Student48

Let me dilute my posts with a story from the past - after all, this is a blog, isn't it?

Being a slightly better performing student, I often had to help my classmates. Sometimes with advice, sometimes directly with my work. Some students find it easier and clearer to do something when they have a ready-made example - I'm not necessarily talking about complete copying and using someone else's work, so this practice wasn't considered shameful.

At the same time, besides classmates, there were also students from the same year and junior years who could be helped this way for free, but there was no place to set up a shared file exchange for everyone, and some systematization of materials was needed.

Pretty quickly, I came up with the idea to put all my materials on the web so that anyone interested could get access to them immediately. The first version of the site was quickly cobbled together and hosted on free hosting - essentially it was just static HTML where I manually added links to files that I uploaded via FTP.

This routine approach quickly became tedious, especially since the hosting started placing rather sketchy advertising banners on the site without permission, simply embedding them in the HTML.

The next version of the site didn't take long to arrive - it was already a full-fledged content management system, though still quickly cobbled together in pure PHP 5.6. But it was all hosted on a VPS in France with a separate domain (the cheapest one I could find at the time, but it served faithfully and even survived a data center fire). After some consideration between tying it to LSTU and having a more general focus, it got the name student48.ru

The site already included an admin panel where I could upload files without connecting via FTP, as well as a database with lists of courses/semesters/subjects and specific materials. There were also site news and a guestbook, where some particularly clever users wrote XSS, and later a file exchange was added with the ability to upload their own materials (which, however, wasn't wildly popular - it turned out that few people were ready to share their work).

Even later, a section with cheat sheets was added to the site, which, naturally, contained materials with answers to exam questions. For the sake of more convenient exam preparation, of course, nothing criminal.

For a provincial university website, the project turned out to be surprisingly popular, and by the time I graduated from university in 2014, it was getting 15-20 thousand views per month. After that, the numbers gradually decreased, despite periodic attempts to motivate new students to upload their work (à la Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia or Puss in Boots from Shrek). The relevance of materials quickly faded, and the project ended its existence in 2021, having about 4 thousand views per month.

There's also a separate story connected with its end - after 9 years(!), when the domain renewal time came (~6$), I decided that I was tired and wanted to quit. This was announced to the site users by a pop-up Boris Yeltsin, asking the audience if there was anyone worthy to continue my work.

One person responded (our additional professional education student, by the way), to whom the domain rights were transferred along with all backups. Unfortunately, this person turned out to be not a worthy successor of my path, and the site ceased to exist.

It's funny that I still meet LSTU graduates at work who remember this site and are surprised when they learn that I'm its creator.

Thanks to the VK group where I posted some announcements, a number of screenshots have been preserved, we can get nostalgic:

Git and other version control systems weren't so popular at that time, though at some point I did create a repository on Bitbucket, but unfortunately, Bitbucket deleted my repository due to inactivity. Nevertheless, I still had a backup of all files, so I uploaded the archive to GitHub - you can dig through my 10-year-old code at student48 repo.

P.S. The 48 in the name and in my nickname on some resources is the region code from the Russian Federation.