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 - November 2024

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 - November 2024

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 - November 2024

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 - February 2025

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!

Hosting - August 2025

During the months of June and July, aftersleep (and really all of tentimesfriday's internet endeavours) suffered a botted attack that wasted so, so much bandwidth. Up until now I've been using Friday's generosity extensively to publish things here, but this was a push for me to start working on getting hosting without freeloading on his computer. That is why I am now testing out hosting with nearlyfreespeech. It's cheap, it's consumer friendly and I trust (though time will tell if that trust is misguided) that they won't censor me even if I write something super controversial.

I still love aftersleep and everyone in it very dearly, and I still go there frequently. I still absolutely encourage you to host your website there - friday fixed the problem for the foreseeable future, and really, these down times are times for bonding in the IRC channel. Please do not feel discouraged to join our community just because I decided to try out other hosting methods.

PGP - September 2025

As I explained in the PGP tutorial, I want a way of signing every one of my posts. While in real life a normal signature can be used (and forged by someone experienced enough), in the digital world you can sign any file to prove that you are the author. Virtually every page and post on this website is signed with my public PGP key. The way I used to do it is I would copy-paste the final renderer from my browser into my PGP software of choice, sign it, and server-side include the new signature in with the webpage. This worked for only my browser, because different browsers have different rules on how to display markdown. This is also I didn't use certain tags that had no real problem with accessibility (and sometimes their lack of use would hurt accessibility) - because different browsers display the same website differently.

As such, I made a new system to completely bypass the need for copy-pasting the text, but it will require you actually download files. At the end of any given post, there will be a box with four buttons: one with an explanation, three with downloads - my public key, the source code of that article, and the signature file of that article. The source code is there for you to check if nothing was tampered with. Some things may be amiss (some posts use server-side includes in their text), but if none of the text is altered, it should be alright. The signature is specifically pertaining to the source code file, so keep them in the same directory. Finally, my public key is what will allow your PGP software to tell if the signature is valid or not.

I won't lie, this will make posts harder for you guys to check. While the source code files are obtained programmatically (it's the same file that's used in displaying), you shouldn't take my word for it because an attacker could have made a malicious copy and served you that instead. So, while before it was as simple as Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Alt+Tab, Ctrl+V, "Verify", now you actually have to read the post and compare with what you have just to make sure it's the same thing. Also no, downloading the source code of the page itself won't work, both because it's not the same text (server-side includes altered it) and because your browser changes how the source code itself is displayed and downloaded. Still, this is the best way I found to make it work across all browsers, and even with the future possibility of using RSS.