more than other tech news sites.

🤔 - the submitter wasn’t the author, and the same post was seen on every other link aggregator of tech related posts… Help me understand why this is the example that sets Lobsters apart?

jrnl.sh is awesome. It helped me organize my life.

Wow I had no idea. Thanks for letting me know about that. Perhaps there is a need for Woof Alert v2 :-P

He does!

If I was good at writing satire, I would write a satire article that is a CGI scripting tutorial, but never use the word CGI and instead call it a “new Open Source function as a service library”.

Similar twist: “Hi folks, I wrote a new library that converts JVM byte code to WebAssembly. For the first time ever, we can write Java that runs in the browser! Never before seen!”

I use them for a couple things (the order form on https://atreus.technomancy.us being one of them), and they’re fantastically useful for sites like that which can be 99% static. I wish more people realized that not everything has to be full of moving parts everywhere.

Author does write

CGI scripting was undoubtedly useful and continues to be useful for small scale web applications, such as developer utilities, simple form data collection and local intranet tools.

(my emphasis)

In the first draft of this article, I used the term “near obsolescence” rather than just the term “obsolescence”, because you’re right, there are still people out there using CGI scripts (I am one of them).

Ultimately, I removed the weakening word. Determining when a technology is obsolete is a tough call, and often opinion based. In this case, it’s my opinion. If the definition of obsolete is “no longer produced or used; out of date.”, then there are very few technologies that can truly and in all cases be described as obsolete. In the case of CGI scripts as they were used in the late 90’s, I think it’s safe to say that that train left the station a long time ago.

Aha! I wish I knew what SLiRP was a month ago. I will give it a try on my next project.

I had so many failed attempts with PPPD that I gave up.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

Purchased a license last night! I hope others do the same.

I picked up an old ethernet card that was new in box, but it expected Windows for Workgroups. This machine only had the standard home edition of 3.1. I never was able to get the card running, which is unfortunate given the slow speeds of the serial line.

Sorry :(. I did not see that tag in the list and historical was the closest relevant thing I could find.

Not all people are super creative with their sites; at least for me most of the social activity occurs on the irc net and the mailing lists.

I think it’s important to note that many of these pubnix servers are not oriented toward generating a lot of public web content, but rather to intra-system activities. IRC chat, bulletin boards, local gaming, “botany”, grafitti walls, and so on are extremely popular. tilde.town is a lush playground of activity of all sorts, just not a lot of it bleeds out through the web. But that’s also kind of the point. Everyone on a tilde knows how to toss a webpage out there in some form or another. They congregate for the community. The outputs are very different.

Now, there are other tildes, like my own https://cosmic.voyage (or gopher://cosmic.voyage) which ARE oriented toward a public channel (collaborative storytelling in our case). Our activity is still more robust in IRC with people talking and planning than the output suggests.

Finally, you touched on federation and that’s some new and exciting territory for the tildeverse. While we do have a round-robin of IRC servers that all federate, there’s also some novel experimentation going on. The circumlunar pubnix servers are rsyncing their local bulletin boards to one another. Cosmic, baud.baby, and circumlunar are experimenting with a low-fi social networking system built on top of fingerd. There’s a lot of playing around of this sort as people push limits and turn their hobby eye toward community building.

maybe they are more active in other ways.

Yes. The community is super active on IRC, 24 hours a day. They also have a local intranet for more private things that users don’t want indexed by google. There are a number of CLI apps that don’t have a web presence, also, such as feels, bbj, botany etc…

You’re right! I can’t believe I forgot that “detail”. I will update the article when I get home. Sorry about that! Thanks for pointing this out.

I’m not sure where you got the idea lynx doesn’t support https, but it does.

There are a few text based browsers that support more modern features as well. Elinks for example has mouse support and tabs. Links2 also supports graphics, even in framebuffer mode. So technically your OS is text only, you can still browse in graphics mode.

Glad you liked my article!

I don’t use Lynx more than a few times a month (this was a thought experiment, mostly). My understanding of the SSL issues in Lynx is that it is related to how the distros configure OpenSSL. I never bothered looking deeper into the matter, but have heard from users on HN that it is possible, it’s just not the default on most [Debian based?] systems.

If someone out there does use Lynx on a regular basis, would love to hear about a solution.

Holy False Dilemma, Batman!

lynx supports HTTPS just fine. Always has, for values of “always” including “longer than most here have been programming”. There’s nothing about HTTPS which excludes lynx or any other text browser.

How does MQTT fair against HTTP with billions of users? HTTP has the advantage here for not needing to be stateful.

As the article says too: sometimes HTTP makes sense. IMO the title should have something like “You should use a real pub/sub broker, not HTTP - VerneMQ is one”.

Wow, that’s neat. Did you open source it, by any chance?

I wrote a cron job that uses espeak and notify-send to tell me “Please make a log entry” every half hour. I was going to put it in the article, but people always give me funny looks about it so I left that part out ;-)

Maybe I will make a part II to this article.

I’ve solved this with a physical journal. I find it’s harder to forget when it’s in front of me. Downsides, my handwriting could be better, so it’s not the easiest thing to review. Plus it’s organised chronologically, rather than by task.