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The Return of the 90s Web

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Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#281

Post by slightwinder »

Aeolun wrote: post #273
slightwinder wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we really need is a new Google, built on open principles (decentralized / peer to peer, fully free software, backed by a nonprofit), We have them, they suck. > and focused on indexing the long tail of insightful content that is neglected by Google because it lacks SEO How would you even define that? SEO is changing all the time. And google is fighting it all the time. And how would you prevent SEO focusing on…

I think the goal is to exclude anything that was created with a popular CMS (to exclude some content marketing), or in the top 100k websites. Then we might go back to something sort of interesting.

That is a good startingpoint, but also something SEO can very easy hack. Obfusicating the usual hints of a popular CMS is not hard.

I wonder whether doing a parallel search on google and filter out by their top-results from your own results would be a feasiable solution? Add a filter on the top 500 websites, and whether known ad-sources are used and you might get slowly there.

Maybe instead of a smart searchengine it would be better to focus on a dumb focus which gives access to all the metadata of a page too, and allows people to optimize for themself. Fulltext alone is not the only relevant content for good results. Google knows it and uses them, but has very limited acces to it for the enduser.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#282

Post by bartread »

hedora wrote: post #154
abrookewood wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give more details? I don't think I've ever heard of M4 before.

You probably already have m4 on your development machine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language)

OK, I'd never heard of this before and now I'm questioning why we have all these JS templating frameworks like Mustache, Pug[1], and the rest.

[1] I actually use this one and it's just fine - great, in fact - but seeing M4 does make me feel like a lot of people may have spent a lot of time reinventing a wheel.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#283

Post by stockstreaks »

kickscondor wrote: post #38
waltbosz wrote: post #21

What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love. My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which the…

People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won't find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext creations and web sites are still everywhere. But try typing "interesting hypertext" into Google or Facebook and see where it gets you. You can't search for something that's off the beaten track. This is where directories come back in. Check some of these out: *…

Developers should come together and build an open-source curated platform where you can find 'only good - interesting, well-written'articles on all topics can be found.

Actually on the Hacker News guidelines it kind of describes this. And although it seems like the articles posted here are higher quality, they eventually get lost after 2-3 days.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#284

Post by stockstreaks »

StillBored wrote: post #78
nextaccountic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we really need is a new Google, built on open principles (decentralized / peer to peer, fully free software, backed by a nonprofit), and focused on indexing the long tail of insightful content that is neglected by Google because it lacks SEO, popularity, links, and other metrics that Google find interesting but we don't necessarily do.

For a long time I assumed that google indexed pretty much everything it, and it was only a question of providing a specific enough set of search terms to drag up older content. But what you hint at might be more correct these days. They are running a reverse wayback machine in that anything not changed in the last year gets removed. If you click the advanced search its "updated within" and the max timeframe is a year…

This is really interesting, I never thought of it this way. Thanks for sharing.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#285

Post by ajmurmann »

koreth1 wrote: post #88
StillBored wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long time I assumed that google indexed pretty much everything it, and it was only a question of providing a specific enough set of search terms to drag up older content. But what you hint at might be more correct these days. They are running a reverse wayback machine in that anything not changed in the last year gets removed. If you click the advanced search its "updated within" and the max timeframe is a year…

> They are running a reverse wayback machine in that anything not changed in the last year gets removed. Sometimes I wish that were true! Try Googling for, say, PostgreSQL documentation and the top result will often be for a 10-year-old version of the software.

One would expect that with their resources they could figure out for which topics recency matters and for which it doesn't.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#286

Post by yagodragon »

input_sh wrote: post #211
yagodragon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghost looks great and very polished! For me though, it provides much less out of the box (no built-in comments etc). It's also harder to self host and manage and the hosted service costs 30$/month which is extremely pricey for an indie blog. 3rd party ecosystem for wordpress (plugins/themes) is huge. I can easily extend my blog to an e-commerce store, an online community etc.

> It's also harder to self host and manage Eh, I disagree. The only difference is that it uses Node instead of PHP. You still hook it up to MySQL/MariaDB/SQLite and you're good to go. Plus I consider its Members feature ( https://ghost.org/members/ ) to be a game-changer, though it's powered by Stripe, so you'll have to be in one of 39 countries supported by it to make it work without extensively hacking your theme.

That's a big difference. I can't use a cheap shared hosting and managing a VPS (os updates, database backups etc) is too much for a small blog. Node.js is fine but it turns out after all these years, php is still the king in crud,blog,cms type of application, which is the 99% of the websites out there.

As for the members feature, wordpress has tons of "membership" plugins. Still though, Ghost landing page for members[0] does a great job explaining why i need this. Excellent design and copywriting

[0] https://ghost.org/members/

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#287

Post by netcan »

waltbosz wrote: post #21

What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love. My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which the…

My favourite spot was a little later, early & mid 2000s. The barriers had been lowered, but publishing still required some motivation. There was a ton of content to discover, a lot of discovery channels and "information wants to be free" still felt like a prevailing wind.

I think part of the reason was, as you say, lower standards. We were being exposed to content that didn't have an outlet before that. The music was new, black, polished chrome... to borrow a Jim Morrison line.

A bigger part is discovery though. Blogrolls & link pages were a thing. One good blog usually lead you to 3 or 4 others.

These days, most content is pushed, often by recommendation engines. Social media content is dominated by quick reaction posts, encouraged by "optimization."

The medium is the message. In 98, the medium was html pages FTPed to some shoddy shared host to be read by geeks with PCs. In 2003, it was blog posts. In 2020 it's facebook & twitter.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#288

Post by ajmurmann »

slightwinder wrote: post #281
Aeolun wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the goal is to exclude anything that was created with a popular CMS (to exclude some content marketing), or in the top 100k websites. Then we might go back to something sort of interesting.

That is a good startingpoint, but also something SEO can very easy hack. Obfusicating the usual hints of a popular CMS is not hard. I wonder whether doing a parallel search on google and filter out by their top-results from your own results would be a feasiable solution? Add a filter on the top 500 websites, and whether known ad-sources are used and you might get slowly there. Maybe instead of a smart searchengine it…

I LOVE the idea of a search engine that lowers the rank of results with ads. This might be the key to success in finding projects of love rather than commercial click holes.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#289

Post by tradesmanhelix »

malwarebytess wrote: post #165

Wow, Hey.com has none of the lag that modern websites have. Is the email client as responsive?

It's created by Basecamp which makes Turbolinks [0], Turbolink iOS [1], and Turbolinks Android (deprecated) [2], so there's a good chance that snappiness you're seeing is due to those awesome tools! (In fact, this Github issue comment [3] seems to confirm that HEY uses Turbolinks.)

On a related note, really wish things had gone this direction. Instead, it feels like React, Angular, etc. re-created the backend in the frontend, so now for most apps you essentially have two backends plus one frontend to maintain. I think as soon as our frontends started requiring controllers and routes to work we should have been like, "Hey, wait a minute..." But I guess design folks tend to know JS, so I can see how that combo won.

My $0.02 from 5+ years in the industry is that you probably don't need React, but Godspeed if you think you do - just maintain extreme discipline or you'll end up with spaghetti code (esp. if contractors are involved) faster than you can blink.

Long-term, I hope things move back to sanity. React and company work OK for some problems, but 95% of websites/webapps can probably get by with either straight HTML/JS/CSS or server-side rendering/templating.

[0] https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks

[1] https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks-ios

[2] https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks-android

[3] https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks-android/issues/111#...

Edit: Formatting

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#290

Post by dredmorbius »

aspenmayer wrote: post #196
basch wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has that, it's just stopped working. You'll end up with articles from 1997 that say they updated 4h ago. And the amount of seo garbage that gets through has polluted the remaining results. What would be really cool was if google could show what the results for a search looked like on a given day. Not the current algorithm, not any sites indexed since then, but what it looked like at the time. Going back to use…

Part of me wonders whether this is technically possible. I’m sure it’s an answerable question.

If you have an indicator of content on a specific date and can confirm no signoficant change ...

Though document fingerprinting is hard. Especially w/ fungible page elements.

Internet Archive has an angle here.

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