Hi all! a couple of months ago I was overtaken by something, perhaps the same as Archimedes thousands of years ago. Now I'll tell you what I'm talking about.
Everyone remembers the “cult of the home pages” in the 90s and early 00s, for about thirty years there was a fashion for them. later it all disappeared somewhere, the Internet shut down, people went to social networks, where the same memes and videos circulate in circles. there is nothing new. I did a little research and came to a specific conclusion: it has become too difficult for people to do this.
if earlier you registered on a hosting, where you simply added information about yourself and posts (like here, or somewhere on larger parties like a live journal), there were also forums, but people stopped going to the forums, although it’s strange, why? Information on the forum lasts a long time and can always be found. information on social networks lasts for a maximum of 3 days, then it is almost impossible to find it. Most people are absent-minded, instead of enjoying life - they write to everyone on social networks about what is happening. Instead of learning, there is googling, and instead of creation, there are wishes in the gpt chat.
So where did the home pages go? Has it become very difficult for people to create them? are the geeks gone? nerds? IT people? Is this not interesting for young people anymore?
The home page of an IT specialist can tell me a lot. he spent perhaps dozens of hours making sure his resume looked juicy, interesting, and provocative to hire him for the job.
An IT specialist who promotes himself on social networks is just a poser who, due to the number of offers he makes to others, gets some result, this is statistics. write 1000 messages to different companies with resumes of the same content, and someone will take the bait. but this is spam and ignorance! although it may be effective, I won’t argue here.
geeks, as a subspecies of a very literate person, still exist and create, their creations are high-quality and beautiful and unique in their own way, but rarely anyone sees this, because a mere mortal does not know what BBS Telnet Gopher or WEB 1.0 is and does not know how to read in other places, which are not social networks.
nerds make their crafts, often post them on GitHub and similar sites to show off their “IT” skills, but what these kind of specialists do is rarely noticeable among the dregs and dirt from modern hipster languages, on dozens of frameworks to at least install something like this on the server it is necessary that the stars in the sky form into the thirteenth sign of the zodiac, no less. but beautiful code is rarely written, and it is dying out as a species, because the modern world needs speed. is it necessary? when will we start talking about optimization?
Most modern software code for creating personal pages is no good. someone will say - there is WordPress! but this is in comparison when you want to dig up a 4 square meter vegetable garden for an onion - you take an excavator. so-so example.
If you use something to write a couple of lines or pages about yourself, then this “something” should not exceed the size of the content, I thought, and decided to create a universal tool that would help with this. and I wrote http://old.net.eu.org/ hamster. HamsterCMS is the simplest engine for creating home pages, single-page websites, and even multi-page websites.
The engine is suitable for geeks, nerds, IT specialists, ordinary users, and even schoolchildren. it's easy to understand. The code is three small scripts written into a template. in my case, the template is made in HTML 3.2 and works under DOS, Windows 3.11, and on very old browsers. Moreover, it works equally well with modern browsers.
You can also make it up with modern HTML5 templates with bootstrap and other show-offs, as you please.
the admin panel is a visual editor (only 4 kilobytes? a visual editor?), yes! it is small and works both in text (under DOS) and in visual (under Windows, and other modern and not so modern operating systems).
I keep praising myself and praising myself? what a great guy I am?
what about schoolchildren? will a student be able to layout a template and create a page, and how difficult is it?
I calculated how many body movements needed to be made to make up the template. I got ten)))
created an empty php file in the editor -1
copied and pasted the template into a new file - 2
selected-copied-pasted the first part of the script, the second, the third (all as in the instructions), -5
saved the file on the computer - 6
connected to FTP server - 8
copied the file to the hosting - 9
opened the link to see what happened - 10
I think that getting a grade in computer science would be a better recipe than getting involved with all sorts of frameworks on GitHub, whose authors most likely only themselves can use it, for average minds IMHO it’s too difficult. the script should be simple and perform clearly its functions, and not be so bloated and complex that it would be impossible to approach it.
I'm for simplicity.
Get ready for hamsterization!
\\ You may consider this PR and advertising material, but my goal was to make this world a little simpler, and to interest young people in creating with this simplicity.
I apologize for my English. I'm try to.
Now I’m making ten new templates that will be compatible immediately with the hamster, so that it would be convenient to deploy the site. about half of the work is already done. Some templates will resemble the DOS interface. so wait for the update! see you soon
Love it! I'm glad people are doing this work!
I've created an ultraminimal theme for wordpress (no divs, for example), but this takes it to the next level.
Thank-you for contributing to the small web!
And I love the quote on your 'about' page... "Don't touch what works well, even if it's outdated". Couldn't agree more!
How much does your WordPress weigh in today's realities? I stopped using it. like Joomla and many other engines 15 years ago. back then they were just super monsters
I haven't checked. I dare not check!
The _output_ is small. But the on-server size? Ridiculous!
Okay... I looked. 102MB plus database.
and without content, how mutch?
That's without the content. The content is in the database and will be minimal (it's text only)
what functions did you install for yourself? Is there a basic package plus plugins? many plugins?
Today I was finishing a text (from symbols) template, the first time in my life I did it, but not the last! ))) and with a favicon and text plus a template, of course, I got as much as 9 kilobytes of Internet traffic. while the release weight is 14.
By the way, have you seen the new template styled for Win95?
https://github.com/turboblack/HamsterCMS
there will be new ones soon
I just created a super-light theme and then added plugins to allow me to insert php code within pages/posts and the classic editor plugin (because their new block editor sucks!)
I saw the Win95 template! Nice!
do you used http://old.net.eu.org/admin.zip this?
can you show what you created?
You can get my theme at https://gamc.uk/ultraminimal-theme/
There is a zip file there that you can download and examine if you wish.
have you tried the modernized version of the hamster?
https://github.com/turboblack/HamsterCMS
Lately I've been missing the homepages of old. I remember all the pages that people put together not to monetize but just to share their joy of a subject. Now people post about their passions on reddit, twitter, facebook, etc. because the immediate responses get them a fast and solid dopamine hit, but like you stated: the information fades away in a few days.
I don’t understand why people make the same type of pages on social networks, where everything is the same and bland, where you blend in with the crowd and become just another nobody
They are designed to addict you, basically modern social networks are a drug. Sure, they do some good in connecting and communicating, but their primary function is to give you positive feedback for staying on them: just scroll to find one more funny meme; refresh to see if you got more likes; an so on. Everything is bland because they reward quantity, not quality.
this is interesting! imo the reason homepages died is because the knowledge of how to create them has stopped being shared. this is why i love neocities so much, because it lets people learn!
I do it in HTML4 with almost no styles, or if there are styles, I hide them in the HTML code, without frameworks and show-offs, otherwise it’s pretentious and banal
i do like a lot of the new css and html features, but i think the issue is less about said features and more about the fact that companies have forgotten the purpose of websites is to convey information and if you make it hard to consume the information your website is a failure.
personally i also handwrite everything i do, i do use a templating engine on my site but that's because i post daily on it so its easier then copying and pasting every page every time, but everything used by the templater is my work by hand c:
i personally enjoy it, its very calming for me, html and css are two of the few programming languages (yes i know they aren't technically turning complete) that i never feel stress in, and as much as i love the feeling of when you solve a massive problem, sometimes you don't want to solve any problems.
https://beefox.xyzI also write down my thoughts in a notebook or in an “idea book” on my phone)))
By the way, if you look at the idea in which I invested my time, it’s quite simple to implement a blog. you just create another page, and then insert a link to this page wherever you want.
and you have no restrictions on design, it can be a different font or color each time. There are no intentional rules or restrictions.
and most importantly, I am now making a second set of templates that will also be displayed equally in browsers of different generations, be it 1997, 2007, 2017, or now. because HTML 4 technologies still work today. and layout on divs was implemented back in version 3.2, on which, by the way, the main page of the site was made. and it opens even under dos.
This is what I would like to see from modern developers, so that their work would work on all computers and not just on the newest ones
for sure!! and yeah the idea does look simple i was just sharing how i create my presence on the internet c:
and yeah absolutely, i strive for minimum backwards compatability equivelent to the backwards compatability javascript has (although i never have my site relying on javascript, which is for the most part like 4 decades at this point (though there have been one or two minor breaking changes over the years), its just a good mesure of "if your computer knows javascript exists, my site will work"). I do have some progressive enhancements so the my sites will be a bit nicer to use on newer machines but otherwise they work absolutely fine on any machine is the idea
and also; well written code that works on most machines is also accessible code, and making accessible sites is one of my most important rules. if a site breaks accessibility in my eyes it is a failure as it does not let anyone read it.
thanks for the answer.
The last time we checked the work was on Windows 95, which runs on 8 RAM on a 386 SX at 25 MHz, and this technology is almost 40 years old! so for me it is a great success that the site and templates are compatible with a 40 year old computer