News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by jerf on Monday May 09, 2022 @09:10AM (#31313576)
This does indeed work fine. The major problem is still finding somewhere to host it, and incurring the still non-trivial risks thereto, since among the many things students want to do with free web space, hosting warez and other things that will get you in trouble quickly is still pretty far up the list. Plus someone has to pay for a domain name or something.

If you can get a modern text editor that can use SSH or something to mount a remote directory you can easily have an HTML party like it's 1999. That's easier than ever. But the surrounding issues are worse than they were in 1999, unfortunately.

Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by eli on Monday May 09, 2022 @09:20AM (#31313661)
It's never been easier to host a webpage than it is today. You can host 100s of student sites on a $5/month VPS. The free tier of AWS/GCP/etc are extremely capable. There are free services like Wix and Glitch that let you build a webpage and then mess with the HTML, no domain name needed.

The problem of warez is certainly no worse than it was 30 years ago, and there are much better tools to address it. A simple storage quota probably goes a long way.

Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by sph on Monday May 09, 2022 @10:14AM (#31314249)
Signing up to and using AWS or GCP is orders of magnitude more complex than those old free hosting services where you got an FTP username and a password. In fact you could upload directly from Frontpage IIRC, but I could never get it to work.

It's simpler for us software engineers, less simple for the snot-nosed webmaster wannabes we were.

Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by 411111111111111 on Monday May 09, 2022 @10:47AM (#31314710)
Thank goodness you don't need to do any of that then.

If all you want is to host static html, then any free hosting service will suffice. I.e. let them create a GitHub account and show them git add / git commit / git push and you're done.

Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by fartcannon on Monday May 09, 2022 @12:33PM (#31316261)
If you can use git, you can run a webserver. It's all just right there waiting for you.
Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by eli on Monday May 09, 2022 @10:55AM (#31314847)
That's because someone did the work of setting up a server for you, configuring the services, and issuing FTP credentials. That part is now a whole lot cheaper and easier and more secure.

It doesn't get much easier than signing up for e.g. Glitch.

Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by fartcannon on Monday May 09, 2022 @12:31PM (#31316238)
Setting up a server is so unbelievably simple that anyone capable of writing software shouldn't blink at the task. The fact that there's a lot of blinking strikes me as profoundly funny.
Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by WaffleIronMaker on Monday May 09, 2022 @08:49PM (#31321958)
I mean, it isn't?

Even the simple matter of port forwarding assumes you have access to the router you're using, and that's a major barrier for a lot of people.

I run the programming club at my high school (I'm a high schooler), and we use Github pages to host all of our stuff for this very reason.

I've used some old laptops to run servers within the network, but my school doesn't want us hosting anything public, and running everything through a free tunneling service like localtunnel is possible, but it scales so much better when students can just follow some friendly instructions to host a static site themselves.

It's not hard for the people with the privileges of (1) having a budget > $0 and (2) not having the adults tell you 'no' every time you want to try learn something.

Am I missing something? Even hosting static content on a server seems like a layer of complexity that is frequently unnecessary for basic use-cases.

Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by fartcannon on Monday May 09, 2022 @10:02PM (#31322527)
You just, as you say, follow friendly instructions. It's as easy as reading a page of a manual.
Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by eli on Monday May 09, 2022 @08:59PM (#31322038)
In 1999? I mean, I did it, but I didn't think it was easy. Every single step was harder then than it is now.
Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by limograf on Monday May 09, 2022 @11:19AM (#31315253)
Here's what we do with beginner developers who have never coded before: - build pages in Codepen so they can see everything build as they go, fork from templates, and share/riff off each other - export from Codepen to a folder so they can see that static sites are just text files in a folder and nothing mysterious -- at this point I also introduce an editor like VSCode - drag and drop that folder onto Github and deploy to Netlify

You can do this in an hour with brand new coders. https://syllabus.codeyourfuture.io/fundamentals/week-1/sessi...

Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by mrlemke on Monday May 09, 2022 @10:16AM (#31314271)
Huh? Just use neocities.org. Even has a built-in editor on the site.
Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by sph on Monday May 09, 2022 @10:18AM (#31314286)
HN knows neocities, everybody used to know Geocities once. How's one supposed to sign up there if it's so niche it's not known outside of the tech circles?
Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by fartcannon on Monday May 09, 2022 @12:34PM (#31316278)
Tell people outside of tech circles.
Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by vsareto on Monday May 09, 2022 @10:40AM (#31314603)
Maybe teach using local html and files and save hosting for the end.
Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by fartcannon on Monday May 09, 2022 @12:46PM (#31316451)
You can even just run a full sever right on your home computer and share the webpages over LAN. It's far more valuable to learn how google/Amazon/microsoft do it, than to learn how google/Amazon/microsoft want you to do it, anyways.
Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by sporedro on Monday May 09, 2022 @09:49AM (#31313947)
I think there’s quite a lot of options for static webpages now though. Would GitHub pages not be perfect for this?
Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by fartcannon on Monday May 09, 2022 @10:04PM (#31322538)
Yeah github pages is basically GeoCities with a little extra data farming by Microsoft. Works fine, if you don't mind that.
Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by schwartzworld on Tuesday May 10, 2022 @06:00AM (#31325282)
Netlify has drag and drop deploys now. Can't get simpler than dragging a folder onto a webpage
Re:I'm a fucking webmaster (2016) by laptop-man on Monday May 09, 2022 @09:16AM (#31313632)
netlify for free static hosting. dirt simple no cc decent free teir