You may have noticed that this blog exist(ed) at https://www-users.tebibyte.io/~yihanwu1024/ on May 16th, 2022. As its name suggests, this subdomain is for user-managed websites. Typically, the URL follows the form of https://www-users.example.org/~user/ or https://www.example.org/~user/, which, quite weirdly, feels a little bit retro.
This impression is because a typical www-users setup only serves static content for its simplicity to configure. www-users is extremely suitable for an environment where users have their system accounts on a server. The webserver parses the URL, gets the username, and serves files from a directory (typically named public_html) in the user’s home. In older UNIX systems, home directories were even readable by everyone by default, presumably because they trusted each other a lot.
Web 2 changed the landscape. In one aspect, users no longer hold system accounts, and instead use each service’s virtual account. And these services grew larger and larger, to a point where operating systems started creating home directories with restrictive permissions by default, too.
Everything is private by default.
Everything has huge depths, too. We rarely know what happens behind the scenes at Blogspot, Google. Or just anywhere else.
That’s why I am bringing www-users back. But with upgrades! We now have a PHP runtime which our users can choose to use. Debugging the NGINX configuration file took me forever, by the way.