About Wes’ Retro Site

This website is hosted by a 8.6 year old fanless computer on my desk in the Sunshine Coast region of Queensland Australia.

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           1.9Gi       340Mi       1.4Gi       1.3Mi       213Mi       1.5Gi
Swap:          3.6Gi          0B       3.6Gi

Filesystem        Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk1p3     25G    2.1G     21G       9%  /
/dev/mmcblk1p1    511M     79M    432M      16%  /boot

23:43:27 up 5 days,  9:02,  0 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

How

Connections are forwarded from my server to the computer over Tailscale. This way I don't need to worry about dynamic DNS, CGNAT, and port forwarding on my router. It's served over HTTP so that it works with old computers.

The server is running Chimera Linux and serves the site via a combination of Nginx and a custom written Rust program.

What

The site is hand coded in HTML 4. Pages are generated from MiniJinja templates. Static pages are generated with a Makefile at build time and served as static HTML. Dynamic pages (under the cgi-bin path) are generated by a custom server implemented in Rust.

The source code is on my forge.

Why?

Who could say? Mostly to scratch an itch, play with Tailscale, and pretend it's 1999 again, but importantly: because it's fun.

Compatibility

This website aims to be HTML4 Transitional compliant. It has been tested on:

• Internet Explorer 4.01 on Mac OS 8.1
• Netscape Navigator 3.01 on Mac OS 8.1
• Netscape Navigator 4.08 on Mac OS 8.1
• Netscape Navigator 4.08 on Windows 98
• modern Firefox

For the best experience the browser should support the UTF-8 text encoding (IE and Netscape 4 onwards support this) and be at least 640 pixels wide. Due to the nature of the table based layout used on the site it isn't super mobile friendly, it does work ok in landscape orientation though.

Credits

Icons

• mac icon
• ti89 icon
• pineapple icon
• welcome GIF
• sun palms GIF
• sun icon