Live data from Hacker News

Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

dolekemp96.org

81–90 of 98 posts

Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

#81
post #72
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average non-commercial site these days is based on an unoptimized Wordpress installation that loads 137 PHP files and does 18 DB reqests to render its main page. This 1996 gem is entirely static content. That's a few orders of magnitude less work for the server to do right there. And it runs on IIS 7, so the the hardware and software that does the actual work is most definitely NOT from 1996.

> And it runs on IIS 7, so the the hardware and software that does the actual work is most definitely NOT from 1996. And this is the big thing right here. We're running sites designed to be basically usable when served by 1996 hardware on systems orders of magnitude faster with almost two decades' worth of optimizations compared to what was acceptable in 1996. I don't know how much NTFS has changed since then, but fi…

I imagine the only real thing at play here is the number of connections the server software is configured to handle. This site has a small handful of small static assets: there's no server-side render, and I'd put money on everything being cached even if no such server-side optimizations have been made (done at the disk and/or OS level).

I'd bet the only limiting factor of '96 hardware would be the NIC, all else being equal. Webserver software was a lot less complicated back then, so its memory footprint was far smaller.

Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

#83
post #11

Complete with the security of '96: http://www.dolekemp96.org/divider.gi [Intentionally broken link]

> \\brainiac.ad.safesecureweb.com\websites\192620cbc\dolekemp96.org\divider.gi

Safesecureweb.com. Heh.

Although other than knowing it's running IIS (which is in the Server header of the responses anyway), it's not particularly useful. Unlike modern web apps, it's not displaying a stack trace or debug information that contains db connection strings and the like.

Also, this is fixed by changing one line in web.config AFAIK (it's been a good five years since I worked with IIS in any capacity)

Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Domain whois shows it's registered to "4President Corporation" and it shares a host with http://4president.org/ with provider 'hostmysite'. Looks like this is someone's intentional effort to archive these things.

Was dolekemp96.org the original website? whois says the domain was registered in 2003 and archive.org first crawled the site in 2001. Domain Name:DOLEKEMP96.ORG Created On:27-May-2003 14:15:22 UTC Last Updated On:25-Jan-2012 00:36:47 UTC

If the domain lapses and is re-sold (not just transfered, but actually deleted and re-created), you can expect to see the newer created time.

It could also be the registrar serving up wacky WHOIS info.

Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

#85

I wish sites were still designed this way. Not the animated gifs or the font size 1, but the fact that once the site is loaded, it's completely done. And if I refresh the page, or bookmark the link and come back later, I'm going to see the exact same page. According to the Chrome developer tools the page took 2ms to render and 4ms to paint. I write JavaScript professionally but not all web sites need JavaScript, in f…

I was even more impressed by the original WWW documents posted by Tim Berners-Lee that hit HN a few months back.

The pages had no rendering or layout, just strictly semantic markup.

They were an absolute joy to read.

The present-day Web is climbing a tower of Babel and reaching baroque levels of ostentation. I see a great re-settling, quite likely as the Web bifurcates into a documentation platform, for information, and an application platform. Most of the Web is still really just static docs.

And kudos for ContrastRebellion mention.

Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

#86
I'm loving this language

"Believe that? America can do better. Bob Dole. Jack Kemp. Cutting income taxes on every family 15%. A 500 dollar per child tax credit. Higher take home pay. Bob Dole. Cut taxes. Balance the budget. Raise take home pay. Tell the truth."

Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

#87
post #10

Ahh, 1996 was an awesome year for websites. Space Jam: http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/

I've always wondered, what's the best looking website of the 1990s? Was there anything that people would deem as "good" as some of today's top designs? I feel like there had to be at least someone with a very refined sense of aesthetic making awesome websites back then.

I remember http://www.sgi.com as particularly nice in 96/97. Alas, there aren't many captures on archive.org.

Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

#89

I wish sites were still designed this way. Not the animated gifs or the font size 1, but the fact that once the site is loaded, it's completely done. And if I refresh the page, or bookmark the link and come back later, I'm going to see the exact same page. According to the Chrome developer tools the page took 2ms to render and 4ms to paint. I write JavaScript professionally but not all web sites need JavaScript, in f…

I code my site by hand... each and every page... for these same reasons. I need to figure out templating because it has become quite tedious to update links and I'm only at <50 pages!

If you like Python, Flask is good. This article is useful:

https://nicolas.perriault.net/code/2012/dead-easy-yet-powerf...

Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I code my site by hand... each and every page... for these same reasons. I need to figure out templating because it has become quite tedious to update links and I'm only at <50 pages!

Lots of static-site generators to choose from. Jekyll's the most popular choice. Link: http://jekyllrb.com

Since you mentioned Jeckyll, I also want to mention Octopress, which is based on Jeckyll http://octopress.org/
Post reply on HN