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18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

fmboschetto.it

211–220 of 487 posts

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#211
I sympathize with the author. I have built my maths site just 2 years after this one, when I was in high school. Ever since I've only been adding material, and occasionally moving old stuff into subdirectories; other than that, it's the same old geocities website made with FPE, except it's now hosted on a university server and has my academic title and office and no more colored background. Oh, and I now edit it with notepad++ and track it with git.

I've had plans to rebuild it for the last 8 years or so, to make it better and slicker and easier to navigate (as it stands, my new papers are mixed together with my scribe notes from undergrad). But I never figured out how to achieve this without also requiring javascript or relying on tools that may not survive the next decade and that I cannot tweak to my needs without learning a new programming language (hello Jekyll, hi Hugo). Nor did I ever find the Right Way how it should be structured; move one thing to the front and something else gets harder to find. I guess it will survive me.

Makes me a lot less judgmental when I see another academic website that can trace its lineage back to geocities and angelfire.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#212
A company in Germany called Arcor had the front page website of my band from 2001 which used frontpage serverside extensions still online about 4 years ago. I couldn't find the FTP password to download the source code so it died when they finally pulled the plug.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#213
You're telling me their site still works in 2020 without needing to serve the client as a server-side rendered react app with the data being provided by several node.js microservices containerized and deployed to a kubernetes cluster and accessed through a GraphQL interface? IMPOSSIBLE!

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#214

It's impressive the amount of content inside! There are countless pages about literature, religion and physics. It's a good reminder of the original goal of WWW: share information.

But thats so not web 2.0/3.0. You gotta add more padding so we can create smooth scrolling. /s. I am a culprit of this too now btw.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#215

This is pretty cool. I had to look Frontpage up! Logic dictates that there must have been a point in time where the prevailing opinion shifted from “Uses ancient UI” to “Has a cool retro feel”. Probably all technologies go through this? Like vinyl becoming cool a few years back. Has happened with Flash games recently. Is there a name for this?

"Nostalgia".

I think they meant a name for the process of something becoming the matter of nostalgia.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also helps if you self-host, I have personally self-hosted a subversion repository with my own projects using Trac [1] for 10 years now. [1] https://trac.edgewall.org/

Trac has been end of life for some time. It doesn't run on python 3. There are open bug tickets about it that have been stale for years. Maybe it will be upgraded now that python 2 is officially dead, but given it wasn't so far and there was no effort in that direction, I wouldn't bet on it.

Is "EOL" the right term? They released a new version 2 days ago:

https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracChangeLog

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#217

My personal site was posted on September 12, 1999, is still updated, and has no problems. It;s a static site that mostly uses straight HTML/CSS. There are a few scripts that generate pages, but generating HTML/CSS pretty easy. https://dwheeler.com . Geocrasher said: > I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page. Yes. I don't get pai…

[deleted]

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I been using ColdFusion for over 20 years. The HTML it creates can be as simple or complex as the developer intends. The output can last decades without updating, I don't understand your comparison.

The issue isn't the HTML it renders, it's finding a hosting provider that supports running it server-side. Of course you could run it yourself, but maintaining a server for a basic blog or personal site arguably exits the realm of "simple."

For a blog or personal site (that didn't have any functionality that really needed a back end) I suppose you could just scrape the generated pages and push them up to any host, but CF seems like a fairly awkward static site generator compared to the usual suspects like Jekyll, Hugo, etc.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#219

There is a search engine dedicated to finding "classic" websites: https://wiby.me/ Click the "surprise me..." link to see a random one.

That could eat up some hours. I landed on a model airplane site and started getting sucked in before realizing I have work to do.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#220

These simple sites show us something profound: If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. There are a some technologies that will never allow somebody to build a site and leave it unchanged for 20 or 25 years. Cold Fusion comes to mind. Almost nobody hosts it anymore for one. Can you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years? The version of PHP it runs on will be EOL long…

Back in 2001 I redid the UWA computer club website ( https://ucc.asn.au/ ) using XSLT with a custom doctype ('grahame'). In the early 2000s XML was the cool shiny thing. They're still using it, in fact I found out recently that someone wrote a Markdown to 'doctype grahame' converter to 'modernise' the site. I guess what I actually built back then was an early static site generator, but it's still kind of cool they're…

I still use my old XML doctype with xslt to produce some websites I maintain. Whenever, if ever, xslt is removed from browsers, converting it to a static site generator will be easy.

I regret nothing. Editing simple xml using Emacs is a breeze.

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