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I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

justinjackson.ca

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Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#181

Post by limograf »

jerf wrote: post #121
fartcannon wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still just use HTML.

This does indeed work fine. The major problem is still finding somewhere to host it, and incurring the still non-trivial risks thereto, since among the many things students want to do with free web space, hosting warez and other things that will get you in trouble quickly is still pretty far up the list. Plus someone has to pay for a domain name or something. If you can get a modern text editor that can use SSH or so…

Here's what we do with beginner developers who have never coded before: - build pages in Codepen so they can see everything build as they go, fork from templates, and share/riff off each other - export from Codepen to a folder so they can see that static sites are just text files in a folder and nothing mysterious -- at this point I also introduce an editor like VSCode - drag and drop that folder onto Github and deploy to Netlify

You can do this in an hour with brand new coders. https://syllabus.codeyourfuture.io/fundamentals/week-1/sessi...

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#182

Post by Snowworm »

mch82 wrote: post #169
SkipperCat wrote: post #71

Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed over. I quickly ditched that topic and went right to building a web page. Taught them a few HTML tags and they instantly became "webmasters". They were so thrilled. They could create blinking text, could make all the fonts pink. All just by moving around some si…

Checkout Firefox Developer Edition, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ Create an HTML file and open it up in the browser without a web server (though some advanced stuff will need a web server running). The developer tools built into the browser can be used to interact with the page and see how changing HTML, CSS, or JavaScript affects it. Web console can be used to experiment with JavaScript, https://f…

It doesn't even need to be developer edition. That is more geared towards extension development rather than web page development.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#185

Post by bccdee »

k__ wrote: post #96
tomhoward wrote: post #20

My 1996 self feels very seen. I think a lot about the way the web was back in the mid 90s, compared to the bleeding-edge technologies of today, particularly blockchain and cryptocurrency. And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfo…

I'm an educator and right now, I'm evaluating the crypto space. A huge problem here is that it's very fast moving. Take the fast moving Web of the 90s and multiply it by how much more people use the Web today. At Eth Amsterdam I talked to many engineers from that space and didn't get a satisfying answer to many questions devs usually ask about new tech. "Where should you store your data?" - "It depends!" Back in the…

No cryptocurrency or Web3 platforms actually store their data on the blockchain. That would be ludicrously expensive; it'd cost tens of thousands per gig at least. Relational databases, cloud object buckets, and CDNs are pretty much all you should need, storage-wise, unless you're solving an especially interesting problem.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#186

Post by legutierr »

blueflow wrote: post #155
legutierr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its barely good for anything except money laundering and tax evasion You can’t think of any situation where you would want to share access to and control of data with multiple untrusted third parties, where you would need to guarantee not only that data modifications are only executed in an authorized fashion, but also that no previous modifications have been reversed? The list of use cases for that capability is n…

What you are describing is a signature, and i use gpg --sign for that.

A digital signature can validate that data has been added by an authorized participant, but it cannot tell you if data has been deleted.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#187

Post by markyc »

frzen wrote: post #168

I think the statute of limitations is up at this point so I am free to share this with you. It was me all those years ago who downloaded and edited the html for google.com adding my name to the page. I showed my mother the result of this pure vandalism before spending the next desperate few minutes putting it back how it was before. I regret nothing

what now?

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#188

Post by rchaud »

SkipperCat wrote: post #71

Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed over. I quickly ditched that topic and went right to building a web page. Taught them a few HTML tags and they instantly became "webmasters". They were so thrilled. They could create blinking text, could make all the fonts pink. All just by moving around some si…

At some point in 2013 I watched Lecture 1 of Harvard CS50 because everybody said that was the best starting point for people interested in web dev, product development, tech in general.

I just wanted to make a website to start off with, just a bunch of linked pages. I already knew a tiny bit of HTML from college, but that was years ago and I wanted to know what had changed. So you can imagine my confusion watching that CS50 lecture as it was seemingly covering everything EXCEPT the stuff non-technical end users are familiar with: websites, apps and games.

Yes, yes, I now know that CS isn't about coding but about underlying fundamentals. But that doesn't change the reality that CS50 online has been viewed many, many more times than people who've sat in a CS class, and those people likely had similarly simple goals as I did.

Long story short however, I took a video course on webdev and learned far more in terms of immediately applicable skills. Again, I wasn't trying to get hired at FAANG. I just wanted to get to the level of 'webmaster', where I knew just enough to handle markup, hosting, SSL and CRUD functions. Learning by doing has been far more rewarding than following online courses.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#189

Post by DamnInteresting »

I built my first site in ~1997, and my primary email address is still webmaster@. Nevertheless, I do feel that these early-Internet nostalgia posts mostly forget how crappy many webpages were back in the day. Blinking text, marquees, animated gifs, frames, inline fonts, ActiveX, "Best viewed in Internet Explorer 3", popup windows, tables for layout, terrible search, etc. Today's sites are often bloated, but those of the past had their own issues.

For me personally, the appeal of the web back then was not that it was good, rather it was new.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#190

Post by fartcannon »

eli wrote: post #176
sph wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signing up to and using AWS or GCP is orders of magnitude more complex than those old free hosting services where you got an FTP username and a password. In fact you could upload directly from Frontpage IIRC, but I could never get it to work. It's simpler for us software engineers, less simple for the snot-nosed webmaster wannabes we were.

That's because someone did the work of setting up a server for you, configuring the services, and issuing FTP credentials. That part is now a whole lot cheaper and easier and more secure. It doesn't get much easier than signing up for e.g. Glitch.

Setting up a server is so unbelievably simple that anyone capable of writing software shouldn't blink at the task. The fact that there's a lot of blinking strikes me as profoundly funny.
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