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Comment by ydlr | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago, the company I work for acquired a small web agency. I was tasked with migrating their client sites to our infrastructure. One of the gems I found was https://www.jubyla.com/.

After a little asking around, I learned that it was created by the daughter of one of the agency's employees.

I couldn't be responsible for depriving the world of this, so I left it running.

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I loved it when the web looked like that. Like a giant art project made by people just having a fun time being expressive.

22 Feb should be Intergalactic Jubyla Day.

Yes before all the joy, colour and happiness of the digital world was sucked out by flat design.

Yeah, while I hated so many designs, it was still great to see see what people were coming up with and the content wasn't posted for "likes" or fakes internet points. It was just stuff people wanted to share. There was also a lot of copying in those days. People would find a cool gif or background image on one site and add it to their own sites. There were all kinds of layouts too. The entire web felt very collaborative and experimental before everyone got corralled into corporate controlled templates and DMCA notices started flying around everywhere.

Very nice.

My 8-year-old is wanting to start a podcast where she reads aloud the stories she has written. She was disappointed when I told her I probably wouldn't be able to get them listed on Audible or on Pinna, but I think a website like that might be just the ticket.

That sounds lovely. Please encourage her and help her. It's an amazing feeling when you put your work on the web on a safe manner as a kid.

It's really easy to get a podcast into Apple Podcasts, just submit a URL for the RSS feed. If you don't mind intervening to edit the XML when a new episode goes up, all you need is a directory on a web host somewhere... you drop in a hand-jammed XML file for the RSS feed and all the mp3 files.

Heads up, I think you're still on the hook for download bandwidth though. Bandwidth is one reason podcast hosting is so popular.

If you use a service like Transistor.fm, you can get a website generated for your feed automatically. Not much customization options, but probably enough to get by. For $9/mo, it's not a bad option.

Here’s a tutorial on how to do it. https://www.chrisjmendez.com/2018/08/10/how-to-submit-your-p...

Please check out https://anchor.fm/ , all you need to start a small podcast. Please don’t shut a child dream like that, I will be a recurring listener!

You should encourage her. If anything, in a few years, hearing it will trigger memories from this time.

> reads aloud the stories she has written

That sounds fantastic!

This is great. Thanks for maintaining this artifact of pre-Web 2.0 days. And who knows, the next hot startup Jubyla may want to buy the domain for millions.

Eventually six-letter domains will be the new 5-letter domains!

This is brilliant. I love finding old pages, my uncle used to have a page way back in the day and I remember (as a kid) being absolutely fascinated by it. Seemed like magic to me. It's now mostly defunct (nothing works anymore, the tabs don't even show up, but it still has a landing page) http://wildrock.de/

Another gem: http://www.christianpoulet.com/iemac/en/indexf.htm

Weird -- I reloaded the page, but the view counter didn't update!

I've seen this exact java support before and modernized it. Here's some new source for your uncle, though without the colored glow effects added by the java applet: https://gist.github.com/Efreak/7d51382bb1787b9e34f3428a61ad7...

Since I first did this years ago and this was a simple copy/paste of that on mobile, it uses javascript to change img src instead of css :hover to change a background.

that's so awesome, thank you!

This is insanely cute, and posting WAV audio files on a website in 2000 strikes me as pretty sophisticated! Did you or someone else convert some older audio-playing mechanism to <audio> tags? I don't remember those existing back in 2000.

My two boys both have colds today, so the little-kid congestion in the recordings is extra adorable for me at the moment. Thanks for sharing.

If I recall correctly the audio tag RFC first came out in 2000 but I'd be shocked if any major browsers supported it.

You could use EMBED to autoplay WAV and MIDI. IE (in classic Microsoft fashion) also defined BGSOUND for the same.

I remember an email signature from around that time that went "If I wanted your website to make sound, I'd have licked my finger and rubbed it across my monitor."

Since the mid 90s Internet Explorer & Netscape had aiff support and autoplay and Javascript 1.0. We had some good times.

https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-javascript/

The earliest browser to support the audio tag that I can find would be Safari 3.1, or the first release of Chrome, in 2008.

(No support in Netscape. Firefox in 2009, IE got it in 2010, Opera in 2011).

Before then, I'd be expecting bgsound on IE, or embed for everyone else, or object and a plugin.

You could do audio with the adobe svg plugin round about 2002-3 I think. I made a pong game with stereo ball noise.

When I first came across the site in 2017, all the audio files were in embed tags and they all autoplayed at once. It looks like one of my coworkers "fixed" that in 2019.

I played them all simultaneously to see how it'd be and I can confirm it is great

It was quite trivial actually, the problem was that downloading a wav file on dial-up wasn't the best experience so you'd have to make sure to downsample for it to be usable.

Curses! I was totally going to steal this site! Foiled again!

This really makes me think I wonder if someone could get a business model working for "permanent" web presences to be set up for small sites with a fixed amount of traffic per month, where you could pay an up front fee and it will be hosted "forever"

The primary issue would be the domain name which, unlike computing power, keeps going up in price. Once you solve that static site hosting is available basically anywhere from Neocities to GitHub and Codeberg Pages.

The problem with all those free static site hosting providers is that you never know when they'll go away entirely, or change things in a way that'll break your website if you're not around to migrate it.

Well no company can give you a forever guarantee.

Some of the big private Victorian cemeteries around London were funded like this. I guess they thought they could get enough money together to create a fund, and run the cemetery off the profits. I don't think it worked out anywhere.

My rough estimate puts that at $300 in expense, to have it permanently hosted:

$1/mo at 4% drawdown yearly is $300.

So yeah, for $500 I’ll figure out a perpetual trust for your minimalistic static, low traffic website.

According to Archive.org [1], it costs roughly $2.00 per GB for perpetual hosting.

ARWeave is meant to do this: Permanent hosting on web3, with the benefit of persistent URIs (i.e. you don't need to rely on DNS for name resolution).

[1] https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360014755952-Arch...

This is great. If some kerbal developers see this please name a planet Jubyla in Kerbal 2.0!

With tons of flowers, and a restaurant and malls!

This would also make a great content addition to Hypnospace Outlaw!

This looks exactly like a site out of Hypnospace Outlaw, an video game where you moderate websites in an alternate 1990s where mind-reading technology exists.

Wow! those butterflies are from CorelDraw. you reminded my childhood. :)

> discovered a new planet named Jubyla. It has rings like Saturn. It looks like chocolate ice cream.

That is so wholesome. I miss the old web.

wow, I can't stop thinking about this! I love jubyla. thanks for posting. any chance you could message me on twitter at @fluffybabycow?

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