An Homage to 90s –/Public_HTML Hosting | Hacker News Reader

An Homage to 90s –/Public_HTML Hosting

public.monster

42 pointsgpi40 comments

What has changed now? I still upload my static web content to my ~/public_html folder on live website, using sftp. Anything wrong with that? Why people coming up with this kind of news? The other day someone was saying scripting the HTML Table element using DOM API is gone.

Check internic.net landing page. Not changed in decades. You don't need to be so desperate for change.

> Please note: You are viewing archival ICANN material. Links and information may be outdated or incorrect. Visit ICANN's main website for current information.

On internic.net I was only able to find one link that linked to internic.net, and that was in big bold letters at the top.

I was mentioning landing page. Not child pages.

I kinda smile seeing this growing up in the real public_html days… Xanga, Geocities, Angelfire, copying HTML from those old Scholastic books to make my first little interactive Pokemon map to hosting WoW guild sites, DKP boards, CS 1.6 servers.

Feels like we’re back again with vibe-coding, app builders, v0, bolt, lovable, all of it. The AI infra even feels familiar. End users getting back the kind of control we had in the public_html days via cPanel shared-hosting, VPS era. And for backend, it’s Supabase or Neon / Postgres now instead of phpMyAdmin and MySQL.

Full circle~

It’s a well done homage - but no one should believe for one second the actual average page back then looked _that good_!

It's well done and looks good, but there aren't nearly enough table elements.

Do marquees not scroll anymore?

The retro part is encouraging beginers to learn to edit html on their own computer, and quickly have a personal space.

Yes, I think that's an important part of the experience. One can edit some text, some CSS/JS if desired (optional), and immediately see the effect. Publish it and now your changes are global.

nice project! reminded me about https://tilde.club/ in the same vein

> Last updated: Monday, September 11761, 1993

Very, very nice.

Eternal September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Thanks for this! I wasn't aware of this reference.

macOS had (has?) a ~/Sites/ folder as well:

* https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/474243/what-is-the...

* https://superuser.com/questions/225346/how-do-i-setup-a-loca...

Cool site, what software do you use? I like Frontpage 2000, but I'm hearing good things about Dreamweaver. Can anyone recommend a good WYSIWYG editor that creates conformant HTML 4.01?

> Last updated: Monday, September 11761, 1993

I absolutely LOVE that detail!!

It would be cool if there's was a public "explore" page to see the sites that currently exist, similar to Neocities.

Might add something like that, but curated. Don't want it to be a spam vector.

Gotta love the creator's personal pitch:

https://public.monster/~dmytri/

Paraphrased: I'm so old my age is negative in Unix time.

If you like this kind of stuff, check out https://midnight.pub/

For similar reasons, a while ago I created a forum and registered https://rangerovers.pub - it's about Range Rovers, and we thought about doing it while we were in a pub. The Bon Accord in Glasgow, to be specific, after a lot of very fine curry in the Koh-I-Noor (gone now, sadly).

Gosh, now I look, it's ten years old in December. It's a pub. Where you talk about crappy old Landrovers and their ailments.

It's also an oldschool forum, and although I'm not really a fan of forums I'd far rather see those back over endless Discourse/Discord/reddit/facebook etc. Host it yourself on a VPS that costs a tenner. Own all your own data. If a couple hundred a year to run it is too much, ask your friends to chip in.

Take the Internet back.

I'll raise a pint to that (bringing back old-school forums over Discord/Discourse)!

BETA tag is pretty slick. The U+1F6A7 under construction U+1F6A7 banner is more like it...

but BETA tags started around 2005, not the 90s

Yeah I mean kinda slick for the '90s. I mean look at that rotation. That some SGI stuff...

This is just a static html site, no? Using build packs or npm for a static page doesn’t even make sense. While I appreciate the throw back design, there’s nothing retro about sticking html files in the public folder; it’s just the correct way to deploy simple static pages (I’ve got a half dozen sites deployed exactly in that way).

This is an homage to the 90s only in the sense that public HTML hosting was more popular in the 90s. Everything about this seems like a modern project (in both design and ideals) with a very inaccurate "retro" coat of paint.

- Site makes use of HTML5 and modern JS. Why bemoan modern frameworks and then use modern, bloated elements?

- Why is there a completely modern register/sign in section in the middle of the home page? Why do young people think every website used to have a marquee? Why does it look like a facsimile of a borderless Windows 95 window? Why the emojis everywhere? Why is there a text shadow effect done with CSS when the 90s way would be to use an image of the text with the effect already replied, with ALT text for text browsers? So many odd design decisions.

- Long content moderation policy talking about how the site is for "Marxist, Communist, Anarchist, Feminist, Postcolonial, Abolitionist, Racial Justice, Queer, Hacker, and Pirate cultures." and how things the site owner doesn't like will be removed.

- The about page looks written with ChatGPT. "That's it. No webpack. No npm install. No 'building for production.', Just HTML. Just vibes." It then goes on to say that they only have "Passwordless authentication (because it's 2025, not 1995)"

This looks to be yet another project fawning over a time and place that the creator didn't experience or have any significant understanding of whatsoever. It's one thing to look at the past with rose tinted glasses, it's another to have a completely fictionalized view of a past you have no knowledge of and then build a service around it.

It feels very contrived, as if someone has seen a handful of screenshots and tried to describe it to someone else, rather than a clear (or just well researched) memory of what the mindset, trends and limitations really were around web design 30 years ago.

You can find many of my actual pages from the 90s here: https://archive.groovy.net, so yeah, I was there. And yeah, it is definitely a fun parody/homage, not a recreation, so yeah, it for sure is contrived. I guess I never once used Comic Sans in the actual 90s, and was not a big user of the marquee tag or gifs.

It is intended to provide easy hosting, which many people need, and to encourage people to work on their own computer, rather than use web based tools, so it will have upload/validation, etc, but never editing or change your html in any way.

Sure, that doesn’t change the impression I got though.

Sounds like a laudable service hope it helps people in the way you describe.

Hey Gary,,I'm Dmytri, no issue with any of the points, but I most definitely was there in the 90s, see dmytri.to, this is just a fun project for me because people still need easy hosting and I've been helping with that for decades.

Forgive me, but you can understand why from looking at the FAQ and content policies that someone would arrive at the conclusion.

So I guess that by your logic, any device, art, website, object, vehicle that is retro inspired should be dismissed?

That's not what I was saying at all.

Well nowhere in the page does the author mention any attempt to be authentic or using html written the same way ad in the 90's so I am wondering where does that negativity come and why?

It looks to me this service is proposing hosting like it is the 90's, not building a web page exactly like it is the 90's with just a wee bit of retro clues.

The whole site goes on about wanting to recreate the feelings of the 90s.

That's it, feeling.

The same way a Mazda Miata gave you the feeling of driving a british roadster of the 60's while having much more modern internals,comfort, reliability and fuel economy.

I've never felt comfort in a Miata haha

Interesting final point you bring up because all of those shortcomings are part of the experience, without them you’re experiencing something completely different. (As a classic car owner that’s not entirely a bad thing in the case of the MX-5).

needs more blink tags ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com