Twenty years ago, almost to the day, I shipped hostnamr — a silly little one-page web app for generating pronounceable hostnames from Japanese hiragana syllables and do-re-mi solfège. Back then it ran on Ruby on Rails, later moved to Sinatra, and was hosted on RedHat’s OpenShift cloud. Then life happened, OpenShift changed, and it quietly went offline.

This week I brought it back. Not as a server-side app — as a static page, hosted on GitHub Pages. The original HTML, CSS and JavaScript from 2006 are untouched and still run just fine in a 2026 browser. Nothing short of amazing, honestly.

The only real change: I retired the Ruby backend and ported the two name generators (Hiragana and Solmisation) to a small, self-contained JavaScript file. The rest — the Prototype.js, the domtab tab switcher, the three-column layout — is exactly as it was.

If you want to see what a “web 2.0” single page application looked like in 2006, here you go. And if you want to read the original launch post from back then, that’s still here too.

Oh, and one more thing though: I took out google analytics…

have fun