Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattwright | Hacker News Reader

30 years since I posted that first script back in high school! Thanks for all the love (and some hate) since then. :) Let me know if you have any questions, I'll try to answer.

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In 1998 the author of the biggest German HTML/CSS/JS tutorial installed WWWBoard to create a forum. In the 2000s it must have been the biggest web development forum in German-speaking countries. Today it is smaller, but still exists.

Not on WWWBoard today, sorry. According to my memory the software lineage was something like WWWBoard → A custom selfwritten forum in Perl → A big rewrite into C, because server resources were spare for a while → Later a rewrite in Ruby on Rails → Today in Elixir.

But the sensibility and the lineage of WWWBoard stayed with all the rewrites, as did the archive since 1998. The current forum is still by default threaded, in a way it gave it its identity in a world of bulletin boards.

(I spend a lot of time there in the 2000s. Thanks!)

That's interesting, thanks for sharing!

Thanks for sharing everything you did. Back when I was just barely learning HTML to update my personal web sites on AOL and Geocities I found your site and that ended up putting me on a constant migration path between whatever free hosts would let me run Perl at the time just so I could have TextCounter and WWWBoard.

I learned a lot about Unix systems at a time where I only had Windows 3.1 as a result, and while I haven't knowingly touched Perl in at least 20 years I can confidently say the experience had to have been a factor in me ending up as a Linux admin.

I'm amazed that you created an HN account in 2014 but that this is your first comment. How did you resist the temptation to comment for so many years?

I asked dang once and he said like 1% of visitors comment.

I had assumed that the majority of accounts are created when the owner first wants to write a comment (or post a submission).

I wonder whether dang meant 1% of registered visitors, or 1% of visitors.

I remember originally registering in order to upvote, not to comment or submit. I'm not sure how common that is but it is a much less scary way to begin to contribute.

You can't vote until you have 500 karma

You can't downvote until you have 500 karma. You can upvote posts and comments right out of the gate, AFAIK.

confirmed - I just crossed the 500 line and the downvote triangle appeared below the upvote triangle

IIRC it was the latter.

I'm curious what percentage responds to replies to their comments. I think it is quite high here.

I read the site (via hckrnews.com, prefer chronological ordering) nearly every day, and have for a long time.

You may not be surprised at what being known for some of the worst code on the internet does for one's willingness to post things under one's own name. ;) That said, I have a different, older account that I have occasionally posted under when I can't resist temptation.

I want to thank you for Matt's Script Archive. I never actually used it, and I often had to help novice Perl programmers who'd gotten bad ideas from it and were writing terrible code, but in my book that's far better than if they had found the world of programming too forbidding to approach. You're responsible for opening the world of programming to many people, and I appreciate that.

heh, thanks! :) To be fair, the feedback has always been more positive than negative.

Thank you for keeping your site up all these years.

Looking at your website brings me back to my childhood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xwY5ciOOC0&t=144s

Although you can't see them, there are four upvotes on my comment, and it seems more reasonable to interpret them as agreement than as praise for my rather pedestrian prose or surprise at the rather quotidian ideas it expresses.

Despite the imperfections in your work, you still contributed something amazing to the internet. Even the imperfections ended up helping people. Thank you.

> some of the worst code on the internet

After enough time elapses (and it has!) it transitions from being "bad code" to just nostalgia-inducing.

Take a gander at the code over at TUHS. The original vi from UCB, for instance, wouldn't be considered "good code" by anyone's standards in the past 40+ years, but nobody is thinking poorly of Bill Joy, Mary Ann Horton, or anyone else involved.

What amazes me most is: How the hell did you maintain interest in keeping the site alive after so much time had elapsed? 1995 was so different from e.g. 2009 and I imagine the same was true of you.

It doesn't take much to keep the site alive -- I've just had to transition it across hosts a few times, but otherwise it just continues to sit there. There is a tiny amount of revenue that still comes through it, but mostly I just like the idea that it still exists, and I think others do too. I suppose I also don't want to let go of my fifteen minutes of fame. :)

These days, the thing that most impresses my nephews is that I posted the second ever video to YouTube (college roommate was a cofounder). I have long since lost control of the channel (it was taken during a transition from old YouTube accounts to Google accounts when someone guessed the simple password). Since hacker news can sometimes be the support site of the internet I'll throw it out there -- if anyone has a contact at YouTube that can return the channel to me, that would be awesome. I imagine it is long-since gone.

Thank you for this site. It helped me learn Perl and use it to make some cool CGI scripts.

When I got tired of having to manage my NIN news website (circa June 1999) by myself, I grabbed the Guestbook script from here, tweaked it a little bit, and it became a very rudimentary CMS for a volunteer staff of about a dozen contributors. Eventually I moved to a more robust Perl-based tool (News Publisher by Grant Williams), a version of which continues to power that same site today.

But I always think of https://www.theninhotline.com/news/ as a hacked guestbook script.

It's somewhat interesting to me that, according to Wikipedia, the word "blog" as an abbreviation of weblog came into use the month before I started that site.

Thanks for your form mailer. That was the first cgi-bin script I had ever installed and run on Apache. xD

Looking back, discovering Matt's Script Archive along with a used copy of Learning Perl in 1997 was probably the biggest influence in the trajectory of my entire career. Thanks, Matt!

As somebody in the ISP/webhosting business back then, I spend quite a bit of time helping people set these up. Such a blast from the past. Glad to see it is still hanging around!

Wow what a small world! When I was learning Perl in the early 2000s, I learned in part by copying and tweaking your scripts.

Thanks for sharing these into the world. I found them a huge help.

Hey, thanks Matt for providing a well lit path to getting things done on the Internet before anyone knew what they were doing.

Thanks for creating this resource that helped so many people build programs for the web so long ago.

Thanks Matt!

I ran a forum (30k+ monthly users) last century using the WWWboard.

i remember you had a script that created animated images before that even was a thing. It exploited some kind of quirk in Netscape, must have been 1994-1996?

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