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Welcome to url.town, population 465

212 points| plaguna | 7 months ago |url.town

87 comments

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Waraqa|7 months ago

With the rise of these retro-looking websites, I feel it's possible again to start using a browser from the '90s. Someone should make a static-site social media platform for full compatibility.

jdpage|7 months ago

Not so much. While a lot of these websites use classic approaches (handcrafted HTML/CSS, server-side includes, etc.) and aesthetics, the actual versions of those technologies used are often rather modern. For example, TFA looks like a page I'd have browsed in IE5 as a kid, but if you look at the markup, it's using HTML5 tags and Flexbox (which became a W3C WR in 2017), while a period site would have used an HTML table to get the same effect. Of course, you wouldn't want to do it that way nowadays, because it wouldn't be responsive or mobile-friendly.

(I don't think this detracts from such sites, to be clear; they're adopting new technologies where they provide practical benefits to the reader because many indieweb proponents are pushing it as a progressive, rather than reactionary, praxis.)

asimpletune|6 months ago

This is totally doable! It can be done with static sites + rss (and optionally email).

For example, I do this with my website. I receive comments via email (with the sender’s addresses hashed). Each page/comment-list/comment has its own rss feed that people can “subscribe” to. This allows you to get notified when someone responds to a comment you left, or comments on a page. But all notifications are opt-in and require no login because your rss reader is fetching the updates.

Since I’m the moderator of my site, I subscribe to the “all-comments” feed and get notified upon every submission. I then go review the comment and then the site rebuilds. There’s no logins or sign ups. Commenting is just pushing and notifications just pulling.

example https://spenc.es/updates/posts/4513EBDF/

I plan on open sourcing the commenting aspect of this (it’s called https://r3ply.com) so this doesn’t have to be reinvented for each website, but comments are just one part of the whole system:

The web is the platform. RSS provides notifications (pull). Emailing provides a way to post (push) - and moderate - content. Links are for sharing and are always static (never change or break).

The one missing thing is like a “pending comments” cache, for when you occasionally get HN like traffic and need comments to be temporarily displayed immediately. I’m building this now but it’s really optional and would be the only thing in this system that even requires JS or SSR.

edm0nd|7 months ago

I loaded up Windows 98SE SP2 in a VM and tried to use it to browse the modern web but it was basically impossible since it only supported HTTP/1.1 websites. I was only able to find maybe 3-4 websites that still supported it and load.

mariusor|6 months ago

If your definition of social-media includes link aggregators, check https://brutalinks.tech. I've been working on things adjacent to that for quite a while now and I'm always looking for interested people.

mlindner|6 months ago

The biggest issue there is that regardless of how your old your html elements, the old browsers only supported SSL 2/3, at best, and likely nothing at all, meaning you can't connect to basically any website.

nubinetwork|6 months ago

I made a twitter clone in PHP during the 00s, but sadly I don't have the code anymore... Although it should be pretty easy to replicate.

vaylian|6 months ago

> Someone should make a static-site social media platform for full compatibility.

What do you mean by that? Especially the "social" part?

rsynnott|6 months ago

Argh, Yahoo is happening again!

(For the youth, this is basically what Yahoo was, originally; it was _ten years_ after Yahoo started before it had its own crawler-based search engine, though it did use various third parties after the first few years.)

JKCalhoun|6 months ago

It's like people are missing that first decade.

(I recall too that when Yahoo did add their own web crawler, all web devs did was add "Pamela Anderson" a thousand times in as meta tags in order to get their pages ranked higher. Early SEO.)

poink|6 months ago

This is cute, but I absolutely do not care about buying a omg.lol URL for $20/yr, and I'm not trying to be a hater because the concept is fine, but anybody who falls into this same boat should know this is explicitly "not for them"

trinix912|6 months ago

While I'm usually one of those who complain about subscription services, $20 per year is not considerably more than registering a .com with the whois protection. Given that you get a registered, valid domain name that you have control over, it's not a bad deal. Also, it does help filter out low effort spam, especially if they decided to add a limit to allow only n registrations per a credit card should it become a problem.

We're always discussing something along "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" in the context of social media, yet now we're presented a solution and criticize that it's not free.

You can also roll your own webring/directory for free on your ISP's guest area (if they still offer that) and there's no significant network effect to url.town yet that would make you miss out if you don't pay.

deadbabe|6 months ago

Just to be clear, $20/year is roughly one Starbucks drink per fiscal quarter.

benrutter|6 months ago

I hadn't realised that this was tied to omg.lol until your comment but now I'm confused. If it's from the omg.lol community, how come the address isn't something like url.omg.lol? (ie. it's a community around a domain, why isn't that doimain used here?)

endemic|6 months ago

I think I pay around $100/year for my dirt cheap self-hosted stuff. So I mean you _can_ do it yourself, but $20 is pretty reasonable.

dredmorbius|6 months ago

Having studied, and attempted to build, a few taxonomies / information hierarchies myself (a fraught endeavour, perhaps information is not in fact hierarchical? (Blasphemy!!!)), I'm wondering how stable the present organisational schema will prove, and how future migrations might be handled.

(Whether for this or comparable projects.)

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_classification>

zkmon|6 months ago

Yes, the seeming hierarchy in information is bit shallow. Yahoo, Altavista and others tried this and it became unmanageable soon. Google realized that keywords and page-raking is the way to go. I think keywords are sort of same as a dimensions in multi-dimensional embeddings.

Information, is basically is about relating something to other known things. A closer relation is being interpreted as location proximity in a taxonomy space.

blenderob|6 months ago

Nice website. But do I need to buy a omg.lol subdomain before I can contribute links here? Why is it an omg.lol subdomain? I'm happy to buy a new domain, but not so happy about buying a subdomain. I'm not sure why I'd be paying omg.lol to contribute links to url.town? What's the connection between the two?

JKCalhoun|6 months ago

Yeah, so $20 to add a URL to url.town.

Anyone with an account already that wants to take requests for URLs to add?

(Hey, charge $1 a request and you should be able to break even on your $20 domain purchase before the day is up.)

thefaux|6 months ago

Pretty on the nose that the only sports category is road cycling.

cosmicgadget|7 months ago

Kind of like the indieseek.xyz directory. Love to see it.

pavel_lishin|7 months ago

Neat - I wish it showed how many entries there are for each category. I was disappointed to see a Parenting category, with nothing in it.

actinium226|7 months ago

Sadly it's the same for Sci-Fi art. I had a link to submit, but you need to sign up and it's $20. Fair enough if they want to set some minimum barrier for the site to filter out suggestions from every Tom, Dick, and Harry (and Jane?), but I don't feel so investing in this to give them $20 to provide a suggestion.

dredmorbius|6 months ago

Clearly, if you want descendent nodes, you'll be looking for the "Child" or "Leafnode" category ;-)

dcreater|6 months ago

What's the selection criteria for being listed on the directory?

sussmannbaka|6 months ago

Someone wants to add it enough to click the button that adds the site. Sometimes you need to REALLY want to add it because no category is applicable so you also click the button to add the category.

chromehearts|6 months ago

I'm not sure either; I know a couple of websites which fit perfectly

toyg|6 months ago

The fact that it already has categories for most hobbies but absolutely nothing for cars, motorbikes, or any mechanical engineering-related topic, makes me sad. I know it's not their fault - young people simply don't care anymore.

bubblyworld|6 months ago

Go make an account and add your own links =)

rsynnott|6 months ago

> most hobbies

... Possibly I'm missing something, but currently it has four categories under "Hobbies"; folklore, Pokemon, travel and yarn craft. Are you suggesting that if someone added "car stuff", that would be, well, basically complete, the big five hobbies represented?

It's clearly extremely new and has almost no content as yet.

archerx|6 months ago

I just can’t stand reading serif fonts on a screen. The site is not compelling enough to power through the torture the font induces.

AndrewSwift|6 months ago

Cool, but I'd like us to get past the idea that a site has to use Times font to be retro.

Times is really not adapted for the web and is particularly bad on low-resolution screens. How many computer terminals used Times for anything but Word processing?

Verdana was released in 1996 — is that too recent?

yreg|6 months ago

Verdana is sans serif, so not a replacement for Times New Roman.

Also, the website styles don't specify font-family at all, so you are complaining about your own browser defaults.

trinix912|6 months ago

In the true spirit of the old web, you can adjust the default font in your browser's preferences to any font you prefer and the page respects it, as it doesn't specify what font to use at all.