Making this website!

The plan

I want the end result to be both a website that I would have fun in as an outsider, and one that can change with time. I want to be able to add to this website easily, but I also want this website to be where I experiment with all things websites: from finally using PHP, to adding a comment section, to doing whatever other crazy stuff I feel like.
In that sense, it needs to be modular. However, I also want support for old browsers.

Domain choosing

On November 3rd, 2024 I purchased this domain, lurkbeforepost.win for 5 years. This link will expire in exactly 5 years, but I did set it up so cloudflare will re-register it automatically 60 days before then.
I was planning on getting lurkbeforepost.com, but not only was .win considerably cheaper (10.44 vs 4.16, that's a 2.5x difference!) but also...

I'm using linux. I advocate for linux all the time.
It would be hillarious if a .win website told you to just install linux instead.

The domain started working on January 31st 2025, after tentimesfriday's help making it redirect to the page, which is hosted on aftersleep.

Accessibility

I have two main goals here: accessibility and looks. Accessibility in this case is to make the website accessible to any web browser. You'd think that means making the website readable on Chrome (and chromium forks), Firefox (and forks like Tor and Mullvad), Safari and maybe the Android/iOS equivalent of them. However, that would be disregarding the potentially more interesting demographic I grew to love: retro users.

This thought mostly started because of razorback95 and Kugee's passion for old OS's, but of course that's not the whole story. When I joined aftersleep (which by the way, you should too), I saw the little buttons in the footer!

(By the way, that isn't the actual aftersleep footer, I made a clone of it in case something happens.)

You will notice that one of the buttons, , will lead to a website named "Viewable with Any Browser". The idea being that website owners should try to accomodate for older browsers by either adhering to old HTML and CSS standards or - more easily - making the website degrade in a graceful manner. Plus you get to put a cool little button along with your blinkies!

(I like this one, by the way, it's funny)

Anyway, this means that anything the user gets should not require any weird things like "frames".

Server Side Includes

Considering that I don't really know what this website is going to look like in the future, I want to keep certain things like navigation menus, footers and headers in their own files. (Could you imagine if I had to change every single HTML file manually every time I wanted to experiment with the layout? Madness!) What most people will do here is to have a PHP script (which we could do), a Javascript... script (which we should use very sparingly) and use HTML frames (which are finicky with certain old browsers) very sparingly.

Instead, to do this, I'll be using Server Side Includes (SSI). The cool part is that I can have a modular framework to work with, the user can have their page in HTML without their browser having to think too much about getting more than one file, and we can all be happy. The scary part is SSII (server side include injections). Actually, keeping this place safe in general is going to be interesting. Then again, live and learn, right?

Hosting

LurkBeforePost is my name on aftersleep. We're a small community, so tentimesfriday allowed people coming in to host their websites there. After some emails (and me proving to be the embodiment of skill issue), I am now proud to announce that lurkbeforepost went live on aftersleep in the afternoon of December 19th, 2024! Having that said, if you check the updates in the main page, you will see that the actual debut of this website (as in, when it's actually ready to be seen) didn't happen until February 2025!

The page still doesn't look great as of February 1st, so I still have a lot to take care of (finding my style for the pages, getting over my PHP skill issue and actually making serverside includes using it, etcetera). Oh well, c'est la vie!