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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.
Maybe I'm not reading this right, but it has its own markup language called "Bug". This is the opposite of no-rot. If it's using technologies you've never heard of before, who is going to be around to maintain them in 10 years?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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 sorry you’re going through this. She’s 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 “group therapy”. It was very helpful for me a couple years ago.
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
May her passing be a gentle one.
For what it's worth, a random person on the internet just shed a tear for the both of you.
Wishing you peace during this time — and thank you for cherishing Kiki as much as you have. A memorial page is a nice way to honor her.
That sucks, sorry about Kiki. Nothing sucks more than losing a cat.
I'm so sorry. Sending you and Kiki love today.
i'm so sorry. i went through that with one of my own recently. please make sure she knows she is loved.
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 “mom and pop” software market. Itch.io feels like it’s doing a lot of work for indie software that used to just be everywhere and easy to stumble onto.
If selling software for money wasn’t 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.
If you accept cryptocurrency you don’t 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).
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.
I very possibly would have dialed into your BBS in the late 90s :)
403 had some great local boards, of both the public domain and piratey kind!
"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.
Sometimes we build things for the way it should be, rather than the way it is.
That must be the first time in a very long time that I've seen something claim to support PHP 4.
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.
Like everything it depends on your goals. As a novice developer PHP is wonderful. Everything you see as an obvious security failing is exactly what made it great to a new dev back when most of that was still allowed by default.
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.
> 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.
Oh ! i cannot see myself doing php again, loved the language and have some good memories too but that me was 10 years ago
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
It's not impossible for me to read, but it is uncomfortable enough that it'd give me a headache if I tried to read it.
Really? I can read it just fine. It’s probably your monitor brightness settings, which is still a design flaw on their part regardless
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".
Just because you can see the source code does not make it open source. Shareware software is proprietary software.
Open source means free software, which is a license that allows unrestricted use of the source code. Shareware isn’t free (as in speech OR as in beer) software.
The definition of OSS is well defined, and isn’t my definition. This is why there is a term called “OSI-approved license”.
It's not closed source.