The Return of the 90s Web • Hacker News Board

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#141

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 2:22 AM UTC

Schopenhauer's 19th century essay "On Authorship" has been a personal fave since discovering it last year:

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little....

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10714/10714-h/10714-h.htm#li...

Brain Pickings articulates my reasons well, though really, just read the source:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/13/schopenhauer-on-aut...

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#142

Post by emersonrsantos » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 2:24 AM UTC

Serverless is the new CGI

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#143

Post by mymythisisthis » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 2:26 AM UTC

I want a good webpage; -Clearly written like a Navy manual, -but using well made animated gifs alongside flat pictures, -with a few videos thrown into the mix, that are short and concise, no longer than 3minutes, -and short audio clips to learn to properly pronounce something.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#144

Post by iphone_elegance » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 2:26 AM UTC

esperent wrote: post #136

arcturus17 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us also choose to write it because it’s fun and the results can be excellent.

Nobody denies React and co. are excellent tools. The frustration occurs when people who enjoy these tools claim that, if you choose not to use them, or suggest they're not fit for a certain task, you're WRONG. In the case of React in particular, this happens a lot. Then of course the people who don't want to use a framework feel frustrated, and next thing you know it's a flame war. I've seen this happen multiple time…

I run into very few people who claim this.. oh you mean on Twitter? well there's the problem.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#145

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 2:26 AM UTC

spc476 wrote: post #119

basch wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree on the long tail. And maybe a way to exclude bigger sites, and newer results (the time range search doesnt really work anymore.) I had a search today, and 7 of the top 10 results were from today. What I was looking for was NOT news, it was historical. If I wanted news, I would click the news tab. Having 7/10ths of the results come from today makes using google to search all of the web ever near useless, as toda…

Here you go: https://millionshort.com/

An equivalent which provides sources older than the past hour, day, week, month, year, decade, century, or millennium would be an opportunity here.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#146

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 2:28 AM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #125

chongli wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEO sites have an Achilles' heel though: they need to make money somehow, and 99% it's going to be ads. So filter them out based on that. Create a space for a noncommercial web.

They can also make money by selling things. Much harder to detect algorithmically than ads, and I don't know if you want to filter it out?

Or by scams, hoaxes, fraud, blackmail, pump-and-dump, propaganda, ....

Less than ads and subscriiptions, but enough to fund a lot of crap.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#147

Post by kickscondor » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 2:29 AM UTC

ozfive wrote: post #133

kickscondor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: *…

Damn, this is all classy. I started writing html in 1996. My first job was at a boutique web shop building vertical portals in Coldfusion. Thanks for the great links. It's inspired me to put up a plain old html/JavaScript homepage again!

Hey this is great. Post the link here if you like.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#148

Post by hedora » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 2:33 AM UTC

the_other wrote: post #77

slfnflctd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fuzzy concept, but I think you're pointing toward something there's a need for. PageRank is/was useful in a lot of ways, it's just not enough by itself. Its weaknesses have been ever more apparent, and it has become less effective over time. There are so many possible viable methods for ranking search results! Particularly now with higher level textual analysis using AI/ML/[buzzword], and perhaps more importan…

> It's a fuzzy concept, but I think you're pointing toward something there's a need for. PageRank is/was useful in a lot of ways, it's just not enough by itself. Its weaknesses have been ever more apparent, and it has become less effective over time. Would you speak to why you think this way about PageRank? What are its shortcomings? To me, who only paid surface-level attention to this, it seemed like Google results…

They had to abandon page rank because it was widely gamed.

As far as I can tell, the main reason Google succeeded was that other search engines let advertisers buy placement for keywords (and didn’t label paid links). I heard from an industry insider that was able to strip the paid links that the engine they worked on gave results that were very similar to Google’s.

The second big reason was that pagerank was a useful signal that hadn’t already been gamed to the point of uselessness. I think this let a tiny team blindside an entrenched industry.

That’s not to say there’s no technical insight behind the page rank algorithm, but it was only a useful signal for a few years.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#149

Post by juliend2 » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 2:36 AM UTC

mafuyu wrote: post #127

Along these lines, does anyone have any recommendations for a service or framework to create a simple personal site? I just want a basic blog, project pages, and photo gallery. I use Jekyll at the moment to statically generate pages to host on github.io, but frankly, I don't have much webdev experience and I'd rather just have something work out of the box at this point.

I would say: start by doing pure HTML, then progressively work with PHP to include header.php/footer.php on every page. Then create helper functions for a few things you don't wanna repeat.

You'll be surprised by how good it feels to know your website from A to Z.

This is what I do for my own site: https://www.juliendesrosiers.com/ . Almost every URL ends with an old-school .php for that very reason lol. But I like the fact that every time i want to modify something, I simply SSH into my dreamhost account and use vim to edit posts and pages. But om your case it could be https://www.panic.com/coda/ .

And if starting from nothing seem scary, you can always start with a basic themeforest theme, or a framework like Bootstrap. Having the html-css already done goes a long way.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#150

Post by FalconSensei » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 2:40 AM UTC

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.

that's why I always filter by last year