A few years ago, the company I work for acquired a small web agency. I was tasked with migrating their client sites to our infrastructure. One of the gems I found was https://www.jubyla.com/.
After a little asking around, I learned that it was created by the daughter of one of the agency's employees.
I couldn't be responsible for depriving the world of this, so I left it running.
Yeah, while I hated so many designs, it was still great to see see what people were coming up with and the content wasn't posted for "likes" or fakes internet points. It was just stuff people wanted to share. There was also a lot of copying in those days. People would find a cool gif or background image on one site and add it to their own sites. There were all kinds of layouts too. The entire web felt very collaborative and experimental before everyone got corralled into corporate controlled templates and DMCA notices started flying around everywhere.
My 8-year-old is wanting to start a podcast where she reads aloud the stories she has written. She was disappointed when I told her I probably wouldn't be able to get them listed on Audible or on Pinna, but I think a website like that might be just the ticket.
It's really easy to get a podcast into Apple Podcasts, just submit a URL for the RSS feed. If you don't mind intervening to edit the XML when a new episode goes up, all you need is a directory on a web host somewhere... you drop in a hand-jammed XML file for the RSS feed and all the mp3 files.
Heads up, I think you're still on the hook for download bandwidth though. Bandwidth is one reason podcast hosting is so popular.
If you use a service like Transistor.fm, you can get a website generated for your feed automatically. Not much customization options, but probably enough to get by. For $9/mo, it's not a bad option.
Please check out https://anchor.fm/ , all you need to start a small podcast. Please don’t shut a child dream like that, I will be a recurring listener!
This is great. Thanks for maintaining this artifact of pre-Web 2.0 days. And who knows, the next hot startup Jubyla may want to buy the domain for millions.
This is brilliant. I love finding old pages, my uncle used to have a page way back in the day and I remember (as a kid) being absolutely fascinated by it. Seemed like magic to me. It's now mostly defunct (nothing works anymore, the tabs don't even show up, but it still has a landing page) http://wildrock.de/
Since I first did this years ago and this was a simple copy/paste of that on mobile, it uses javascript to change img src instead of css :hover to change a background.
This is insanely cute, and posting WAV audio files on a website in 2000 strikes me as pretty sophisticated! Did you or someone else convert some older audio-playing mechanism to <audio> tags? I don't remember those existing back in 2000.
My two boys both have colds today, so the little-kid congestion in the recordings is extra adorable for me at the moment. Thanks for sharing.
When I first came across the site in 2017, all the audio files were in embed tags and they all autoplayed at once. It looks like one of my coworkers "fixed" that in 2019.
It was quite trivial actually, the problem was that downloading a wav file on dial-up wasn't the best experience so you'd have to make sure to downsample for it to be usable.
You could use EMBED to autoplay WAV and MIDI. IE (in classic Microsoft fashion) also defined BGSOUND for the same.
I remember an email signature from around that time that went "If I wanted your website to make sound, I'd have licked my finger and rubbed it across my monitor."
This really makes me think I wonder if someone could get a business model working for "permanent" web presences to be set up for small sites with a fixed amount of traffic per month, where you could pay an up front fee and it will be hosted "forever"
The primary issue would be the domain name which, unlike computing power, keeps going up in price. Once you solve that static site hosting is available basically anywhere from Neocities to GitHub and Codeberg Pages.
The problem with all those free static site hosting providers is that you never know when they'll go away entirely, or change things in a way that'll break your website if you're not around to migrate it.
Some of the big private Victorian cemeteries around London were funded like this. I guess they thought they could get enough money together to create a fund, and run the cemetery off the profits. I don't think it worked out anywhere.
This looks exactly like a site out of Hypnospace Outlaw, an video game where you moderate websites in an alternate 1990s where mind-reading technology exists.
After a little asking around, I learned that it was created by the daughter of one of the agency's employees.
I couldn't be responsible for depriving the world of this, so I left it running.