If we’re going back to the 90s, can we re-embrace avoidance of proprietary Microsoft tools (GitHub) in favor of f/oss alternatives?

What do you recommend? There was one I remember seeing the name of here but I've forgotten

https://sourcehut.org/ the owner is a frequent hacker news poster.

Yep that was the one! Thank you

Personally, I self-host Gitea. It works extremely well.

It has webhooks that tie nicely into my (also self-hosted) Drone (CI) and Mattermost (f/oss self-hosted Slack replacement) and CapRover (self-hosted Heroku) setups.

That's awesome! It sounds like a great setup for a solo dev wanting to save money, or even for bootstrapping a startup. Thanks for sharing

On a $300/mo server from Hetzner it can run git, CI, image registry, Mattermost, email, wiki, Discourse, Mumble, and host a bunch of apps (dev, stage, prod) without breaking a sweat. I set up the filesystem so it stores all server state for all apps and stuff in a single directory tree (thanks to Docker you can mount whatever source directories you want into a container at any path).

A continuous rsync job in a loop makes sure that that directory tree is always synchronized onto another $20/mo VPS elsewhere. (Failures on that backup machine/script are reported realtime via webhooks back into Mattermost.)

It's a really robust system (for a single machine) and thanks to everything being containerized, can be easily replicated from the backup host back onto a new machine in under an hour or so in the event of crash/disaster.

For 90% of small businesses, even the $300/mo server is significant overprovisioning/overkill.

Thanks for the further detail! I'm favorit-ing your reply for when I'll need to set up something like this soon. I appreciate it!

nginx+git+cgit

That is an alternative, if you are using git you probably are well versed in Linux.

Were webrings implemented using image tags as well? My memory is faint, I remember having to copy/paste quite large a snippet of code, but don’t remember the actual implementation.

It’s probably infinitely more simple than I think it was.

There was a whole block of pre-formatted HTML you would have to insert into your website. When you clicked on a button to navigate the ring it would like to a cgi script on the "owners" domain to take you to the next site.

Edit: Down this [1] page a little bit you can see an example of the code you would have to copy/paste

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19970616173036/http://www.acmepe...

[inserts gif of visitor counter spinning out of control]

[also adds in some "under construction" gifs]

I really wish I had some way to access my original AOL website. So many memories... and web ring links...

Could always browse http://oocities.org for some similar memories!