All right, ladies and germs, repeat after me.

[Webby Dasserman]

"The Internet belongs to the people. It does not belong to Goolag, Faecesbook, and Twatter."

"The Internet belongs to the people. It does not belong to Goolag, Faecesbook, and Twatter."

"The Internet belongs to the people. It does not belong to Goolag, Faecesbook, and Twatter."

"The Internet belongs to the people. It does not belong to Goolag, Faecesbook, and Twatter."

"The Internet belongs to the people. It does not belong to Goolag, Faecesbook, and Twatter."

Smell what I'm steppin' in? Good.

We've been on about the importance of owning your own website as a way of regaining control of the Web from fascistic corporations for awhile now, but we haven't really told you how to do it. It's the easiest thing in the world. I mean if Trix can manage to run a website between lengthy masturbation sessions, anyone can.

Although it may be hard for some of you n00bs to believe, nearly everyone had their own website in ancient times. Companies like Yahoo! and Angelfire even provided free personal website hosting. Yeah, they paid for it by putting their annoying banner ads on your site, but still.

Nowadays, you have to pay for your own hosting. Fortunately it's pretty cheap to start out. You're only going to get a few visitors per day until it takes off, if that. Any budget personal hosting plan can handle the traffic for the first few months, so no biggy. A good place to start is GoDaddy. Their Economy Plan has everything you need.

https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/web-hosting

While you're there, you may as as well register a domain name too. That's your "dot com" name that makes it easy for people, to find your site. It's not strictly necessary, but if you don't have one, people will have to remember your server's IP address. Ain't nobody got time to memorize a bunch of numbers.

https://www.godaddy.com/tlds/com-domain

You'll probably find the best domain names are already taken. If yourname.com isn't available, try yourname.net and so forth. Also, a lot of brand names have intentional misspellings in them: Krispy Kreme, Rite Aid, Loctite, and so on. That would be a good way to go if you're looking to create a brand image.

If you start outgrowing your initial hosting plan and find you're sinking too much money into keeping your site going, you can always monetize the site with PayPal, Patreon, or SubscribeStar donations and subscriptions to cover the costs.

https://www.subscribestar.com/

https://www.paypal.com/us/home

https://www.patreon.com/

You could even put Goolag ads on your pages if you want, but that's less common these days.

https://www.google.com/adsense/start/

You won't have to worry about any of that for awhile though. For now, you need to think about what kind of website you want. There's free software for everything you want to do. And by "free," I mean no strings, no obligations, no bullshit, ever. How is that possible? Well, there are a lot of people out there who like to do nothing but write software all day long. They don't want to keep writing the same software over and over again, so they share what they've written with others, and use what others have written to accomplish their own objectives.

Examples:

Discussion forum: https://mybb.com/

Blog: https://wordpress.com/

Shopping cart: https://www.opencart.com/

And the list goes on and on and on. Some other good places to find free Web applications are:

SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/

PHP Junkyard: http://www.phpjunkyard.com/

Hot Scripts: http://www.hotscripts.com/

Fuck, dude, there are so many free script download sites, I'm not even gonna try to list them all. Just do a search for whatever kind of program you want. It's out there, trust me.

Besides being free, another advantage of free software is that it's usually open source. That means anyone can look at the code and confirm there are no trackers, backdoors, or other malware in it. It also means you can customize the code any way you like to suit your particular purposes.

Anyway, once you've decided what you want to do with your website and selected the software you want to use on it, you need to upload the software to your hosting server. To do that you need a free FTP program. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It's the standard way of uploading and downloading files to an Internet server.

There are dozens of free FTP clients out there as well. (Are you starting to see how much work thousands of individuals have put into making it incredibly easy for the average Joe to build a website?) In my opinion, FileZilla is the best of the bunch. It has two panes: one shows files on your computer, the other shows files on the server. To transfer files back and forth, all you do is drag them from one pane to the other. FileZilla is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

https://filezilla-project.org/

After you upload the software, you'll need to run the installer. This usually involves visiting a page on your site, filling in a few bits of information, and clicking the Submit button. Your hosting provider will provide all of the information you need to fill in. If you can't find it in your hosting control panel, they'll have an online help ticket system where you can ask.

Now you're ready to go. It would be a good idea to learn some HTML and CSS if you want to customize the software, but, again, that's not strictly necessary. These languages tell the visitor's Web browser how to draw the page. They were specifically designed to be easy to learn by the average Joe. As we said before, the World Wide Web was created for the people, including dipshits like Trix as well as computer geniuses like me.

[Mister Obvious]

I mean if Trix can manage to run a website between lengthy masturbation sessions, anyone can. ... As we said before, the World Wide Web was created for the people, including dipshits like Trix as well as computer geniuses like me.

Well said sir.

Totally excellent info here.

[Mister Obvious]

The internet renaissance is upon us...

Be a part of it.

[Lars Fargo]

And delete yo muthafuckin' Facebook.

[Mister Obvious]

I also recommend only getting a .com...

None of the newfangled domains are going to stand the test of time.

The .net and .org are good to secure only after you've gotten your brand a .com domain.

For example, Interstellar.net and Interstellar.org both redirect here to Interstellar.com, but I would never use the .net or .org for my main gig.

As long as you have your own domain name and your own site though, you're at least doing the right thing, regardless of what TLD you have.

[Guest]

I really think webrings need to make a comeback. It's hard as fuck for a new website to gain exposure. A new site is literally drowned out in a sea of millions of more established websites. Yeah, you can do all of the SEO optimization stuff, search engine submissions, etc., but you're still competing with a lot of other people who are also doing all of that. And the deck is still stacked against you if your content is targeted for suppresion by search engine algorithms.

And of, course, everyone is trying to compete with giant social media sites that only want to allow independent websites to exist as adjuncts to their their own all-encompassing umbrella. Look at how mainstream news organizations have to publish their content in multiple special formats to cater to Faecesbook's and Goolag's proprietary standards.

To break big tech's stranglehold, people with common interests need to band together and create networks outside of big tech's sphere of influence -- networks that drive traffic to their independent websites rather than to Faecesbook and Goolag. Webrings are a primitive but effective early form of social networking that has been cast aside in favor of consolidating the networking aspect into a handful of centralized locii of control. Webring technology is so simple that no single company can dominate it because hosting a webring directory is just as easy as hosting a personal website.

[Mister Obvious]

Webrings are a primitive but effective early form of social networking that has been cast aside in favor of consolidating the networking aspect into a handful of centralized locii of control.

I'm into "primitive"...

What works works.

End of story.

The "modernized" internet don't look like it's workin' out too damn well to me...



The foundational principles (and platforms) will always work, and frankly, they're all I personally fucking care about.

Webring technology is so simple that no single company can dominate it because hosting a webring directory is just as easy as hosting a personal website.

Can't ANY site have its own "webring"??

Every site needs to link to all the other sites, and this in and of itself will form a new kind of 'advertisement'.

Some sites could pay for more front-center listings on other sites with an audience they want.

Make sense?

So why can't we just have a WebRing on this site for example?

I think what we're talking about here is doing something old in a 'new' way.

We'll make a WebRing, just with our own twist.

[Kitty Von Catsworth]

"I mean if Trix can manage to run a website between lengthy masturbation sessions, anyone can"

it might be fun to  have a look at all the stains trix has  left   

[Guest]

Can't ANY site have its own "webring"??

Well, a webring is a bunch of sites connected by a little navigator bar at the bottom of each member site's homepage, so the concept of a single-site webring wouldn't make sense. You can host a webring (or an entire directory of webrings) on your own site though.

We'll make a WebRing, just with our own twist.

It so happens that I've been working on a new webring program. I'm going to put it in the public domain because the societal benefits of it being freely available would outweigh whatever measley sum I could get from trying to sell it. The word "WebRing" is apparently a registered trademark of webring.org now, but they can't patent the technology. It's literally just a little HTML snippet on each site that links to the previous and next site in the ring. We'll just have to come up with a new name for our system. No biggy.

Anyway, post all of your ideas and I'll try to put them in.

[Mister Obvious]

The word "WebRing" is apparently a registered trademark of webring.org now, but they can't patent the technology. It's literally just a little HTML snippet on each site that links to the previous and next site in the ring.

Exactly.

Regardless...

These old methods are making a resurgence.

This is necessary and something which should be celebrated.

[Guest]

You could join a webring at webring.org if wanted to, but I got a cringy SJW vibe from their TOS. That's what made me decide to do this.

[Mister Obvious]

Yeah they are no doubt compromised.

[Guest]

Yeah they are no doubt compromised.

I see what they're doing.

WebRing.org has major issues. All of the images are broken, and the stylesheet doesn't load. The server is extremely slow.

Some of the hubs are on domains other than webring.org. The current owner has evidently subverted it to some kind of keyword loading, link farming, domain name squatting scheme.

Some member sites don't even have a navigator bar, which breaks the ring navigation. WebRing.org evidently doesn't even do rudimetary checks to ensure compliance.

The copyright blurb in the footer ends at 2016. Either the owner doesn't give a shit about webrings as long as he's making money from it, or it doesn't make any money so he gave up on it.

[Guest]

A quick update on the new webring program.

The program will have 5 classes of data objects, 2 relational pseudo-object classes, and a couple of classes for composing and caching HTML pages.

The data objects are pretty minimalistic, having just enough properties for the system to function properly. Data objects and their properties:

User
-- id
-- username
-- password
-- question
-- answer
-- joined
-- accessLevel

Notice no e-mail address or other PI is stored here. When users register, they must provide a question and answer to be used to regain access to their account if they forget their password.

WebRing
-- id
-- title
-- description
-- ownerId

The ownerId refers to the user ID who created the webring. When a user is deleted, all of their webrings will be reassigned to the sysop. The sysop cannot be deleted.

Category
-- id
-- title
-- description
-- parentId

The parentId refers to the category that this category is a subcategory of. It will be 0 for top-level categories. If a category is deleted, its subcategories (if it has any) will become subcategories ("children") of its parent category, if it has one. Otherwise, the children of the deleted category will become top-level categories.

Site
-- id
-- title
-- description
-- domain
-- ownerId

When the owner of a site entry is deleted, the entry is transferred to the sysop, same as for WebRing entries.

The relational objects store relationships between data objects.

categoryRel
-- categoryId
-- webringId

The WebRing referred to by webringId is in the Category referred to by categoryId. A WebRing may be in more than one Category. When a WebRing is deleted, all of its category relations are deleted.

siteRel
-- webringId
-- siteId

This works the same way as categoryRel. The referenced Site is a memeber of the referenced WebRing.

The system will use cookies for users to log in and manage their accounts, but there will be no click tracking, nor will the system place tracking cookies or JavaScript on member websites. A sysop could modify the software to do all of that if they want, but I'm not going to make it easy for them.

[Guest]

Don't waste your time with 000webhost.com, pholks. They unfortunately decided to get creative and build their own site management system rather than stick with the tried-and-true CPanel and FTP server setup used by most hosting providers. Their system can't remember that you're logged in from one page to the next, so you constantly have to re-enter your password. Also, if you're uploading software that has many nested folders, which is practically every package in existence, you'll have to create every folder and then upload the files into each folder individually. Major waste of time and effort.

[Guest]

X10 Hosting seems pretty decent if you're looking for free hosting.


https://x10hosting.com/


I got this site up and running in 5 minutes.


http://pamsconfessional.x10host.com/


You can register your own domain name if you want, but I'm not gonna bother with that for this site. The free subdomain name suits the purpose of demo'ing the software.


I encourage everyone who wants a cool website of their own to download my software. (In fact, I encourage everyone to have their own website, period.) I built it based on MO's recommendations of what a personal website should be, and it's 100% free to do whatever you want with.


https://github.com/diggydude/bolthole-bbs

[Guest]

Okay, I just found the down side to X10's free hosting. (You knew there had to be one, right?)


There's no error log and no PHP error reporting, period. Just a generic HTTP 500 error page. If your script has a bug, you'll have no way of knowing what went wrong.


The "bug" turned out to be that X10 has disabled file uploading. No avatars, no user pics of any kind. I wonder how they were expecting people to use phpBB or Wordpress on their servers.

[Mister Obvious]

I think it’s fucking amazing.

The login box pops up for me instantly though and doesn’t seem to go away.

[Guest]

The login box pops up for me instantly though and doesn’t seem to go away.

It won't go away unless you login or register.

[Mister Obvious]

No Guest browsing?!

Did we say we didn’t want Guests??

I can’t remember.

Sorry if we did.

It’s first thing in the morning mkay, I haven’t had my coffee!