
The 10 Megabyte Manifesto - daturkel
http://10mbmanifesto.neocities.org/
======
daturkel
Hey, I'm the creator of this. Feel free to tear it apart or give me whatever
criticism you want. Email me at dan [at] danturkel [dot] com if you want and
check it out on github [0]

[0]:
[https://github.com/daturkel/10mbmanifesto](https://github.com/daturkel/10mbmanifesto)

edit:

The basic idea here is sort of twofold. A) You can make a really great website
that can still be hosted on Neocities. B) Sometimes that's a better idea than
a site that requires things other than the basics.

I want to add a section on lightweight frameworks and tools for building sites
that could be put on Neocities (skeleton, foundation, etc.) but I'm hoping
that the creator will add subdirectory support so I don't have to write
instructions on how to mod all these frameworks. Also thinking about designing
a little widget/button to put on your site's about/colophon page to advertise
that your site is 10-m-m compliant. Thought that would be kitschy but cute.

second edit: Another section I'd like to add is tools for slimming your site
down. Things like HTML/CSS/JS minifiers, PNG/JPEG optimizers, etc. I pretty
much wrote this thing up in a day so there's plenty to do.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Why is it hard to offer directory creation?

What would be wrong with giving people a chrooted slice of noexec filesystem
with a usage quota set, that they could manipulate as they pleased?

~~~
eksith
That would require more resources than is possible with a limited budget for
the number of people the creators intended. And far more than is needed for
hosting _a site_.

What you ask for is already possible for a few bucks a month with countless
VPS hosts. This is free, remember?

Also, the OP isn't part of the NeoCities team. He's merely an advocate for it.

~~~
Dylan16807
Don't just say it takes resources, give a plausible mechanism. I can't think
of any way for subdirectories to take more load than normal files in one
directory. Am I not being creative enough?

~~~
trotsky
I have no idea how neocities is implemented, but my first thought as far as
implementing something like that wouldn't be to give users actual filesystem
access, but rather to put everything in an object store. Typically that'd be
flat until you bolt on something to simulate a hierarchy.

~~~
johnchristopher
That would require more resources on the server side than simply storing flat
files in directories.

~~~
trotsky
and way less effort to cluster or shard

~~~
eksith
Cluster, I can understand, but why shard?

I've run forums even on rickety DIY PHP + Postgres that's held up very nicely
to several hundred logins and even more sessions per day on very modest
hardware (1.5Ghz Core 2 duo, 2Gb memory).

It doesn't take a boatload of resources for a simple login and static content
if it's just static content. Sites can be separated (or "sharded" if you like
that term) on Nginx with very little effort for static content.

E.G.
[https://gist.github.com/perusio/2154289](https://gist.github.com/perusio/2154289)

There are more elegant solutions for that which still don't require blob
objects.

------
comefrom30
Neocities is perhaps another one of those websites where it would be nice if
HN included more than two levels of the domain name in parentheses.

e.g. instead of

> The 10 Megabyte Manifesto (neocities.org)

you would have

> The 10 Megabyte Manifesto (10mbmanifesto.neocities.org)

~~~
daturkel
Indeed, I certainly didn't mean to mislead anyone into thinking this is
"official" from the neocities guys, but I think that's pretty obvious once you
click the link.

------
kijin
Directories and .txt files sound like a no-brainer, but the 10MB limit might
actually be very useful, and I hope they don't raise it anytime soon.

Remember when everyone bitched about the fact that Twitter only allows 140
characters? But that little inconvenience helped spawn an entire industry of
URL shorteners and very simple image hosting solutions. Not necessarily a
desirable development (especially URL shorteners), but we can't deny that the
140-char limit triggered a great deal of innovation.

Think of the 10MB limit as a challenge. Try to cram as much as possible into
it, and make liberal use of CDNs and third-party storage services like S3.
You'd be amazed at what you can do with 10MB of disk space if you concentrate
on text and minified scripts.

~~~
semiprivate
The 140 char limit has nothing to do with image hosting and you already
touched on how URL shortners are toxic.

------
larrys
Side note: ran an entire small business on a 10mb hard disk off an IBM
compatible in the 80's. Later in the 80's on a multi user Unix system with a
70mb hard drive. (Won't get into before that at the school computer center but
the space give was in K).

All text based, no graphics.

Eagle PC (founder drove his Ferrari off a cliff the day the company went
public).

~~~
patmcguire
The wikipedia article is crazy, they undid the IPO for Eagle because of this?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Computer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Computer)

~~~
larrys
I had an Eagle 1600. I remember when founder drove off the cliff and I
remember how it damaged the company. The rest of that wiki article I don't
know if true or not.

I remember the distributor I bought the machine off of (I pretended I was a
computer dealer so I could buy wholesale and even had checks printed to make
it seem more legit) telling me that he had more demand for Eagle because of
the death and all the attention on Eagle from the publicity. (Have no idea
whether bs or not but definitely remember him telling that to me at the time).

They were nicely designed machines. The 10mb was not full either. Did all
sorts of things with it.

------
mashmac2
For those who require custom domains, try something like
[https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/) which
offers static hosting at very affordable rates.

It's really interesting to think about this for all sorts of static site
generation from non-static sources (Wordpress, rails, django, et al).

~~~
Dylan16807
NFS is good for hosting text and layout, and works wonderfully with the idea
of a small useful site. But don't make the mistake of storing bulk images on a
host that charges 100x as much as S3 for disk space.

Edit: I did some math for fun. Assume 500 users storing 1GB each for one year.
They'll pay less than $600 on S3, and roughly $60k on NFS. For reference, the
price of a high-end dell poweredge with 512GB of _ram_ is $15k.

~~~
lifeformed
Why not use both? I run my sites on NFS and put my media on S3.

------
everyone
I'm a game dev and right now I'm making myself a simple ajax website to show
off my portfolio. I saw this and thought, hey perfect! I tried it out and now
I dont see the point of it... There doesnt seem to be any ftp access to where
the site is hosted so I cant create new directories or upload multiple files
at the same time. (As far as I can figure out anyway) Theres plenty of free
adless webhosts that have ftp and php if you want. Eg.
[http://www.000webhost.com/](http://www.000webhost.com/) Neocities just seems
like a another one of these with less features atm.

~~~
eksith
I strongly disagree that 000webhost is in any way comparable to NeoCities.
Reasons:

000webhost has a complaint list long enough to circle 8 city blocks. NeoCities
doesn't randomly delete sites or secretly try to funnel to paid services. It
offers one service instead, and it's free. Considering the creator's goals,
this is ideal.

ATM, 000webhost caps bandwidth for the free package which NeoCities doesn't.

Rather than providing everything including the kitchen sink and have it
patched together poorly, NeoCities offers something very simple very well.

I consider NeoCities to be Twitter to 000webhost's Facebook.

(Disclaimer: I'm in no way affiliated with NeoCities)

~~~
everyone
I put some college websites up on 000webhost before and they are still there.
I didnt have any issues. I know this is just anecdotal evidence of my personal
experience. When I was checking out neocities about page
[http://neocities.org/about](http://neocities.org/about) It seems the business
model is to pay for the server space with only donations. I was concerned that
this service might not last so long.

~~~
eksith
If the resources are kept in check and the infrastructure is maintained in a
sane manner, there's no reason why the service can't work well on donations
alone. It's no Wikipedia after all, and certainly serving static pages would
require far less overhead than server-side scripting (of course, this excludes
logins/sessions, but considering how simple the backend is and sessions are
limited there, it shouldn't require too much overhead either).

And I don't think the creator feels this is a "business" in any way. It's more
like an ambitious hobby/public service.

------
coolnow
What was that phenomenon called where you come across something new and then
notice it the very same day? I just learned about Foundation a few minutes ago
and this page uses it.

~~~
daturkel
That's called the Baader-Meinhof Pehnomenon or the Frequency Illusion. It used
to have it's own wikipedia article but now it's just a single sentence in List
of Cognitive Biases [0]. Check out this post here though [1].

[0]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-
Meinhof_phenomenon#Frequ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-
Meinhof_phenomenon#Frequency_illusion) [1]:
[http://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-
phenomenon...](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/)

------
daturkel
OP here, added tools and showcase to the index. Check it out.

------
semiprivate
Neocities needs a terms of service.

~~~
daturkel
Lest it not be totally obvious, I am not affiliated at all with neocities. I'm
on my phone but I'll add a disclaimer later.

