11–20 of 131 posts
Except it's not, not really - it's hosted by Cloudflare which even requires you to enable JavaScript to pass.
The server may be 24 years old and serving pages, but it's only serving them to the Cloudflare cache, which is kinda meh.
I remember how magical and mysterious a view counter used to feel when I was a kid. How did the website know when someone visited it? Where was the count stored? And how on earth could a website update its own HTML to show the new count? Geocities days were magical. I wonder if kids today have similar thoughts about Twitter profiles and such. It’s probably much easier to pick up the knowledge — back then, it was balk…
> Doing this in modern times would be so complicated. No, it wouldn't. All you need to store this kind of data is a simple file. Most people would probably use PHP for something like that due to its ubiquity, but it could even be a few lines of bash, or Python, or Go, or whatever...
You mostly likely need a WAL Mode SQLite database. Most of the time, it's way simpler that handling state handling in concurrent situations yourself. (also, bindings are often available - if not outright bundled by default - under most common languages)
The "easy" way is all fun and games until your file is accessed in a concurrent fashion, and then your options are:
a) flat out die when concurrent things happens (file locks; default sqlite3 behaviour);
b) just write blindly to file and pretend concurrecy doesn't exist, but randomly lose data - (write to files directly like a crazy person; sqlite3 PRAGMA schema.synchronous = OFF)
c) allow reading at anytime, but serialize writing somehow (file locks + write + move atomic file operations; append writing and a journal; sqlite3 PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL)
I remember how magical and mysterious a view counter used to feel when I was a kid. How did the website know when someone visited it? Where was the count stored? And how on earth could a website update its own HTML to show the new count? Geocities days were magical. I wonder if kids today have similar thoughts about Twitter profiles and such. It’s probably much easier to pick up the knowledge — back then, it was balk…
Geocities got reincarnated as https://glitch.com/ and it has many more features and you can clone others sites or starter packs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The server may be 24 years old and serving pages, but it's only serving them to the Cloudflare cache, which is kinda meh.
It's not, Cloudflare is just being used for rate limiting / ddos protection here.
* Animated gif: check
* View counter: check
* Repeating background image: check
* Mobile? What's that? : check
Those were the days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The server may be 24 years old and serving pages, but it's only serving them to the Cloudflare cache, which is kinda meh.
It's not, Cloudflare is just being used for rate limiting / ddos protection here.
Except it's not, not really - it's hosted by Cloudflare which even requires you to enable JavaScript to pass.
I remember how magical and mysterious a view counter used to feel when I was a kid. How did the website know when someone visited it? Where was the count stored? And how on earth could a website update its own HTML to show the new count? Geocities days were magical. I wonder if kids today have similar thoughts about Twitter profiles and such. It’s probably much easier to pick up the knowledge — back then, it was balk…
Geocities got reincarnated as https://glitch.com/ and it has many more features and you can clone others sites or starter packs.
I remember how magical and mysterious a view counter used to feel when I was a kid. How did the website know when someone visited it? Where was the count stored? And how on earth could a website update its own HTML to show the new count? Geocities days were magical. I wonder if kids today have similar thoughts about Twitter profiles and such. It’s probably much easier to pick up the knowledge — back then, it was balk…
The realtime hit counter and fascination therewith brought up a memory.
Back in '95 the regional dial-up ISP I used offered personal website hosting on one of their boxes (the standard http://www.isp.com/~username gig). I was very excited to put up a personal website. That was fun for awhile but soon I wanted to do more with it. I liked the look of hit counters, guest books, etc.
I became annoyed because this "CGI" thing I'd read about didn't work. I could FTP up Perl scripts named with ".cgi" filenames, however accessing them only resulted in seeing the Perl code.
I setup a webserver (NCSA httpd) on my Slackware box and started experimenting. I learned about .htaccess files and, more importantly, learned I could override the server's main httpd.conf with directives in my directory's .htaccess file.
A little experimenting with my ISP's web server turned up that, sure enough, they had not configured "AllowOverride None". Lo and behold I could enable server-side includes[0] in my directory-- including executing CGIs via SSIs!
Once I figured out how to chmod +x my scripts thru the FTP server I was in business. I had a hit counter! I had a script to check the referer (sic) and add a link in the footer back to the "main page" if you didn't "come from" there. I wrote out my own log files (because I didn't have access to the server's main log file) so I could see the IPs, user agent strings, and referers of visitors. (I also learned about file locking and parallel execution of the script by multiple requests occurring simultaneously. Fun!)
(The ISP didn't offer shell access but I figured out, pretty quickly, that I could write a rudimentary web shell with my SSI-based CGIs. I didn't do too much with that because I didn't want to get caught and I'd mostly gotten the desire to do "unauthorized pro-bono remote system administration" out of my system by that time...)
This little "site" my friend and I ran got listed on Yahoo (we submitted it... >smileWired had recently done an article on Yahoo[1]. I saw a client named "srinija.yahoo.com" and remembered the article talked about a "Srinija Srinivasan" being an employee there (working on ontology). It was really exciting to see somebody named in a Wired article accessing my silly little site. (The most memorable client name from Yahoo was "ratbastard.yahoo.com", BTW. I'd love to know the backstory. Guess I already wrote about this once...[2])
[0] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/cgi/ch05_01.html