truly changed, and not in a good way.
Related to this, I had trouble finding examples of pre 1996 web design. The internet archive has a lot from 1997 onwards. The oldest live examples of sites from that era, that I know of are: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T... http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html The BBC also donated its Networking Club to the Internet Archive: htt…
There's always the famous Dole Kemp '96 campaign site (a fair representation of mid 1990s web design): http://www.dolekemp96.org/main.htm And this one from CNN (still 1996, but appropriate representation of that 1995/96 era when design had changed a bit from the earlier plain white backgrounds & basic text layouts): http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/
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Not specifically directed at you, but sort of directed at you: I wish everyone who pined for the 25-years-ago days of mostly text pages would, instead of pining, just go out there and produce that content they want to see. Instead of pining, start writing. Hosting is cheap or free, browsers still parse simple HTML, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating a return to that simpler form.
Rent is expensive in my city, do you think it is reasonable to tell someone who can't afford rent to just buy their own building? That's what you are suggesting.
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another reason to use archive.is
Considering the topic of discussion, how sure can you be that archive.is will still be around in a year? Three years? Ten? As much as I tried, all I could find about it is that it's run by one guy in Czech Republic who's paying $2000/month out of pocket for hosting, and apparently dislikes Finland.
http://archive.is/robots.txt doesn't seem too bad, it looks like you could slowly inhale everything... in theory. There are no sitemaps (they're there, but empty placeholders); you have to know the site name to be able to get a workable list.
The author hasn't ruled out/blocked archiving the snapshots, but apparently it's... big. http://blog.archive.is/post/154930531126/if-someone-was-will...