Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot • Hacker News Board

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#81

Post by tribby » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 5:53 AM UTC

kyledrake wrote: post #8

mrskeltal wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does hosting costs you at this moment?

Just servers, about $550/mo once we launch the new infrastructure. That doesn't include the $10k I had to sink in to buy the equipment and IP addresses. Then pad the bill a lot of misc other nonsense: social media liability insurance (yes this is a thing), ARIN fees, LLC registration, a literal fax machine (for DMCA compliance), monitoring, etc. Grand total will hover around $1000. Architecture is a core + CDN model.…

> That doesn't include the $10k I had to sink in to buy the equipment and IP addresses

where did you buy the IP addresses? I them for sale on sites that purport to auction IP space but I've never known which of those sites are trustworthy etc.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#82

Post by jneal » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 6:04 AM UTC

jmduke wrote: post #2

Original discussion from Neocities' launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5918724 Personally, I don't have any reason to use Neocities but I am enormously happy that it exists. Geocities and Angelfire and all of those weird web sandboxes are where I first wrote code, and what led me to pursue software engineering as a career.

Same here. My first web page was on "expage" but I quickly ended up on Geocities and Angelfire for quite awhile. When I finally moved on to 'real' hosts I used Hypermart and Virtualave to host my Perl.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#83

Post by erikpukinskis » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 6:15 AM UTC

kyledrake wrote: post #63

ReverseCold wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a whitelist is better, there can be a ton of file formats that have vulnerabilities in their readers.

True. The main issue is that people love to create new web formats. For example, there was some 3D model formats we didn't support initially. It's pretty hard to keep up.

I don't think you necessarily need to keep up! Just keep moving and you'll get what you need over time.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#84

Post by bencollier49 » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 6:27 AM UTC

ReverseCold wrote: post #56

kyledrake wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about flipping it around - instead of whitelisting certain files, simply blacklisting the problem formats. Thanks for reminding me.

I think a whitelist is better, there can be a ton of file formats that have vulnerabilities in their readers.

Like .cur files! According to a quick google search, there was/is a buffer overflow vulnerability in XP. Makes me wonder how many SP1 XP installs hit Neocities.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#85

Post by brazzledazzle » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 6:38 AM UTC

kyledrake wrote: post #4

Hi! I started Neocities. I read HN regularly. Neocities was actually launched and bootstrapped on HN about 3 years ago, and donations from HN users bankrolled the first year of operating it. Things have been going really well, the site is growing and still sustains it's own existence through donations and supporter accounts. I still work on the site heavily. We're launching some big features soon (more space, Github…

I'd love to hear about your experience with building the anycast network.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#86

Post by aidenn0 » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 6:51 AM UTC

kyledrake wrote: post #67

Apocryphon wrote: post #61

I wonder what the Yahoo! dismantling will do to all of the Geocities content. Hopefully they lay dormant in archive somewhere, clearly labelled.

As I understand it, it's gone. They possess no archive, except for what was backed up by web archivers. I could be mistaken. I spent years trying to acquire what remains of Geocities, which is the domain itself, geocities.com. I got closer than you would expect, but was told it was being "used internally" so they couldn't divest of it. I was also told I wasn't the first person that inquired. As I understand it, geoci…

FWIW the e-mail address foo@geocities.com is an alias for foo@yahoo.com and I still have several accounts using that address.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#87

Post by avenoir » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 8:05 AM UTC

Ah, the name brings back some memories. A long time ago, about 15 years in total, when hosting a PHP site was too expensive for a 15-year-old and free hosting usually came with ads there was a community on neopages.net which offered no cost ad-free PHP hosting. The only thing you had to do to get it was submit an entry on neopages forums containing a link to your current site along with a description of why you deserve a subdomain on neopages. You'd then get judged by hosted members and either get an account or try again. Neopages was the community of teenage geeks that got me hooked on PHP after I outgrew GeoCities. Curious if any of you guys know what i'm talking about or had a site hosted there? :) Some of you are likely in your early to mid 30s now.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#88

Post by type0 » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 9:57 AM UTC

kyledrake wrote: post #4

Hi! I started Neocities. I read HN regularly. Neocities was actually launched and bootstrapped on HN about 3 years ago, and donations from HN users bankrolled the first year of operating it. Things have been going really well, the site is growing and still sustains it's own existence through donations and supporter accounts. I still work on the site heavily. We're launching some big features soon (more space, Github…

I wonder if you have any plans for u2f two factor authentication (or even TOTP)? For people that are in the process of learning HTML, u2f seems like the only secure option because the mental overhead needed to grok ssh usually is too big.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#89

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 10:09 AM UTC

dicroce wrote: post #77

I've always thought geocities could have been facebook. People just wanted a page to post pictures and share with their friends. Geocities could have automated something like that....

MySpace shows that it wasn't just about having a page to share images and stuff IMO.

Geocities & MySpace had little consistency across pages. But Facebook won by starting off with trend-setters (college kids) and using network effect as it's foundation.

In the UK FriendsReunited filled the "share pictures and info" hope too and briefly was pretty massive.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#90

Post by wscott » Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 10:46 AM UTC

kyledrake wrote: post #19

robto wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vaguely remember something about making the sites available through ipfs. What was that like and what came of it?

The sites are still all being archived through IPFS! The link of the latest archive was temporarily removed from the site profile, but it's coming back soon when we launch the new IPFS infrastructure (weeks not months). The first IPFS implementation was experimental, the next version is going to be pretty amazing. Stay tuned. Using Neocities with IPFS has been really great for stress testing, as we have a lot of cont…

You are doing a pretty huge service to the IPFS project just by trying to use it at this scale. I would love a blog post giving your experiences using it. One of my main complaints about IPFS is that it is very hard to have visibility into the project if you are not willing to follow all the github issues.