Lets make a website like it's 1999!

Lets make a website like it's 1999!

Posted on by Thea

To change from my regular ramblings about healthcare and reading one to many rose-tinted reckons about how things used to be, let’s make a website like it’s 1999!

What this is and isn’t

My aim is to show how you got your site online in 1999, but not to be historically accurate, so

But I will show how we made websites dynamic and the compromises made when you had limited space!

I’ll make another post on the server setup if you want to follow along. Ask nicely and I might just give you access to TheaNET.

Setting the stage

It’s 1999! You’ve just signed up for your first internet connection with your local ISP, TheaNET! Hey that’s your name as well! They’re a very modern ISP, supporting your new V92 56k modem, and you get 30 hours of connection per month for a very reasonable $29.95.

Looking through the signup pack they sent you, there’s a CD with Netscape Communicator and a bunch of trial apps, some pamphlets, and a letter with connection details on it. One part catches your eye:

All accounts come with complementary website hosting with 10MB of disk space and 100MB of traffic per month.

Not only can you browse all the sites on the internet, you can make your own. This is truely the future.

A few weeks later

How hard can it be? You’ve gone to the local bookstore and purchased a copy of “HTML Made Easy”. The first chapter tells you to open notepad, enter this text, and save it to index.html on your desktop

<html>
<head><title>Thea's Website</title></head>
<body>
<h1>Thea's Website</h1>
<p>Welcome to Thea's website!</p>
<p>This site is still under construction, please check back soon!</p>
</body>
</html>

Now to upload it. The instructions from TheaNET say

To upload to your website, use a program like WinSCP (included on the CD-ROM) or a similar sftp tool. Copy the files in to the public_html directory (if you can’t see it, you can create it). Use your dialup login and password to access your web hosting.

After some fiddling around with the copy program you get the public_html directory created and index.html copied over. Entering https://www.thea.net.nz/~thea/ in to your web browser you see your website come to life! On the internet!

It doesn’t look great, but it’s a start, it says it’s under construction so everyone knows you aren’t finished, and you’re about to read the chapters on images and text formatting.

… to be continued!

Editors Notes

scp instead of ftp

Because I want to make this something safe for others to follow I use scp for file copying. While I could set up an FTP server not only are maintained and secure FTP servers pretty rare, the protocol really doesn’t work well with modern networking. The server I’m using does not have a public IP address.

Generally ISPs did not include shell access with hosting and only allowed ftp access, which is possible with scp as well.

What’s with ~thea?

This is a user directory! In 1999 using a per-user subdomain was not very common, and on UNIX-like systems ~ is used to represent the home directories where users store their files. ~ is your home, ~thea is Thea’s home. The Apache web server continued this convention to represent each user, but served out of public_html in that user’s home directory.

This disappeared as websites got more dynamic due to cookies. Cookies are stored per-domain, so if you had http://www.thea.net.nz/admin/ which set an admin cookie, http://www.thea.net.nz/~nefarious_user/cookie_stealer.html would be able to steal it and gain admin access.

This will come up again later.

You forgot the doctype!

Nobody used a doctype in 1999!

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