It's extremely weird to see this site on HN! I built this site in 2014 -- and haven't touched it since. I wasn't a developer then, I was a product manager, and this was a "look, hiring managers, I can build things" side project (it worked, I've been a dev since 2016).
Despite being about 40% broken I keep the site up because it's still reasonably functional and there are a surprising amount of sites that now depend on having hotlinked the patterns directly from this domain. If it ever degrades to the point of being actively dangerous (and the attribution link rot is pretty close), I'll shut it down. Until then, it's a fun relic from the internet of a decade ago.
Just to answer a question upthread (and I 100% agree this should be on the website), the patterns are all CC-BY-3.0, meaning it just requires attribution and any pattern can be used for free.
> If it ever degrades to the point of being actively dangerous (and the attribution link rot is pretty close), I'll shut it down.
If you do shut it down, and safety is a concern, I would keep the domain going for a while with an “it is all gone…” message, otherwise as soon as it expires it'll be replaced by something less safe. Usually this will be a standard “domain for sale” page with a pile of trackers, but as this domain has hit the front page of HN today I expect several bots have just scraped the content so if they get the domain they can shove it back up with ads & trackers.
Or if you want it to survive but don't have time to clean up the rot, maybe do as someone else suggested and put in on GitHub, so others can fork & fix it, and replace the site at the current domain with a link to that so anyone following a link to the current domain can find the remnants and any forks. And if a particularly well maintained fork does turn up, perhaps link directly to that too.
Could the whole thing be open sourced and moved to Github pages so it can be forked and maintained? This is an amazing resource on par with the defunct Webtreats.etc that was never properly archived as far as I know outside of Wayback(Kinda).
I could even see this whole thing just being packaged into finished projects, to allow user or admin-selectable themes, especially with the new CSS features.
Assuming the CC-BY requirements are met using just the data that's available, this still has a lot of potential.
> If it ever degrades to the point of being actively dangerous (and the attribution link rot is pretty close), I'll shut it down.
To avoid the problem of linked domains leading to malware or things like that, you might consider linking to archived snapshots on Wayback Machine of the links instead of the real pages, for those sites that are now no longer hosting what they used to.
Please don't ever treat archive.org as a free CDN, they are a public library in need of your support, not free hosting for your side-project. There are enough free resources (e.g. Github Pages, Netlify, Cloudflare...) that are better suited for this task.
I think I actually meant to reply to dreadlordbone's comment, where they implied image hotlinking - "it loads slower" because archive.org is not a CDN.
I just replied to another one of your comments. This one also feels like an LLM. Your comments are so different from eachother when I go to your profile; some are like “ya me too bud” and some are so extremely chatgpt like, such as this one…
Despite being about 40% broken I keep the site up because it's still reasonably functional and there are a surprising amount of sites that now depend on having hotlinked the patterns directly from this domain. If it ever degrades to the point of being actively dangerous (and the attribution link rot is pretty close), I'll shut it down. Until then, it's a fun relic from the internet of a decade ago.
Just to answer a question upthread (and I 100% agree this should be on the website), the patterns are all CC-BY-3.0, meaning it just requires attribution and any pattern can be used for free.