18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

[geocrasher]

These simple sites show us something profound: If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. There are a some technologies that will never allow somebody to build a site and leave it unchanged for 20 or 25 years. Cold Fusion comes to mind. Almost nobody hosts it anymore for one. Can you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years? The version of PHP it runs on will be EOL long before.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page.

Looks like Web 1.0 got something right after all :)

[jgrahamc]

My 23 year old web site: https://jgc.org/ It's still updated from a Perl script that generates static HTML.

[dwheeler]

My personal site was posted on September 12, 1999, is still updated, and has no problems. It;s a static site that mostly uses straight HTML/CSS. There are a few scripts that generate pages, but generating HTML/CSS pretty easy. https://dwheeler.com.

Geocrasher said:

> I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page.

Yes. I don't get paid to maintain my personal site, so simplicity and longevity are most important. If I have to rewrite things because of incompatible changes in the infrastructure components (e.g., Python2 to Python3), or because proprietary company C has decided to stop supporting product P that I depend on, then I have to spend time that doesn't actually provide any new value. Keeping things simple, and minimizing dependencies, can be useful. Like everything else, there's a trade-off.

[mattkevan]

Once worked on an enormous, very popular site built by hand in Frontpage.

It had millions of pageviews, made over 6 figures a month in AdSense and been updated so often and for so long that the owner didn’t actually know how many pages there were. Had to hire someone just to index it.

Not bad for plain old html and css.

[rchaud]

Ah, the old days of the web, when it was possible to make money via AdSense. Users would actually bookmark sites those days, so there was no need to throw an email signup popup in their face when the page loaded. The comments would have real people conversing, and not filled with spambots pushing fake Guccis and Air Jordans.

[dmje]

As I spent half a day trying to wrangle my way through some sass grunt compiler frontend bullshit just trying to update the colour of some links on a client website, I find myself nodding sagely again. In the early days you could view source, see what was going on, copy and recreate someone else’s site, learn a whole bunch of new stuff and actually get shit done. Now, it’s all JavaScript bullshit and 100k lines of css. It’ll last about a month before it’s out of date and replaced by the Next Big Thing. HTML, css, a sprinkle of JavaScript. That’s what’s proven to last.

[zladuric]

I'm not sure a FrontPage site would be much better. It's also a big mess of generated markup you'd have to go through manually, if you didn't have the proper FP version.

[dbalatero]

My favorite like this site is http://www.burger.com - this dude has a hilarious array of hobbies and awesome beveled button links.

[cgh]

He is a member of the Cherokee Nation with interests ranging from model railroading to fireflies. And he puts it all out there on his personal webpage, updated regularly since 1996. There was a time when it was normal to stumble upon pages like this one.

[dabeeeenster]

Have to wonder how much that domain name is worth...?

[cameronbrown]

"Webmaster" - I miss that term..

[mtm7]

I went from a page that said:

> My charge for typical business or civil work is $450.00 per hour.

To one that said:

> I am a relative newcomer to the world of turtles.

...in two clicks. I love this site.

Also learned a recipe for a quick and easy blackberry cobbler[0].

[0]: http://www.burger.com/bcobbler.htm

[zeitg3ist]

To this day I still visit www.scaruffi.com to read his opinions about music - the layout hasn’t changed since the 90s or even the 80s for some pages.

[LukeBMM]

24 years of weekly quotes is actually really impressive.

[mhandley]

But is it still running on Cern/3.0, installed circa 1993. Ours is:

  $ nc www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk 80
  HEAD /staff/m.handley/ HTTP/1.0                    

  HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows
  MIME-Version: 1.0
  Server: CERN/3.0
  Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2020 17:02:59 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Content-Length: 9185
  Last-Modified: Sun, 16 Jun 2019 15:27:37 GMT

It's running on Sun Sparc hardware from the same era, and has been in active use for all of those 27 years.

[nonamenoslogan]

I used to have a bunch of Sparc's circa-early 2000's. Sold some, recycled some, wish I'd have kept at least one. The price of a SparcstationLX that works is silly now-a-days.

[webscalist]

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... 100 Points. Mobile First. Better than React Native.

[pmlnr]

100 points on pagespeed is not that hard with static sites.

- drop 99% of the JS (PWA, lazy-loading, infinite scroll, jquery, you don't need any of them for a webpage), convert the remaining for 1% to vanilla js and use it as progressive enhancement.

- use EM or % as layout width/height

- inline css, js, and svg

EDIT

- no webfonts!

The only thing that'll remain as an issue are tables wider, than viewport, on mobile.

My site: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

[stabbles]

This is hilarious! Turns out 18 year old websites were mobile friendly after all

[nyuszika7h]

> Unable to process request. Please wait a while and try again.

[1_player]

I'm surprised to see <marquee> still exists and works in modern browsers. And saddened to see it updates at ~20fps, at least on Safari.

Time for a smooth, GPU accelerated 60+fps marquee implementation?

[seisvelas]

While <marquee> support is near universal, I was sad to find out that <blink> has not fared so well.

I'm sure a lot of you already know this easter egg, but if you search "blink tag" in Google, Google makes all the blink tags actually work (using JS of course but still)

https://www.google.com/search?q=blink+tag

[SketchySeaBeast]

Wait, how do the rest of you test if a field accepts or rejects html?

[throwaway_fbnet]

Here is a life-saver maintained by a 77 year young lawyer for a lot of public good: http://www.drtsolutions.com/. Case laws against SARFAESI, an Indian law that expedites bank recovery for non-performing assets. He updates it manually in FrontPage even today!

[jannes]

Wow, that page is amazing!

I hadn't seen the old Google logo in years: http://www.drtsolutions.com/drtqueries.htm The search widget doesn't even use an <iframe>. Just a plain <form>.

[drops]

One of the most prolific and well-known music reviewers - Pierro Scaruffi - has a website built in 1995 with a design not updated much, or at all, since: https://www.scaruffi.com

[ctruelson]

Similar to Robert Christgau! https://robertchristgau.com/

[alexmorenodev]

He even reviewed one of my favorites albums launched recently: https://www.scaruffi.com/vol8/bentknee.html

[rchaud]

I've come across this site many times when looking up different bands...the breadth and diversity of bands and genres covered here is truly amazing!

[jacquesm]

That's a great website, thank you.

[attil-io]

> This website does NOT use cookies. Period.

Love it!

[generationP]

I sympathize with the author. I have built my maths site just 2 years after this one, when I was in high school. Ever since I've only been adding material, and occasionally moving old stuff into subdirectories; other than that, it's the same old geocities website made with FPE, except it's now hosted on a university server and has my academic title and office and no more colored background. Oh, and I now edit it with notepad++ and track it with git.

I've had plans to rebuild it for the last 8 years or so, to make it better and slicker and easier to navigate (as it stands, my new papers are mixed together with my scribe notes from undergrad). But I never figured out how to achieve this without also requiring javascript or relying on tools that may not survive the next decade and that I cannot tweak to my needs without learning a new programming language (hello Jekyll, hi Hugo). Nor did I ever find the Right Way how it should be structured; move one thing to the front and something else gets harder to find. I guess it will survive me.

Makes me a lot less judgmental when I see another academic website that can trace its lineage back to geocities and angelfire.

[geocrasher]

My favorite "Retro awful": Site:

https://www.lingscars.com/

[cosmodisk]

I remember how she was ridiculed on Dragon's Den,yet she's the one employing a bunch of people and having a successful business. I remember reading that she's even hired someone to do some maintenance in the town,because the local council couldn't afford it anymore.

[ahmetkun]

this one looks very retro but the code is actually quite modern. it has custom fonts, css animations, gradients, etc. and no tables.

[matteuan]

It's impressive the amount of content inside! There are countless pages about literature, religion and physics. It's a good reminder of the original goal of WWW: share information.

[dpcan]

In my ~17 year career as a professional web developer and consultant, I'm not sure that any technology has made me more frustrated and miserable than the days when I had to help people who insisted on using Frontpage to build their websites.

[DannyB2]

Remember the Front Page license.

Originally, Front Page had a four page license. It specified that if you use Front Page to create a web site, you cannot disparage Microsoft, Expedia and a list of several other Microsoft owned properties.

So with a license like that, I can't assume that any site created with Front Page is unbiased when it comes to a list of various Microsoft owned properties.

After the slashdot effect (long ago) Microsoft removed this from the license.

[oftenwrong]

There is a search engine dedicated to finding "classic" websites:

https://wiby.me/

Click the "surprise me..." link to see a random one.

[0xferruccio]

There’s so many italian old italian sites with this design

My favorite in High Scool was http://ripmat.it

That site is the only reason I managed to learn Math school

[acomjean]

Those backgrounds are fantastic. Just right arrowing through them... is a trip. http://ripmat.it/mate/a/ac/ac5.html

[barbarbar]

This site is very fast.

[timonoko]

My personal web-page is from 1992 and updated occasionally. This page is preserved as it was in 1994: http://timonoko.github.io/alaska . It started as Gopher-page in 1992 and I just moved those associated pictures into it, without truly understanding formatting and all that shit. Some dudes in Usenet told me about <p> and <img> tags.

[Santosh83]

The biggest drawback of sites from this era is they don't reflow on mobile screens. On a desktop they still work as well as they ever did. I'm still searching for a good WYSIWYG HTML composer that can generate clean, responsive pages. Seems like this is a problem where there isn't sufficient incentive for the big tech companies to tackle, and the only s/w that seems to come close is BlueGriffon.

[thanatropism]

> I'm still searching for a good WYSIWYG HTML composer that

You need a dev team implementing Agile for react-native-ux with CI/CD capabilities and devops.

[jacquesm]

That's a client side problem, not a server side problem. The rendering and presentation of a webpage are entirely up to the client, absolutely nothing dictates that a page should look a certain way on a certain client.

[verytrivial]

Well, I'm not so sure -- have you tried viewing that site via a WAP proxy? That's the 2002 way to solve the problem.