
1999.io: Blogging like it's 1999 - gk1
http://1999.io/
======
nstart
For anyone who might not have been following Dave Winer's work, or thought
streams in the recent past, the reference to blogging like it's 1999 isn't
about the tech. It's primary concept is about it going back to the roots of
being about openness. Instead of blogging on all the closed platforms, Dave
has always advocated for blogging on your own terms. Whether from wordpress,
ghost, or his new tool, it's all the same level of importance in keeping the
open web alive.

A lot of his focus in this product is likely to be around the ease of editing
and ease of getting your content out there. For example, it comes with support
for instant articles built in. I imagine things like Amp page support will
also get built in.

Re the twitter login. It's not something I personally believe in, but I know
that Dave has a strong belief in Twitter having potential to be much better as
a dev platform of sorts. From identity management, to message delivery.
Debatable, but for another time. Just thought I could help provide some
context here.

Whether this platform is better than WP, Drupal, or Ghost is all a matter of
personal preference honestly. I'm not sure Dave really cares about it that way
either. He just wants to keep making the open web more appealing than the
closed.

Of everything in this announcement so far, the most intriguing part is his
idea of interop with WP and Drupal and other platforms. One thing I can
connect it with, is how his posts cross post to FB, and Medium. And he's
talked about live editing a bit over there. If I recall right, Dave kind of
imagines a future where the editor and the server are different. So I might
edit things on my 1999.io server while the updates are all served on a WP or
Drupal site. A bit more context to this. In the past Dave also wrote about
wishing the Medium.com experience was more like that. Where I could use their
incredible editor and publish to anywhere I wanted instead of just medium.com.

The one thing and "maybe" criticism I have of Dave's stuff, is that it is very
high level/abstract at times. I've followed his work for years, and it's
always taken me a while to digest any of his ideas because there's a lot of
imagination that goes unsaid there. In many ways this is like the wonderful
work he's done in creating RSS too. RSS alone is simply a germ of an idea
which can then be used in so many creative ways. Dave's ideas are very
similar. A germ of an idea that he hopes others will pick up on and push
forward. New frontiers!

~~~
davewiner
Thank you. That's pretty much exactly right.

~~~
nstart
Forever a fan dave! Thank you so much for teaching me about the open web from
all your blog posts :)

------
sharkjacobs
When I was blogging in 1999 it involved appending each new blog entry to the
top of the html page which went in the content frame.

And I don't think I'd heard of "blogging" yet.

~~~
peterwwillis
Oh my god. Frames. The horror...

We used to append content into a single page because the alternatives were A)
independent post files and a cgi script to concatenate them dynamically on
each view, or B) re-create the static page from individual post files.

Since using a database was totally overkill, and static + individual posts
wasted precious megabytes, and a new dynamic process per page load was way too
CPU-intense, we just curated a single static page. Saves disk and CPU. When
posts got past a certain number, the process'd do some juggling of content
into a new archive file.

~~~
spc476
Methinks you are selling older computers short. I ran my blog (up through
2005, maybe to 2006) on a 50MHz 486 with 32?MB RAM (maybe 64MB? It's been a
decade) and a gig hard drive.

That same server was also my email server.

Then again, I wrote my own blogging engine in C [1] (and still use it).

[1] [https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog](https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog)

~~~
peterwwillis
Sure, you could do plenty with old 486's. But not hosting thousands of weblogs
generating dynamic content. Not without load shooting up to 100, anyway. For a
paltry few visitors, not so bad, but the more users and higher the traffic the
worse it'd get.

I should add that I completely forgot (has it been that long?) about the hacks
we'd use to speed up dynamic content. Since there were no competent threading
models for PHP and Perl at the time, we would use either FastCGI, or mod_php
or mod_perl. The former would allow you to build app servers to handle
multiple requests without terminating, to speed up initialization and
share/cache memory. The latter would embed a PHP or Perl interpreter in the
Apache process, eliminating lots of overhead, enabling better communication,
and of course allowing you to prefork multiple Apache processes and execute
scripts as soon as a request came in, and optionally stay resident in memory.
But that's just execution speed; if you're reading from flat-files and
spitting them out one by one, that's still a very i/o-bound operation and eats
up more CPU than necessary.

And ultimately, very few web hosts allowed using mod_perl or mod_php, and no
weblog maintainer ever wrote FastCGI (nor were the servers configured for it).
So everything was forked at run-time, leading to very slow page loads for any
CGI script - unless you ran your own server, of course. It wasn't until later
that LAMP development became more common and people started putting the
kitchen sink into MySQL and PHP.

------
akent
The front page tells me nothing. Go and read this blogpost about it instead.
[http://scripting.com/2016/06/08/1311.html](http://scripting.com/2016/06/08/1311.html)

~~~
sumitgt
Yeah, what is it with people using front page designs like that these days.

------
lucb1e
Well this site does not look very '99, nor does "Sign up with Twitter". Never
mind.

~~~
davewiner
This post, written with 1999.io, might help explain the context.

[http://scripting.com/2016/06/08/1311.html](http://scripting.com/2016/06/08/1311.html)

Dave

~~~
yxlx
I read that and I _sort_ of get it but still feel that I do not _quite_ get
it.

------
jagger27
[http://tilde.club/](http://tilde.club/) is what feels like 1999 to me,
because it's just a plain old multi-user Linux box. That's it.

------
fiatjaf
I don't understand what is this about. Is it just a poorly implemented super-
common blog engine?

~~~
rplnt
It's very poorly done welcome page that's for sure.

------
phantom_oracle
I don't know if this is some type of cynical irony, but calling your software
"blogging like it's 1999" whilst using a .io domain creates many feelings for
me.

~~~
jcd748
Should have been a .nu domain!

------
jimjimjim
sounded interesting, until I selected 'view page source' on one of the pages
and saw a screen full of .js

not really very 1999ish.

~~~
dasil003
90s were all about JS, how could we forget Doc Ozone?
([http://www.ozones.com/](http://www.ozones.com/))

------
Rodeoclash
I thought this was going to be bringing back the .plan file :(

------
mmgutz
Disappointed. Where are the spinning 3D button gifs?

------
kasparsklavins
Ironically, it loads as fast as a 1999 web page on dialup.

------
nym
What does this have to do with 1999 exactly? RSS 2.0?

------
kristianc
This confuses me. Several months ago Dave Winer wrote a post titled 'Anywhere
but Medium' where he railed against closed platforms such as Medium that could
disappear at a moment's notice and where the editorial voice was controlled by
a company (as an individual gets to decide who gets noticed).

Now Dave Winer is launching a platform that could also disappear at a moments'
notice, where the best chance of being 'noticed' is likely to be getting
reposted by Dave Winer.

What's more, it seems to go against some of the Open Web principles that Winer
espouses (seems to require JavaScript to view any content, doesn't seem to
render anything if you have Safari Content Blockers running, requires a
Twitter account even to get up and running with the thing). All in all it
seems to have very little to do with 1999 or any kind of 'golden age' for the
Web.

Developers already have tons of options for getting a blog up and running,
from GitHub Pages to Posthaven and Ghost - what gives with this?

~~~
x1798DE
> Now Dave Winer is launching a platform that could also disappear at a
> moments' notice,

Looks like you can set up your own server, so assuming you point your own
domain at this, if 1999 goes belly-up, you can just switch to another host
seamlessly:

[https://github.com/scripting/1999-project/blob/master/docs/s...](https://github.com/scripting/1999-project/blob/master/docs/setup.md)

> (seems to require JavaScript to view any content

This is true of the "About" page, but it looks like that is not true of actual
blog entries. If you enable JS on the about page, they explicitly state that
one of their goals is a graceful fallback when JS is not present.

------
auvrw
the deps for 1999 consist of request and a date/time lib ... cool.

someone else mentioned ghost, and i'm posting mainly to link that project

[https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost](https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost)

and thank the author b/c i learned a lot a/b node development from it.

------
rbanffy
What? No visit counter?

------
corndoge
Just a blank gray page for me?

~~~
bbcbasic
That's brutalist

------
tim_geek
@davewiner, you mention interop with other CMS software. What kinds of interop
are you looking for?

------
MustardTiger
In 1999, I could view a simple page containing nothing but text without
requiring me to download, compile and execute a massive wad of code in a huge
bloated VM with a JIT. There's no need for any javascript there, try having a
web page.

~~~
WorldMaker
I don't know where you were in 1999, but where I was in 1999 IE4's DHTML was
all the rage among the elite wannabe high school web developers. Early
explorations into XMLHttpRequest (via this awesome ActiveX technology, wow)
and DHTML Components (which perhaps unsurprisingly don't seem all that
different from today's Web Components under the surface).

(I'm only remembering some of this because I recently dug up some of my actual
circa 1999 website work.)

~~~
MustardTiger
I was on the same web you were. The one where doc ozone was a bizarre novelty
and well over 99.999% of text based sites had no javascript at all, much less
being entirely created from javascript.

~~~
WorldMaker
It may have been more of a novelty back then, but I remember a lot more than
0.001% of websites having some JS or some Flash (or both), and maybe not many
were entirely JS (though there were some I'm trying to recall), there were
plenty of websites at the time that were 100% Flash, including the websites of
some major corporations.

Again, certainly from the perspective of a high school web developer at the
time, my "budget" consisted of just about as much JS as a I wanted and could
get my hands on, whereas I was on mostly static web hosts which constrained me
from doing as much as I would have liked at the time in server side code... I
know I wrote some very heavy JS sites at the time, and I know I was not alone
in that constraint.

Again, sure, it was mostly for novelty, but the web where websites had
basically no JS at all was several years before 1999.

~~~
MustardTiger
_text based sites_

Just because "web designers" had shitty flash pages, doesn't mean "personal
home pages" that were just test and images did.

------
khedoros
When I go to their "about" page, this is the entirety of the content that I
see:

> How is 1999.io different from other blogging platforms?

Looking at the source, I see a little more content.

"Create a test site" is almost completely blank (no text, just a drop shadow
and some pull-down arrows near the top of the page). Their other links seem to
work as designed.

My work blocks some domains, and is stricter about ones that it doesn't know
about (like 1999.io), but I didn't have trouble with accessing any of the
fargo.io css or js files.

------
WorldMaker
This amuses me, partly because I recently uploaded some backup archives of my
actual 1999 websites and blogs to GitHub.

[http://blog.worldmaker.net/2016/06/07/portrait-web-
developer...](http://blog.worldmaker.net/2016/06/07/portrait-web-developer/)

The web in 1999 was a very different place, and not a lot of it survives in
even the Internet Wayback Machine (web.archive.org).

------
NKCSS
Let me cross-post my comment from
[http://my.1999.io/users/NKCSS/2016/06/09/0001.html](http://my.1999.io/users/NKCSS/2016/06/09/0001.html)

Nick Kusters@NKCSS1 min 0 likes Checking the editor to see how this works...

It seems to bare-bones to me.

Nick Kusters@NKCSSJust now 0 likes I expected a lot more to be honest; and no
edit button seems like an omission.

------
jflowers45
why do you need to be able to post to my twitter timeline?

~~~
davewiner
We don't. And it doesn't.

~~~
macintux
Twitter's permissions stink. I've refused to connect with a few interesting
services because there's insufficient granularity.

------
_RPM
Was the `nano` command a joke? I know it's a fine editor, but it seemed like
sarcasm.

------
Jack5500
How can I delete my "test" account? Since the test content stays there, even
after I signed-off from the "test" this should be a mandatory feature.

------
stevewilhelm
> You can link an MP3 or video file to a post, and 1999.io will generate
> standard RSS 2.0 enclosure code in your site's RSS feed.

What? No Atom? No NewsML? That is so 1999.

------
peterwwillis
For this to be 1999-era _journaling_ , it would need:

    
    
      - To be written in Perl
      - To support .php, .pl, & .cgi in the user's /cgi-bin/
      - To host about 10000 accounts per physical machine
      - To use FTP, or a CGI form, for remote file management
      - To use HTML 4.01/XHTML
      - What's CSS?
      - What's Twitter?
      - Features: A user profile/bio! User comments! Subscriptions! Communities!
      - Up to 10 megabytes of FREE storage
      - Free add-ons like a hit counter and a feedback submission e-mail form
      - One free e-mail address and five free e-mail aliases
      - EXTRAS: Virtual host name and domain name support, up to 5 e-mail addresses &
        20 e-mail aliases, up to 1000* megabytes of storage, and No Advertising Banners!!!
      
      * actual space may vary based on how badly we over-committed storage

~~~
KON_Air
Don't forget Webrings!

~~~
emillon
I'm hoping to make them fashionable again!
[http://webring.club/](http://webring.club/) :)

------
unicornporn
> We use Twitter for identity, so creating a connection to Twitter is part of
> the setup process.

That must be as far from "blogging like it's 1999" one will ever get. :-/

~~~
Zikes
Beats asking for a password over HTTP and storing it as plaintext, at least.

~~~
na85
Implying Twitter won't just hand it over to governments.

~~~
startling
"Governments" aren't anywhere near the complete scope of risk you bring on
yourself by storing passwords badly.

------
adzm
1999? XML is our savior! The future of the web will be interconnected SOAP
services! It's the year of the Linux desktop! Itanium will revolutionize
software if someone would just make a sufficiently smart compiler!

~~~
MichaelGG
To be fair, the neat parts of SOAP, WSDL, still is pretty neat. XML is mostly
hated because named closing tags make it stupidly verbose -- a big mistake.
After that it was extra complicated which made platforms like PHP have crappy
implementations, I guess.

But having to rewrite lots of boilerplate code for everyone's JSON or "REST"
API is annoying. There's even projects to describe JSON schemas and APIs
because that's actually useful. Maybe _this_ time it'll be simple.

Transactions over SOAP (WS-AtomicTransaction I think) is also sort of neat I
guess, but too complicated to be useful on the Internet?

~~~
tacone
> After that it was extra complicated which made platforms like PHP have
> crappy implementations, I guess.

If the implementations are bad, the specification may be not simple enough.

------
kristianc
> Blogging like it's 1999

> 3\. It's written in JavaScript and runs under Node.js.

------
airencracken
If I have to enable javascript to view parts of your website at all, then it
isn't anything like 1999.

~~~
davewiner
To edit a blog you have to enable JavaScript because the blogging software is
written in JS.

It would be possible to create a client that didn't, but that doesn't exist
today.

~~~
gergles
You have to enable JavaScript (from fargo.io) to view posts (or at least to
view the About page.)

~~~
davewiner
The About page should NOT have required JS. That was a mistake. I'm going to
fix it, but not tonight.

Here's an example of a blog post written in 1999.io.

[http://scripting.com/2016/06/08/1311.html](http://scripting.com/2016/06/08/1311.html)

You do NOT need JS on to read it, by design.

~~~
x1798DE
I feel like a lot of people are harshing on the fact that this is not like, I
dunno, geocities or something, but I just want to express some appreciation
that an effort is made for those of us who do not want to execute arbitrary
code just to read a blog entry.

One note - on that page, it seems that while the content is there independent
of Javascript, the navigation is loaded (from three different domains) with
Javascript. I suspect there's a more graceful way to fallback there.

------
scvs_rule
Websites in 1999 didn't use 2MB PNG files as background images..

~~~
rplnt
Do people nowadays really don't care? Or are completely oblivious to the fact
that images can be huge? 2MB is still a lot of data even today. I could see it
loading (on 100Mbit no less).

------
tigeba
Just for the record, I want to point out that it does not render well on
Netscape Communicator 4.75.

[http://grab.by/QH2u](http://grab.by/QH2u)

~~~
cordite
In a way, I feel amazed that it even recognized that TLD.

~~~
tigeba
A big problem for machines of this vintage is HTTPS everywhere. Google still
works pretty well and will let you access it over HTTP, but the rendering of
the search results is a bit janky.

