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I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

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Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#151

Post by hawski »

addicted wrote: post #120
CharlesDodgson wrote: post #45

I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.

Is it richer and deeper now? Maybe at the fringes, but I feel that the internet today, with my emphasis being on the "inter" (different) "net" (networks) part of it, is far less deeper or richer than before. What we basically have reduced to are a bunch of siloed netowrks such as Facebook. When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of results from a variety of sites I had never heard about.…

I'm beginning to think that there is a niche for a peculiar kind of a search engine. A search engine for static almost-none to none JavaScript pages. It would penalize pages for ad-network usage.

I would really like to not have in search results most sites that try to monetize on my attention. I want raw facts and opinions. No click-bait to grab my attention or feed my internal cave man with rage. No ad-networks or data extraction operations. Just pages put there by people that want to share knowledge and ideas. I mostly find it on pages that lack ads and often are pure HTML - no CSS and no JS. At least in areas that interest me.

Maybe there is a place for a search engine that would index only pages like that? It certainly would be easier than competing with Google on indexing whole of the attention-whoring Internet.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#152

Post by handedness »

dep_b wrote: post #142

Just yesterday I was helping an uncle changing the Flash-based menu of his site about classic race cars to a newer one so it would actually show on phones. It was all .htm files that included the Flash menu every time, apparently he worked with some kind of 15-year old copy of Dreamweaver that would add it to the top of every page he created like a template. I could have switched it to a PHP include but that would ei…

Any chance you can point us to the site? Sounds fun.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#153

Post by andai »

zokier wrote: post #112
andai wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please clarify?

Make local mirrors of any content you care.

Could you recommend any software for mirroring websites?

I've been using scdl and ytdl lately to backup some SoundCloud stuff since it looks like their future is very uncertain.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#154

Post by kyledrake »

wcummings wrote: post #114
Apocryphon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Neocities should add a webring feature.

Is this a joke?

No, I get this request quite a bit from people that sincerely miss web rings. I'm not sure how much of it is anachronistic nostalgia and how much of it is a true desire to bring it back. To give an example of this, I've gotten more than a few requests to add the Gopher protocol to Neocities.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#155

Post by Arcsech »

mintplant wrote: post #74
sah2ed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's now Chrome headless which is slowly edging out PhantomJS for such use cases.

Are you suggesting running an entire web browser on the server-side just to render each client request to HTML? That VC money must really be flowing...

This article was posted on HN a while back suggesting exactly that: https://hackernoon.com/leaner-alternatives-to-server-side-re...

It's just as ridiculous as it sounds.

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#156

Post by [deleted] »

memracom wrote: post #150

Did you try looking them up at archive.org? I expect that many of them will work there. The web is ephemeral unless somebody archives it. Many companies offer an archive service for your sites for a fee, and archive.org does it to provide a historical record,

[deleted]

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#159

Post by dep_b »

handedness wrote: post #152
dep_b wrote: post #142

Just yesterday I was helping an uncle changing the Flash-based menu of his site about classic race cars to a newer one so it would actually show on phones. It was all .htm files that included the Flash menu every time, apparently he worked with some kind of 15-year old copy of Dreamweaver that would add it to the top of every page he created like a template. I could have switched it to a PHP include but that would ei…

Any chance you can point us to the site? Sounds fun.

Well alright:

http://www.cupecitas.com.ar

It hasn't been updated yet though!

Re: I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked

#160

Post by mod »

davehtaylor wrote: post #81
adventured wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always the famous Dole Kemp '96 campaign site (a fair representation of mid 1990s web design): http://www.dolekemp96.org/main.htm And this one from CNN (still 1996, but appropriate representation of that 1995/96 era when design had changed a bit from the earlier plain white backgrounds & basic text layouts): http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/

I absolutely adore that CNN 1996 site. Man, designs like that were great.

I agree--I think that design is wonderful.

The credits link & page are pretty bad, otherwise no complaints.

And hey, it still works well on small screens. Not flawless, but close.

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