the story of dancraft.org


part 1: the backstory

The term 'dancraft' came from our teacher Dan who always made random crafts out of stuff he found on the ground.

This is the first official 'dancraft'.
There were some before but this was the one that cemented the name 'dancraft'. When we went to an excursion to a Chinese restaraunt, Dan went outside for a "breath of fresh air" and found an assortment of items and cobbled them together into something.

My friend Joey compared Dan to a witch, saying "What witchcraft is to witches, dancraft is to Dan." The term was later compared the popular video game 'Minecraft'.

The 'dancraft' that was made was given to the Chinese restaraunt owner as a token of appreciation for our meal. The owner said he would put it in his garden, which everyone but Dan didn't believe. We all thought it would be in a dumpster by the next week. Suprisingly, we found out that he had kept the 'dancraft' and it was in his garden. My other teacher Martin, went to the restaraunt a few months later with his family and got this photo as proof.

part 2: the website idea

After that, 'dancraft' became a joke in our classroom. I was bored one day during class around April so I went to google and looked up 'dancraft' to see what showed up. The first result was 'dancraft.co.uk' which manufactures 'military pace sticks' whatever those are. I also found 'dancraft.net', a dead minecraft server.

I was curious as to what 'dancraft.com' was so I put it in the address bar. What showed up was a GoDaddy page saying the website is for sale. I had wanted to host a website for a while, so I asked Martin if we could send them an email to see how much it was. Me and my friend thought it would be funny to have a dancraft website. He said yes, as it would be a good opportunity to learn how to talk to people in a business sense via email and if it was too expensive, how to politely decline and say sorry for wasting your time.

We were connected with a man named Steven to negotiate the price of 'dancraft.com'. He lived in the UK, whereas we were in Australia, so the email corrospondance was very slow, due to the difference in time zones. It took over a week, but we finally got the price he wanted to sell it for. The price was set for over $10,000 AUD. TEN THOUSAND AUSTRALIAN DOLLARS. My first thought was, "are you fucking with us?". We very quickly realised that there was no way in hell we were getting the 'dancraft.com' domain. A few days later we declined, saying that it was out of our budget at the moment. It was not out of our budget at the moment, it was out of our budget in our entire lifetime. Our budget was maybe $100 max. We had severly underestimated Steven.

part 3: the hosting

Before we had hit up Steven on his email, a small youtuber that I'm subscribed to uploaded a video about website hosting: Free or extremely cheap web hosting by U0YKNAHT0N. In the video he recommended a multitude of services, but the one I was most interested in was a website called homebrewserver.club. It's a website that guides you on how to self-host your own website from home or anywhere.

I browsed through the site and read through the instructions. When I felt like I understanded what the instructions were, I decided to try it out at home. First, I needed a computer to host the website on. It needed to be one that used little power and could be run 24/7. I had an old Raspberry Pi that was perfect for the task. I set it up with Raspberry Pi OS without a Desktop Environment because for what I was using it for I didn't need a GUI. I set it up connected with WiFi and SSH so that I could connect to it via my PC. All I had to do was plug the Raspberry Pi in and make sure it was on and it was all good to go.

Then I went to my ISP settings and opened both ports 80 and 443 on the raspberry pi's IP address.
Then later I bought the dancraft.org domain, as it was SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than dancraft.com. Later me and my classmates thought dancraft.org was funnier, as if we were some kind of organization.
Once I bought the dancraft.org domain I connected it to my public outward IP address.

part 4: the planning

Me and my class then thought up a plan. I wanted to make it looks like an old 90's geocities site. We felt that if Dan would make a website it would be one of those. We mocked up an initial design on paper.

I then started coding the website. I used my experience running an old personal website to build it. I wanted to add a guestbook widget and looked up guestbook sites and signed up to one but realised that it was going to shut down in July. But then I found one that someone made in JavaScript which could just be added to the site natively and not have to use a third-party website. It had it's own ugly CSS so I edited to match the style on dancraft.org

part 5: the interaction

On the front page I added a website hit counter to count every time a new IP visited the website.