The best part of the no-build, small-footprint approach is longevity: no dependency rot, nothing to maintain, and it'll still open and run in ten years. We've half-forgotten that "view source and hack it" is how a lot of us learned the web in the first place. Good to see tools that lean back into that.
Hello, neat project. I am also from Edmonton area. I wonder if we have talked previously, in the the late 90s I ran a local BBS system with my colleague.
A fair amount of software follows the model but does not use the term, everytime I go on the play store to look for an app I encounter many that offer a free version with limited features.
The term doesn't make much sense anymore because we don't share software, we just download it from the source. The business model makes more sense than ever, though.
Most of the shareware I got was downloaded from BBSes and the internet and even these central repositories that are the norm now are nothing new, in the 80s I went to a local BBS that was dedicated to shareware and in the 90s a handful of sites, and there was always the developer's site for the direct download but often they just linked you to one of the big repositories. The only shareware I can remember getting physically was the stuff that came on a disk/cd with some magazine I bought just for the CD filled with shareware. I miss those CDs.
For as long as I can remember shareware was more than the physical sharing, it was the model of a free version that you could share and a paid version and sometimes both versions were the same and it was just requested that you pay if you can (buy me a coffee). Some of this shareware was even adware, I remember getting some drawing program that had a popup every 15 minutes advertising the author's programs, it would go away if you paid; my first "hack" was realizing that I could start the program and then turn the computers date back a day giving me 24 hours and 15 minutes before the popup appeared, after a couple weeks my mom tasked me with fixing the computer, she was having to reset the date every couple days for some reason.
Edit: deleted a comment about source code, realize I misread your post. Should try to fix a couple of those sentences as well, my language skills tend to fall apart when I get nostalgic and I find it very difficult to restructure the thought, I lose the nostalgia.
I meant more as an active use-term for software licensing that kiki uses (and in the sense of the OP's question), not in its historical sense that it is used by writers now.
I happen to have a cat named Kiki who looks rather like the mascot for this project. Her health is failing, now. I just spent the night on my living room floor next to her. I'll, likely have to put her down, today.
I might use this project to make a memorial page for her.
I'm sorry you're dealing with this. I had an orange tabby also named Kiki for most of my childhood through early adulthood, 16 years. He suffered from kidney failure and it was a sad day when we had to put him down.
I'm sorry to hear about Kiki. She's very beautiful, thanks for sharing.
She reminds me of my tuxedo cat Bob who recently passed. I remember laying down all night in the comfort room before he had to be put down and sobbing knowing how much pain he was in. It's really hard.
I think a memorial site is a lovely idea, I created one for my cat as well: https://bob.duchastel.com
Iâm sorry youâre going through this. Sheâs very cute.
Dedicating a project to her sounds like a great idea.
If you use Reddit, I can also highly recommend the r/petloss subreddit for a bit of âgroup therapyâ. It was very helpful for me a couple years ago.
I wish we could get back to a âmom and popâ software market. Itch.io feels like itâs doing a lot of work for indie software that used to just be everywhere and easy to stumble onto.
If selling software for money wasnât such a pain in the arse I would put stuff on my website rather than itch.io
It took me two weeks, plus sending IDs, incorporating an ltd, to get a license to sell software with Paddle. With itch I just need a paypal/stripe account.
I am going through this right now! I am provisionally approved and still waiting. Even worse I am going through SMS phone number verification with SMTP2GO.
Apparently if you wanna send automated texts in America, you need a real phone number. And to not get immediately blocked, you need to fill out a form that goes to the major carriers for approval (like AT&T). And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.
> And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.
In defense of Paddle (I use them for my own livelihood), they're on the hook for remitting sales taxes to ALL the governments where your customers might reside. They also manage customer disputes, chargebacks, refunds etc. I always redirect support emails to Paddle.net [0] which does the trick 99% of the time.
Stripe or PayPal are nothing like that. They're just payment platforms.
Since Paddle takes on so much liability, it seems reasonable to ask for a lot of initial paperwork from its sellers.
Yep, it's called 10DLC. My teams work on telephony integrations, and for the devs to even test that outbound SMS is working, we need to go through this process with every provider we integrate. Massive pain, indeed.
If you accept cryptocurrency you donât need to do any of this, and not even deal with PayPal (who WILL rob you without a second thought, as has been well documented on the internet for MULTIPLE decades at this point).
I would like to (Bitcoin Lightning only, with a healthy convenience discount) but I'd have to move off Hetzner for my servers because they are really against crypto in a very vague way, and again, that's a lot more work than just using itch.io
"It's built so that if something looks wrong, you can change it yourself without spending hours reading tutorials and watching coding videos"
Does anyone do this?
Every none coder I know just has llms build everything for them - can't imagine why they'd be looking up coding tutorials for a homepage.
include $_GET[...], register_globals, magic quotes, extract($_REQUEST), weak comparisons, loose typing, eval, risky file upload defaults/patterns, preg_replace /e, dangerous deserialization gadget chains, path traversal into includes, and the whole "URLs can be file paths" abstraction...
PHP is basically "RCE-as-a-Service" as far as I'm concerned. Allowing a URL in any function that wanted a file path was an absolutely bone-headed design choice. They made `curl | php` a language feature.
C and Go are two languages I feel like if you learn them, you can come back years later and if your memory is still good, you could get back up to speed pretty darn quickly. Every few years I go back to Go and try to build web apps using only the standard libraries, and I always find myself very quickly picking up all the concepts.
For some reason, Java has the same feeling. Professionally I do both embedded and statistical computing, and Java's been nearly anathema to this. But every 5 years I patch a hobby project I did once in college, and it comes right back (and with JVM hot reloading too.) It gives me the engineering warm and fuzzies.
I'm not going to blame you _too_ much, since I had similar suspicion, but you could have (as I did) just downloaded the .zip file and examined the contents. In the shareware version, some things are probably missing (I think not all themes are there), but otherwise it's just a bunch of PHP files, no obfuscation or anything. The markup language is configured in a text file, and the parser for that file is just next to it. The configuration is used for configuring the markup parser, which is also present. And so on. It's not open-source only if your definition of OSS is "has to have a Github page".
The best part of the no-build, small-footprint approach is longevity: no dependency rot, nothing to maintain, and it'll still open and run in ten years. We've half-forgotten that "view source and hack it" is how a lot of us learned the web in the first place. Good to see tools that lean back into that.
Hello, neat project. I am also from Edmonton area. I wonder if we have talked previously, in the the late 90s I ran a local BBS system with my colleague.
> kiki is shareware.
Now that is a blast from the past.
Is much else distributed that way these days?
A fair amount of software follows the model but does not use the term, everytime I go on the play store to look for an app I encounter many that offer a free version with limited features.
The term doesn't make much sense anymore because we don't share software, we just download it from the source. The business model makes more sense than ever, though.
Most of the shareware I got was downloaded from BBSes and the internet and even these central repositories that are the norm now are nothing new, in the 80s I went to a local BBS that was dedicated to shareware and in the 90s a handful of sites, and there was always the developer's site for the direct download but often they just linked you to one of the big repositories. The only shareware I can remember getting physically was the stuff that came on a disk/cd with some magazine I bought just for the CD filled with shareware. I miss those CDs.
For as long as I can remember shareware was more than the physical sharing, it was the model of a free version that you could share and a paid version and sometimes both versions were the same and it was just requested that you pay if you can (buy me a coffee). Some of this shareware was even adware, I remember getting some drawing program that had a popup every 15 minutes advertising the author's programs, it would go away if you paid; my first "hack" was realizing that I could start the program and then turn the computers date back a day giving me 24 hours and 15 minutes before the popup appeared, after a couple weeks my mom tasked me with fixing the computer, she was having to reset the date every couple days for some reason.
Edit: deleted a comment about source code, realize I misread your post. Should try to fix a couple of those sentences as well, my language skills tend to fall apart when I get nostalgic and I find it very difficult to restructure the thought, I lose the nostalgia.
Commander Keen! Duke Nukem! Leisure Suit Larry! Scorched Earth! Lemmings!
Happy times
Would love to know myself. I haven't seen the term used in 20+ years.
Not enough reading of Hacker News, young grasshopper! (-:
Used several times within the last month alone.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375691
I meant more as an active use-term for software licensing that kiki uses (and in the sense of the OP's question), not in its historical sense that it is used by writers now.
> kiki was built around the idea that the web took a wrong turn a couple of decades ago. HTML was supposed to be simple and straightforward
Hear, hear. We need more of this kind of courage to start over from first principles.
This is a tangent to this post, but...
I happen to have a cat named Kiki who looks rather like the mascot for this project. Her health is failing, now. I just spent the night on my living room floor next to her. I'll, likely have to put her down, today.
I might use this project to make a memorial page for her.
https://ibb.co/7dRCnWrp https://ibb.co/1GWwDKLY
Oh geez -- we went recently through this with our tuxedo, who sadly passed a few years ago. I am glad you'll be able to give her the peace she needs.
The kiki this software is named after, is an extremely rambunctious rotten kitten whom we adopted after our tuxedo passed away.
https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/115742268356907140
:)
I'm sorry you're dealing with this. I had an orange tabby also named Kiki for most of my childhood through early adulthood, 16 years. He suffered from kidney failure and it was a sad day when we had to put him down.
May you have peace during this time.
i'm so sorry. i went through that with one of my own recently. please make sure she knows she is loved.
I'm sorry to hear about Kiki. She's very beautiful, thanks for sharing.
She reminds me of my tuxedo cat Bob who recently passed. I remember laying down all night in the comfort room before he had to be put down and sobbing knowing how much pain he was in. It's really hard.
I think a memorial site is a lovely idea, I created one for my cat as well: https://bob.duchastel.com
Iâm sorry youâre going through this. Sheâs very cute.
Dedicating a project to her sounds like a great idea.
If you use Reddit, I can also highly recommend the r/petloss subreddit for a bit of âgroup therapyâ. It was very helpful for me a couple years ago.
Wishing you peace during this time â and thank you for cherishing Kiki as much as you have. A memorial page is a nice way to honor her.
I'm so sorry. Sending you and Kiki love today.
Oh man. That really stinks. Losing a pet is hard. Hang in there.
Should have been written with bouba philosophy.
Kiki's themes can be edited to suit one's personal tastes. The theme .css files are about 120 lines long.
I wish we could get back to a âmom and popâ software market. Itch.io feels like itâs doing a lot of work for indie software that used to just be everywhere and easy to stumble onto.
If selling software for money wasnât such a pain in the arse I would put stuff on my website rather than itch.io
It took me two weeks, plus sending IDs, incorporating an ltd, to get a license to sell software with Paddle. With itch I just need a paypal/stripe account.
I am going through this right now! I am provisionally approved and still waiting. Even worse I am going through SMS phone number verification with SMTP2GO.
Apparently if you wanna send automated texts in America, you need a real phone number. And to not get immediately blocked, you need to fill out a form that goes to the major carriers for approval (like AT&T). And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.
> And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.
In defense of Paddle (I use them for my own livelihood), they're on the hook for remitting sales taxes to ALL the governments where your customers might reside. They also manage customer disputes, chargebacks, refunds etc. I always redirect support emails to Paddle.net [0] which does the trick 99% of the time.
Stripe or PayPal are nothing like that. They're just payment platforms.
Since Paddle takes on so much liability, it seems reasonable to ask for a lot of initial paperwork from its sellers.
[0] https://paddle.net
Yep, it's called 10DLC. My teams work on telephony integrations, and for the devs to even test that outbound SMS is working, we need to go through this process with every provider we integrate. Massive pain, indeed.
If you accept cryptocurrency you donât need to do any of this, and not even deal with PayPal (who WILL rob you without a second thought, as has been well documented on the internet for MULTIPLE decades at this point).
I would like to (Bitcoin Lightning only, with a healthy convenience discount) but I'd have to move off Hetzner for my servers because they are really against crypto in a very vague way, and again, that's a lot more work than just using itch.io
"It's built so that if something looks wrong, you can change it yourself without spending hours reading tutorials and watching coding videos"
Does anyone do this? Every none coder I know just has llms build everything for them - can't imagine why they'd be looking up coding tutorials for a homepage.
That must be the first time in a very long time that I've seen something claim to support PHP 4.
Oh ! i cannot see myself doing php again, loved the language and have some good memories too but that me was 10 years ago
PHP was and still is the best.
I dunno, PHP seems to have a lot of foot-guns.
include $_GET[...], register_globals, magic quotes, extract($_REQUEST), weak comparisons, loose typing, eval, risky file upload defaults/patterns, preg_replace /e, dangerous deserialization gadget chains, path traversal into includes, and the whole "URLs can be file paths" abstraction...
PHP is basically "RCE-as-a-Service" as far as I'm concerned. Allowing a URL in any function that wanted a file path was an absolutely bone-headed design choice. They made `curl | php` a language feature.
that font color is impossible to read on the black background
I'm guessing this is made for a specific audience who dig this type of UI
Really? I can read it just fine. Itâs probably your monitor brightness settings, which is still a design flaw on their part regardless
Reminds me of a time when my homepage (before lj blog) was using cmsimple. BTW, c still exists. Not sure if it is still "simple" tho.
https://www.cmsimple.org/en/
> c still exists
C and Go are two languages I feel like if you learn them, you can come back years later and if your memory is still good, you could get back up to speed pretty darn quickly. Every few years I go back to Go and try to build web apps using only the standard libraries, and I always find myself very quickly picking up all the concepts.
For some reason, Java has the same feeling. Professionally I do both embedded and statistical computing, and Java's been nearly anathema to this. But every 5 years I patch a hobby project I did once in college, and it comes right back (and with JVM hot reloading too.) It gives me the engineering warm and fuzzies.
The design philosophy says you should be able to repair your own tools, but this is closed source proprietary software.
Cute page, but does not walk the walk.
I'm not going to blame you _too_ much, since I had similar suspicion, but you could have (as I did) just downloaded the .zip file and examined the contents. In the shareware version, some things are probably missing (I think not all themes are there), but otherwise it's just a bunch of PHP files, no obfuscation or anything. The markup language is configured in a text file, and the parser for that file is just next to it. The configuration is used for configuring the markup parser, which is also present. And so on. It's not open-source only if your definition of OSS is "has to have a Github page".
It's not closed source.