It feels strange, typing about something I'm interested in, into a raw HTML document directly. It feels like the old Internet, the way things were supposed to be, static HTML pages which occasionally featured a POST request you could make to some database. But everything has changed so rapidly since that point in time, and now we have React or Vue requiring build pipelines and node_modules folders larger than the actual application, authentication flows that pass through three different OAuth providers before you can leave a comment, and websites that won't load a single paragraph of text without executing 2MB of JavaScript. Somewhere along the way, we traded simplicity and ownership for "developer experience" and "modern best practices."
I miss when you could view source on a webpage and actually understand what you were looking at. When "publishing to the web" meant editing an HTML file and uploading it via FTP, not configuring CI/CD pipelines and managing environment variables across staging and production. When a personal website was just files on a server.
This page you're reading right now? It's just HTML. No framework, no build step, no package.json with 400 dependencies. I wrote it in a text editor, saved it, and it works. You can right-click on this page, navigate to Sources on your web inspector, and see the full content of this page in HTML format. That shouldn't feel revolutionary in 2025, but somehow it does.
That was the motivation behind the Zurvur (powered by the Shitbox, as I affectionately call it). Repurpose old hardware that had seemingly been phased out by years of new releases and CPU versions into something that can serve a modern webpage. And you know what? It worked! The fact you're reading this text right now is proof of this.
Even despite the 14 years' worth of hardware exploits that had to be patched at the software level, incurring untold amounts of performance implications, this 2011 device can still serve you a webpage the old fashioned way in 2025. It just seems impossible. It feels like tech from a decade ago or more should work at a snail's pace compared to modern-day requests. But here is the Zurvur, a piece of technology from a bygone era, still handling requests from 14 years past its manufacturing date.
I just think that's really cool.