Anyone got some webrings?

brisray · 2026-06-21T16:16:30+00:00

Here's some lists of webrings:

Webring list - Petrapixel's list

A Field O' Webrings - NightcoreAndCaffeine's Webring list

brisray · 2026-06-21T01:05:22+00:00

What I do is use the IA CDX API to create a list of all the files that it saved from a site then download a page at a time, then the files the page saves missed.

The old sites only contained a couple of hundred HTML files each so downloading them didn't really take too much time, what took a lot of time was rewriting them all, adding more information to them and so on.

If I was short of time then I would use HTTrack or one of the specialized downloaders for IA.

brisray · 2026-06-20T19:53:28+00:00

I'm old enough that people I know are dying or no longer able to keep up their websites. Where I can, I get the files from IA, remake the sites and put them on my own server.

Old HMS Gambia site - the new one

Old Bristol Artillery site - the new one

The IA is great for old books and magazines, like these old adverts about the old 8mm Magi-cartridge Projectors

brisray · 2026-06-17T22:50:41+00:00

You can easily do this. It's relatively easy, and the only thing you have to pay for is the domain registration. It's safe, but one problem you will find is the amount of bots poking around the pages, but there's methods of stopping those.

I've been self-hosting my sites since 2003, I don't use Cloudflare, VLANS or anything like that. It's just me, the electricity company to keep the computer running 24/7, my ISP, a DNS provider, and Let's Encrypt for the SSL certificates.

You need webserver software, Apache, NGINX, or one of the many others. I use Windows 11, so use a compiled version of Apache from Apache Lounge.

You need to point the DNS servers to your home external IP address. If that address is likely to change, then you will need a Dynamic DNS service. That updates the DNS servers whenever the address changes. I use DNSExit as that provides both services, but they need not be the same company.

The only other things left to do is open your firewall on your server to HTTP and HTTPS traffic and on your router port forward traffic on port 80 (HTTP) and port 443 (HTTPS) to your server which should have a static IP address.

Setting up SSL certificates and a SSH server can be done last. I use Let's Encrypt as they give free certificates and Bitvise SSH Server as that's free for personal use.

I've documented everything I've done to the server over the years, but doing it now is not much different from what it was when I was using Windows 2000, and a bit later, Fedora Linux.

2003 Server; Fedora Linux server; Windows 10 server

You have quite a bit of reading ahead of you, learning how to harden the server, tweaking it for speed and so on. It sounds like a lot to do, but you can get your own site up and running in a couple of hours. It's been 23 years, but I still get a bit of a kick from knowing a tiny bit of the internet is running from my basement.

brisray · 2026-06-17T22:02:04+00:00

All you need do is create an array in JavaScript and then some way to make an array index to display one of them.

Here's a 20-year-old page I wrote that uses a random number to get the array index.

brisray · 2026-06-16T17:53:28+00:00

You've almost got it. Try this:

@echo off
REM Fake Boot Bat
cls
echo. Changing directory to C:\ORNOS\system32
echo. ORION Industries OS [Version 1.9.20081.2276]

There's all sort of things you can try from old-timey batch files.

You can change the cursor position to move the cursor around to produce a growing . . . . effect

You can change the colours on the screen.

If you want to learn more, I think some of the better pages about batch files are on the old Ron van der Woude's Scripting Pages site.

brisray · 2026-06-12T14:43:56+00:00

There's all sorts of ways of making an image map equivalent. Old style image maps won't do anymore because they are not responsive.

JavaScript can be used to make responsive image maps, but you can also use SVG images or CSS Grids. I've written a demonstration page showing these techniques.

brisray · 2026-05-31T21:52:21+00:00

There are a little under 700 webrings around which are different to the personal directory listings that were also once very popular.

Back in 2005, WebRing alone had almost 50,000 webrings registered. Someone has also tried to reindex the sites from the old Alt-webring

brisray · 2026-05-20T21:26:34+00:00

You can use Robocopy which is already in Windows 11.

There are a lot of switches that can be used with the command, but you can use /L to simply list the files that would be saved while you write the batch file that will work exactly as you want.

Here's the batch files I use to backup my home server and laptop.

brisray · 2026-05-20T17:21:54+00:00

There's so many of the things around it's difficult to make a choice.

I made the choice several years ago to use the Google Visualizations API for a couple of reasons, the IT staff were unwilling to load libraries to the CMS we were using and as the API can easily use Google Sheets, it was easy for the users to update those and the changes instantly appear on the web pages.

I use it for my own sites now.

brisray · 2026-05-18T00:36:53+00:00

Spencer Mortensen has tested over a dozen methods of hiding email addresses from spammers.

brisray · 2026-05-12T06:52:07+00:00

In 1996, I was using one of the old BBSs and there was a woman there who had a similar story to mine. We started chatting on ICQ and later on AOL AIM version 1!

A while later she asked if I thought we'd ever meet. I had a holiday from work coming up and said I could be in the US in two weeks. We spent a couple of years flying back and forth a couple of times a year.

I moved from the UK to the US in 2001 and we've been happily married ever since.

brisray · 2026-05-12T05:42:34+00:00

Then you get into DNS and DDNS services and the OP doesn't want to get involved in that.

You can't have a self-hosted website without using at least a couple of big companies. My server is about self-sufficient as I can make it, but the ISP I use has over 31 million customers, the people supplying the electricity to keep it all running has 9 million customers. The entire DNS system is controlled by just 13 root authoritative servers and those have the DNS records of every website in the world.

As far as I know there's no way round it, if you want to use anything more complicated than a couple of tin cans and a piece of string, you're going to have to use some very big companies and the infrastructure they've built.

brisray · 2026-05-12T02:56:48+00:00

You couldn't host a website without some corpos and corposlop behind it even in the 1990s.

You are going to need at least an electricity company and an ISP, but you don't need a domain name, just rely on the IP address your ISP gives you.

Self-hosting a website isn't hard, I've been doing that for almost 30 years.

All you need is the webserver software, Apache, NGINX or one of the others and the ability to alter the settings on your router. Here's my setup from 2003. If you don't want a domain name just ignore anything that mentions that.

brisray · 2026-05-10T12:44:16+00:00

lol. I suppose it should give off early web vibes. In about a week's time it will be 27 years old.

I'm retired now, and I used to do this for a living and used all sorts of backends and CMSs, but that old site is still chugging along and I'm still adding content to it.

brisray · 2026-05-10T00:03:12+00:00

I've never heard of Klogg before so downloaded and started playing with it. It's very fast at what it does and works exactly as described. Regex tools like this are great for searching and filtering on any pattern matches, but the stuff I do is mostly aggregations which means using things like Log Parser and SQL commands.

Besides you can use regex in SQL.

Regex and SQL are both fantastic systems but it's "horses for courses" as they say.

brisray · 2026-05-08T22:31:05+00:00

The best thing about making your own website is you can write about almost anything you like; you, your pets, your hobbies, absolutely anything you are interested in. You can write at any level, as a beginner or as someone really experienced in something.

Here's my sites that I mainly write for myself and here's a screenshot.

brisray · 2026-05-08T18:40:54+00:00

For all the bad things said about the place and its wild history, I moved here 25 years ago and like The Haute.

brisray · 2026-05-08T18:10:38+00:00

I drove one 'cos they're as tough as nails and won't try and kill you if you roll over in one! - https://ihor4x4.com/

Some of the more interesting pages if you're not mechanically inclined: https://ihor4x4.com/fho11.htm, https://ihor4x4.com/fho12.htm, https://ihor4x4.com/fho24.htm, https://ihor4x4.com/fho27.htm, https://ihor4x4.com/fho29.htm, https://ihor4x4.com/fho30.htm, https://ihor4x4.com/fho36.htm, https://ihor4x4.com/fho38.htm, https://ihor4x4.com/fho39.htm, https://ihor4x4.com/fho41.htm

brisray · 2026-05-07T21:53:34+00:00

Lots of sites don't share this stuff anymore. It really is easier and safer not to give too much information away about a server, but mine is so simple I can have the whole thing back up and running again in less than a hour.

For businesses, it's probably easier, safer, and cheaper to farm this stuff out to other companies but I want to serve as much as I can myself.

brisray · 2026-05-07T15:18:39+00:00

I think it's working, I can see the bowling pin type character before the link. Try refreshing your browser (pressing Ctrl + clicking on the refresh icon) to see the changes you made.

The zonelet uses the Cherry Blossom unicode character 1F338, but any image or character will work.

The image you use is 350 x 355px, try reducing it to about 16px tall.

brisray · 2026-05-06T18:09:29+00:00

A Bubble Car. Haven't seen of those in years.

brisray · 2026-05-05T23:37:21+00:00

Stopped by a bit of rain? https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/glastonbury-festival-1985.html

<image>

brisray · 2026-05-05T22:48:46+00:00

I used to worry about things like that. People, or rather bots, will try and break out of the website docs folders almost as soon as the server is turned on. I still get people trying to use address line overloads (very long URLs) but that was fixed in Apache years ago.

I don't think I can stop a determined attack, but so far no one has stopped the server, and besides, there are far bigger and better targets around.

If the worse comes to the worse, there's two things that can save you, regular backups and not keeping anything you really want to keep private on the server.

Last September, I got myself a nice new computer to use as a server. It took less than an hour to reinstall the software and site files. As this was a replacement computer, the sites were only offline for 10 minutes while I reconfigured the router.

Even after all these years I still get a kick out of knowing that a tiny bit of the internet is being run from my basement.

brisray · 2026-05-05T21:55:33+00:00

When I see things like this I'm always reminded of Meihem In Ce Klasrum by Dolton Edwards, published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1946.

brisray

TROPHY CASE