Ask HN: What's the quickest way to get something online? Hey HN, I have this frustration with the modern web. Everything's locked into a platform or requires a build step or CI. It got me thinking the other day: what's the easiest way to sync a TXT file onto the web? I thought about FTP, scp, Dropbox, GitHub — but all of them require multiple manual steps and feel complex. It got my wondering: why isn't it easier today to put something on the internet than it was 10 years ago? |
What did the "easy" way look like 10 years ago? I don't recall any method that wouldn't require at least some manual steps.
I'm wondering why nothing simpler/more automatic has popped up.
From what I remember, everything always had a few steps... Perhaps you're suffering from "rosy retrospection"?!
Pastebin is another option for simple text.
For slightly more complex sites, check out Vercel or Cloudflare Pages. Both will host your site for free with reasonable quotas.
As for: > why isn't it easier today to put something on the internet than it was 10 years ago?
It IS. Just put it on farcebook or tweeter or medium or blogwhatever. Even easier than geocities.
People don't want to spend eons discovering and reading your poorly formatted text file or janky HTML that doesn't work with phones and is vulnerable to drive-by ad injections and such. If you just have a simple message, those networks do a more effective job (for better or worse) of disseminating it. Readers flock to those networks because it makes content consumption easier.
It's like asking why you have to jump through major publishing houses to get your book on the front of the store display shelves, when anyone used to be able to write and bind a book. You still can, but the world at large doesn't want to spend effort sorting through your stuff and every other amateur's. It's not the ease of publication that matters to them, but the curation. The signal to noise ratio is too low otherwise (and is still very low even with curation).
From the hosting side, free web hosts became a victim of their own success, economonically infeasible, especially as bots and spiders took over the net. Most of the web is junk these days and there's not really much money in making it easier to publish more junk.
From the dev side, the CI and build tools are only necessary if you want to heavily use Javascript for interactivity or clientside loading. Plain ol' HTML and CSS work as they always have, with no building required. Just host it somewhere.
$ echo '<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29253277">question</a>' > question.html
$ scp question.html oilshell.org:oilshell.org/share
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scp has worked the same way for ~20 years. It completes in ~10 ms, and there's no password prompt because I have ssh-agent set up.
I have used Dreamhost since 2009 and it works great: https://www.dreamhost.com/
i.e. It has survived every single HN front page spike with no problems. If you make reasonable web pages then they're very easy to serve.
I have multiple domains under the same hosting account for less than $10/month. I prefer to pay what the service costs to run rather than rely on free hosting subsidized in other ways.
Shared hosting with shell access is an underrated commodity. It seems that many people are not aware that it exists, compared to VPS or the cloud (both of which require you to become a sys admin, not just a shell user).
I think the main barrier is that many features are hidden behind the shell, and admittedly it took me quite awhile to learn. I started using the web in 1994 or so, and didn't really learn how Unix works until over 10 years later, after my second job!
But I suggest taking the time to learn our shared language of computing and networking. It will still be around in 10 years, as opposed to all the free services of startups! They are convenient, but non-composable, which means you get hamstrung when you want to build bigger things.
Buy a domain, create a new site linked to a Github repo, and write HTML and push!
(Not a paid shill, just a happy user)
But to the question asker's original point
> what's the easiest way to sync a TXT file onto the web?
For my personal website I use a custom static site generator and rsync
> rsync -a output_folder/ website_host:/var/www/website_folder --delete;
where "website_host" is an alias in my SSH config file.
> [...] all of them require multiple manual steps and feel complex
I create a bash script called "publish.sh" in every project so I don't have to remember these things.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Hostin...
Both of these are still an option. Today, I reach for Netlify which I think is easier—-just drag and drop a folder if git is too much.
I would really like to hear the answer to that! And why the 10-years-ago thing can't be done today.
I would think with improvements in tech, things would actually become simpler.
It is not much easier and cheaper nowadays than 10 years ago because is has always been quite easy - with the main change that a cert for https is free nowadays.
If you literally mean a txt made public: gdrive, Dropbox, notion, s3,…
Maybe ngrok fits the bill, to literally share a folder on the internet.
I am not sure why you are in such a rush. I would argue today it is easier than ever to „put something“ on the internet. I do not think it can be simpler that the options above. Either learn (a minimum amount) or be in somebody‘s platform. IMHO none is too bad, just different tradeoffs. Good luck!
how much do you care about the provenance of the file? I would just slap it into pastebin and call it a day. If that isn't what you mean, any commodity cpanel reseller will probably do. If you want even more control, Caddy is drop dead simple.
I built a way to show a static site on there too: https://github.com/abemassry/wsend-static
There are a lot of tools you can build on top of it as well because the core is simple: send a file, get a link.
I built something that was useful for me, 32,000 other people have found it useful as well, let me know if you have other questions as well. Thanks for checking it out!
1. GitHub pages or similar 2. Fastmail file hosting (or similar)
The first is pretty well known so I won’t waste your time explaining that. The second is a feature of some accounts for the Fastmail service which I personally use and recommend (no affiliation, just a happy customer). They give you a limited amount of space depending on your plan and you can upload files there. I haven’t done much with it this way, but in theory you could host a small scale static website that way fairly easy. Other providers certainly offer similar alternatives as well, this is just a “works for me” thing.
Good luck finding something you like!
I know, devil is in the details.
Digital Ocean probably has a one-click droplet for a static server you could use.
It ultimately depends on the usecase. Small web hosts still exist, you can also still stand up a personal fileserver at home in many cases and host a file to a few people. Heck you can even email some files or host it as a torrent.
If you need millions of people to see it and want it to be nearly guaranteed to survive with 99.99999... SLAs then yes, you probably do need all that platform complexity.
Some of these platforms make it relatively easy. S3 isn't too bad to get up to speed with for a quick sort of file hosting strategy.
> why isn't it easier today to put something on the internet than it was 10 years ago?
Interesting question. If it's easy, then probably you're putting your content onto someone else's domain. This leads to two issues (which are related).
1. The domain that's hosting your content can be legally responsible for it, so you have copyright and other legal issues which leads to them putting barriers in your way.
2. The host also might want to make money off your content, so they're going to want to control the ecosystem via things like logins, moderation, etc.
Copy paste the file in a directory, the whole directory is visible (index) as a page on the web. At this point you can just grab the link to the file and share it
I've used it before. it's great and fast and simple.
Highly not recommended, but get a static IP address and open a port on your home network to the internet that points to a folder you drag to would be the most open?
Create a new site. Create a text file. Paste in your content. Hosted!
The quick ways are generally locked into a platform. But if it's a text file, does that matter? If you don't want the lock in, there's some initial setup, but after that it can be drag/drop.
There's also some middle ground, like serving from a local NAS box. Still locked-in, but more under your control.
It allows anyone to generate a URL and just copy/paste or edit HTML content using the HTML contenteditable=true attribute.