I miss this era of the Internet. It represents a period of time where average people used the open Web to publish, rather than post on a corporation's platform.
Obviously there's been plenty of development since then that I would not give back, but people favoring publishing their own sites rather than posting on social media is not incompatible with those developments. That part didn't need to be lost.
I used to have a Geocities containing weird bad poetry I wrote when I was a teenager.
I forgot about it, until years later I stumbled upon it again. I was embarrassed. I asked Yahoo to delete it.
But I'd forgotten the password, and I'd used fake personal details (wrong date of birth) to create the account, and I couldn't remember what the fake info was, so they refused to delete it because I couldn't verify that I was who I said I was.
What do I do? I hit on a solution. I decided to DMCA myself.
I sent Yahoo a DMCA takedown request for my old Geocities, and straight away it disappeared. Mission accomplished.
This reminds me of my first Geocities website: a full repository of KoRn's lyrics to date.
It's not that this didn't exist elsewhere on the internet (indeed it did, as of course I used these other sites as source material), but nowhere seemed to have the exact red-text-on-black-background look I was going for at the time.
The most excruciating part of this memory is not that I worshipped a nu-metal band, but instead that I hadn't yet discovered the magic of copying and pasting text. That's right: everything, from the lyrics themselves to the HTML tags, were typed manually by yours truly into the raw HTML editor.
I shudder to think how quickly I'd be fired today if I hadn't learned how to properly use a modern keyboard.
When I was ~12, the spacebar on the family computer broke. We didn't have a lot of money at the time and a new keyboard was a luxury we couldn't afford. The only way to enter a space was to paste it! So when booted into Windows, I'd find a space in a file name or a document, copy it and I'd paste it when it was needed (I just started learning how to code so I needed it often). Upshot of this was that nobody in my family wanted to bother with pasting a space every time, so I had a lot more time on the computer.
I actually had a similar experience as a kid reading fan fiction for the Legend of Zelda games. I wanted to share the fan fiction I was reading with friends at school, but my family's "internet computer" had no printer, and our "printer computer" (an old Laser 486) had no internet, so I had no way of printing the stories I found on the internet.
Had I understood the concept of saving web pages (or even copy and pasting text), I could have stored the stories I wanted to share as plaintext files, put them on a floppy disk, and then transferred them to the Laser 486 to print. The idea that the text could be transferred from one machine to the other didn't really register with me, so what I did instead was to read Zelda fanfic online, then rush upstairs to the other computer with enough of the story still fresh in my head and re-construct the stories as best I could from memory. Usually, I tried to imitate the style and structure of the original fanfiction, but sometimes I would inject my own personal style or intentionally change details in places where I felt like my own imagination could improve over what I recalled of the original story. The longer I did this, the more I found myself re-writing others' stories rather than aiming to simply reproduce them, sometimes to the point where my "imitation" could barely be distinguished as an attempt to copy.
I started writing fiction professionally in my 20's (which I'd consider to be a fairly young age), and I think a big part of what allowed me to go pro so young is that under the Malcolm Gladwell "10,000 hours of practice" model I ended up getting most of my practice in pretty early (at the time not even acting with the intention of practicing fiction writing), so perhaps my inability to copy and paste text was ultimately responsible for kicking off my career as a storyteller. In retrospect, re-writing fan fiction was the modern equivalent of apocrypha (non-canon stories) repeated and passed down through oral tradition.
I actually still force myself type out anything that's important enough for me to know it or understand it. Text, code, doesn't matter. Some things I'll even write by hand if I really think it's important enough for me to remember.
When I was in high school I created a website just to annoy my cranky teacher, Mr. Davis. The concept was simple, I got people to constantly ambush the teacher in the middle of classes and hug him while I took pictures. Then I posted them to the website, Hug Mr. Davis, along with really dumb text.
It got a little out of hand, there's a picture on there of a football player tackling Mr. Davis in the middle of a lesson (I think he got suspended).
Mr. Davis threatened to sue me if I didn't take the website down. I left it up, but became the only student at my high school banned from bringing cameras to school.
This brings back memories, the days when geocities, and software like frontpage and dreamweaver were a thing.
Most personal websites were exactly like this, word art, silly animated GIFs, "under construction" images, the author being optimistic about updating the site.
Soemtimes you'd come across someone who'd made a site that more focussed around a special interest and they updated it often, a personal endevour that probably never got that many views, but my god sometimes you'd come across some gems.
Every now and then I go to the Space Jam site because for some reason they still host it. Some great 90s web stuff in there, especially all of the tiled backgrounds and liberal use of frames.
https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm
I love it. I have an unreasonable amount of nostalgia for old websites like this. This is what the whole Web looked like back in the early days, before the usability and design gurus figured out the "best practices" and all sites started looking the same. It really was a wild new frontier. I'm not saying the Web was objectively better back then, but it sure was fun.
I just found my first website (from January 2000) in the Wayback Machine. Not gonna post it here, but it's actually not that bad -- it had a consistent header, sidebar navigation, and a collection of nerdy sci-fi jokes that for some strange reason I thought were hilarious. :/
Did the web need to look like this? I was born in '83, and I was super excited to get on the net in the early 90's. Just don't know if we just lacked the ideas or if we couldn't make them look better.
The copy on that site is next level cringe worthy.
Also, does anyone remember the original Andy's Art Attack when it came to design? http://www.brucelevick.com/andyart/. Make sure to click into one of the pages because the sidebar was epic for its time.
There is a movement, called "tilde communities", to bring back personal pages and BBS-like communities. I'm part of http://tilde.town for instance. It's quite remarkable how the simple restriction of community size makes for an entirely different experience than, say, twitter or facebook. Knowing that I will re-encounter the same folks, and that I am not yet their friends (although we are friendly) creates an interesting cultural constraint that feels much more like a small town experience. We talk about cats, fun software ideas, and sex changes. We exchange messages on a local bulletin board. We play text games. It's fun and small, and more meaningful somehow.
That's awesome. I recently found my first site is up too(http://home.earthlink.net/~flighttime/justins/). Still running on free hosting from my family's ISP from 20 years ago. Complete with a Dodgers' schedule from 1998.
Making interactive forms and CGIs was where I really started getting inspired to learn programming. Matt's scripts were some of the first perl I learned from. I basically transformed WWWBoard into a web-based chat back in '97.
Really makes me cringe to read some of that text, but that was high school.
Oh, and even more eye-bleeding is the page I ran for a Nomic that I was in, and webmaster (sorry, "Secretarylet of the Revolution in charge of Web Pages") for: http://www.nomic.net/deadgames/macronomic/. I don't know what I was thinking when picking that particular shade of red; red made sense, but I'm sure that even with the palettes available back then, I could have picked one a bit less painful.
It's not embarrassing at all! It's no different than picking on the clothes we used to wear back in the 90s. Everyone was neon, too large, and a bit too flashy. It's a product of the times.
It's always kind of neat to look at these sites and see the creativity of them. I wasn't really on the internet back then, but I do remember just looking for all of those multi-color joke sites. I love it when these sites pop up here.
Some things are just worth keeping around, just so that we don't lose our history and zeitgeist of earlier decades. We don't have photographs to remind us and if the old internet dies, we lose a huge chunk of what made today possible.
Are we still on Web 2.0? I'm guessing you're referring to Web 1.0. I find it amusing that nobody called it Web 1.0 even after they started talking about 2.0.
My personal site is nowhere near as funny as the e-commerce site that my dad and I started that was built off of his brick-and-mortar bicycle store chain. Dad edited the site with some horrible text editor. There was no shopping cart; you would email or fax your order form to us with your credit card on it. People still loved it and we were getting dozens of orders a day within a couple of weeks of launching.
Missed the early 90s; started late in 1999. However, I remember the fun Flash era in the early 21st century. I played my part religiously (my name was on the credit roll of the Flash IDE). Published my personal site[1] for the first time in 2001, with designs inspired by the likes of 2Advanced, Ultrashock. It went on for few years. I remember those days where design award was a thing. My site used to win quite a bit. :-)
I also remember using Blogger[2] to publish to my site via their "Publish to FTP" feature. I remember using a different comment system because Blogger didn't have its own. Later, moved to Movable Type[3]. Beta tested WordPress[4] at a time when it had no option to create pages. I think, by 2003/2004, my website became just a full-fledged blog, powered by WordPress and it remained to this day.
The early 00's was, indeed, an era of lots of fun and experiments.
[+] [-] Legion|8 years ago|reply
Obviously there's been plenty of development since then that I would not give back, but people favoring publishing their own sites rather than posting on social media is not incompatible with those developments. That part didn't need to be lost.
[+] [-] skissane|8 years ago|reply
I forgot about it, until years later I stumbled upon it again. I was embarrassed. I asked Yahoo to delete it.
But I'd forgotten the password, and I'd used fake personal details (wrong date of birth) to create the account, and I couldn't remember what the fake info was, so they refused to delete it because I couldn't verify that I was who I said I was.
What do I do? I hit on a solution. I decided to DMCA myself.
I sent Yahoo a DMCA takedown request for my old Geocities, and straight away it disappeared. Mission accomplished.
[+] [-] Firerouge|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unethical_ban|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suddensleep|8 years ago|reply
It's not that this didn't exist elsewhere on the internet (indeed it did, as of course I used these other sites as source material), but nowhere seemed to have the exact red-text-on-black-background look I was going for at the time.
The most excruciating part of this memory is not that I worshipped a nu-metal band, but instead that I hadn't yet discovered the magic of copying and pasting text. That's right: everything, from the lyrics themselves to the HTML tags, were typed manually by yours truly into the raw HTML editor.
I shudder to think how quickly I'd be fired today if I hadn't learned how to properly use a modern keyboard.
[+] [-] art0rz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mratzloff|8 years ago|reply
Boom na da mmm dum na ema
Da boom na da mmm dum na ema GO!
So... fight something on the... dum na ema
Fight... some things they fight
So... something on the ...dum na ema
Fight... some things they fight
Fight... something on the... dum na ema
No... some things they fight
Fight... something of the... dum na ema
Fight... some things they fight
Part of me...
Oh...
[+] [-] Kuiper|8 years ago|reply
Had I understood the concept of saving web pages (or even copy and pasting text), I could have stored the stories I wanted to share as plaintext files, put them on a floppy disk, and then transferred them to the Laser 486 to print. The idea that the text could be transferred from one machine to the other didn't really register with me, so what I did instead was to read Zelda fanfic online, then rush upstairs to the other computer with enough of the story still fresh in my head and re-construct the stories as best I could from memory. Usually, I tried to imitate the style and structure of the original fanfiction, but sometimes I would inject my own personal style or intentionally change details in places where I felt like my own imagination could improve over what I recalled of the original story. The longer I did this, the more I found myself re-writing others' stories rather than aiming to simply reproduce them, sometimes to the point where my "imitation" could barely be distinguished as an attempt to copy.
I started writing fiction professionally in my 20's (which I'd consider to be a fairly young age), and I think a big part of what allowed me to go pro so young is that under the Malcolm Gladwell "10,000 hours of practice" model I ended up getting most of my practice in pretty early (at the time not even acting with the intention of practicing fiction writing), so perhaps my inability to copy and paste text was ultimately responsible for kicking off my career as a storyteller. In retrospect, re-writing fan fiction was the modern equivalent of apocrypha (non-canon stories) repeated and passed down through oral tradition.
[+] [-] exolymph|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milesvp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmarreck|8 years ago|reply
I used to be a hardcore industrial fan
[+] [-] TipVFL|8 years ago|reply
It got a little out of hand, there's a picture on there of a football player tackling Mr. Davis in the middle of a lesson (I think he got suspended).
Mr. Davis threatened to sue me if I didn't take the website down. I left it up, but became the only student at my high school banned from bringing cameras to school.
http://www.oocities.org/hugmrdavis/ (click picture to enter)
[+] [-] crtasm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jypepin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mherrmann|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bartread|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azinman2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brokenmachine|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djhworld|8 years ago|reply
Most personal websites were exactly like this, word art, silly animated GIFs, "under construction" images, the author being optimistic about updating the site.
Soemtimes you'd come across someone who'd made a site that more focussed around a special interest and they updated it often, a personal endevour that probably never got that many views, but my god sometimes you'd come across some gems.
[+] [-] owlninja|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheGRS|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sedachv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ambrosite|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ambrosite|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samsonradu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cortesoft|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troxwalt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpeden|8 years ago|reply
I just wish the guestbook still worked. :)
I hadn't looked at the site in years and was actually surprised to find it still running. It's been on the same free hosting site for about 20 years.
[+] [-] noonespecial|8 years ago|reply
Write it in perl.
And lets us know its working again with a blink tag.
[+] [-] giarc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickjj|8 years ago|reply
- The midi version of the exorcist theme song[0] that autoplayed
- That old animated HR of a stickman peeing onto an internet explorer button
- Various 2600 magazine related documents and links
- A whole bunch of VB6 apps I made and their source code
- A guestbook / hit counter
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1PH_Y8Xn4g
BUT here's my first freelance web design site from 2001:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010201051000/http://darkelement...
The copy on that site is next level cringe worthy.
Also, does anyone remember the original Andy's Art Attack when it came to design? http://www.brucelevick.com/andyart/. Make sure to click into one of the pages because the sidebar was epic for its time.
[+] [-] greymeister|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canadaduane|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lukeas14|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nagVenkat|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpeden|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madrox|8 years ago|reply
Making interactive forms and CGIs was where I really started getting inspired to learn programming. Matt's scripts were some of the first perl I learned from. I basically transformed WWWBoard into a web-based chat back in '97.
[+] [-] Reedx|8 years ago|reply
His stuff was great and it was amazingly ubiquitous back then. If a site had an email form, forum or guestbook, chances are it was his work.
[+] [-] lambda|8 years ago|reply
Really makes me cringe to read some of that text, but that was high school.
Oh, and even more eye-bleeding is the page I ran for a Nomic that I was in, and webmaster (sorry, "Secretarylet of the Revolution in charge of Web Pages") for: http://www.nomic.net/deadgames/macronomic/. I don't know what I was thinking when picking that particular shade of red; red made sense, but I'm sure that even with the palettes available back then, I could have picked one a bit less painful.
[+] [-] ariofrio|8 years ago|reply
Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20050409065436/http://boglin.iwa...
[+] [-] forgotmypw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] econner|8 years ago|reply
Which scaleable node js javascript react framework did you build this with?
[+] [-] rpeden|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dizzystar|8 years ago|reply
It's always kind of neat to look at these sites and see the creativity of them. I wasn't really on the internet back then, but I do remember just looking for all of those multi-color joke sites. I love it when these sites pop up here.
I always enjoy showing people Zombo Com:
http://www.zombo.com/
Over time, Flash died and so they kept the spirit alive by creating an HTML5 version:
https://html5zombo.com/
Some things are just worth keeping around, just so that we don't lose our history and zeitgeist of earlier decades. We don't have photographs to remind us and if the old internet dies, we lose a huge chunk of what made today possible.
[+] [-] peterwwillis|8 years ago|reply
If you want a lot more of these pages, look through the webring directory. http://dir.webring.org/rw . Here is a random list of them from one user I found as an example: http://ss.webring.org/navbar?f=l;y=victoriavandyke;u=1001988...
A detailed description of webrings: http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/rng1/webring-dot-com-system.h...
[+] [-] oneplane|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZanrielJames|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrissnell|8 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/19961030052323/http://www.bikewo...
[+] [-] Brajeshwar|8 years ago|reply
I also remember using Blogger[2] to publish to my site via their "Publish to FTP" feature. I remember using a different comment system because Blogger didn't have its own. Later, moved to Movable Type[3]. Beta tested WordPress[4] at a time when it had no option to create pages. I think, by 2003/2004, my website became just a full-fledged blog, powered by WordPress and it remained to this day.
The early 00's was, indeed, an era of lots of fun and experiments.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20020515000000*/brajeshwar.com
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service)
3. https://www.movabletype.org/
4. https://wordpress.org/