Hacker News Reader

Comment by nrivadeneira | Hacker News Reader

Geocities was great before this happened. I was on Geocities before it was acquired by Yahoo and it was literally just static HTML sites. Guestbooks, hit counters, etc. were all just added into your HTML without special tags.

View on HN

I may have gotten things switched but I seem to recall that Geocities had SSIs before Yahoo took over. But it's stretching my memory to recall it.

How did you have stuff which relies on a server backend (like guestbooks) without having the server inject HTML somehow?

CGI-based images or pages. I don't believe GeoCities let users upload their own CGI scripts, but I believe they had a set of pre-defined CGI tools you could call. You could also set up things like guestbooks using an external service. It wasn't unusual to see "Guestbook provided by $FOO" at the bottom of guestbook pages. Kind of like Disqus, but before JavaScript.

Tripod let people write their own (limited) perl scripts for their site... when I found that out the first thing i did was try to get something from Matt's Script Archive to work, but it didn't. Then I wrote my own guestbook and what had to be the lamest forum ever.

Yes, I remember these external services but in those cases you had to link to a page completely off the site.

Geocities had some feature where you could actually embed guestbook entries into your page.

Truthfully I don't remember for sure, but I used external services just as @Lexarius mentioned. I didn't write it myself at the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com