Yeah I wrote my own guestbook with Perl in the late 90's and it lasted the entire life of the sites I used it on. Perl is great for stuff like that and it's supported by all kinds of hosting environments!
It's free hosting from the 90s, so no money for me! They inject that ad in exchange for hosting the site. Hopefully they're getting their money's worth today.
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.
This is a fantastic search engine. I clicked 'surprise me' and ended up at http://homebrewcpuring.org - a web ring! I don't think I've seen a web ring in 15 years. I wish they were still popular; what a wonderful way to discover new stuff.
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
We don't get a ton of media attention (and when we do it's usually stupid and focused on anachronistic design rather than creative control), but we're still growing steadily and getting a lot of really interesting new web sites and traffic.
Hey, do you want to collaborate somehow? A friend and I built this, and I know you like IPFS, plus we both miss the Geocities era, so we can probably find something to improve:
I don't think it's official. If you click on the links on that page, you are directed to the official Jeopardy and WOF websites. I suspect that at one time there were quite a few ads on this website. Glad it's still hosted though. I love looking at these sites, brings back a lot of great memories.
For example, when my school first got internet access. It was on two computers in the library. Each class would get scheduled time to come and "surf". You would prepare for your upcoming slot by coming up with a list of urls. I remember wanting to go to the TSN website (Canadian ESPN basically). They would list it during shows and I remember having to watch for a while because I couldn't write it all down at once... http://www.tsn.ca I would get a few characters, then have to wait for the next splash of the url.
Back in 97 I had a PS1 (then known as PSX) news site on Geocities that had a weekly newsletter with game reviews contributed by other internet randos. I actually got some free games to review from companies. I was too young to think of making a backup when it fizzled out, and I couldn't find it on that Geocities archive site. That made me deeply sad.
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. :/
I found mine on wayback and was shocked that you can actually make one move in the Othello game. The game ran as a CGI script (in C) and was stateless.
That's awesome, but to me it is an example of retro design -- that is, a site made to look as if it was built back then, not something that would actually have been built back then. Still very cool though.
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.
I can sort of see how social networking sites evolved from these kind of websites where people just wanted to share part of their personal lives. Thanks for sharing.
There is supposed to be more content, but it's ridiculously broken under webarchive indexing
Backgroundlar (wallpapers)
Gif arşivi yenilendi (gif archive)
Duvar Yazıları (some wall texts)
YENİ 1 ICQ KULLANICISI(Toplam 17 Kullanıcı) (apparently i had a list of potentially Turkish users).
İnter Emlak bölümünde kiralık ev arayan biri var (and my attempt for starting an online real estate site.
I really, really wish I could find my old Geocities website. It was mostly just a bunch of jokes I found around the Internet, and it'd be interesting to see what kind of stuff I found funny back in 1999.
It might be sitting on an old hard drive in my basement (I never dispose of them with other equipment, instead telling myself I will someday wipe them manually and/or drill through the platters).
> I never dispose of them with other equipment, instead telling myself I will someday wipe them manually and/or drill through the platters
Don't do that! Hoard them to sell on eBay for hobby money later. There is a looming retrocomputing SCSI hard drive shortage. You can already get good prices for 50-pin SCSI drives. I don't know about ATA/IDE drives, but I imagine people trying to build "authentic" systems will drive demand in the next decade as well.
Not for everyone. I know a few people that prefer to run real hard drives in their hardware, especially when they show at vintage computer exhibitions. These people go out of their way to get old ones for spare parts and to repair what they have. Adapters are the last resort when the drives they need can only be obtained for astronomical prices or not at all.
Oh yeah, for sure, I know there are many purists who want the legit original hardware. Just that many hobbyists who just want to run their favorite old computer(s) opt for the adapter as it's a lot easier to buy a bunch of SD cards, even if the adapters can be a bit pricy.
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.
I hope the younger folk appreciate all the web-design sins we committed before they were born, so that no one else need repeat them, ever again.
I might still have a page or two left over from 1998 or thereabouts, on a PATA hard drive collecting cosmic rays in my garage. But no, you can't see them. I am too ashamed.
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.
I don't remember exactly what I used to build these but it was probably some combination of AOLPress, Macromedia Dreamweaver, FrontPage, and Hotdog Professional FTP
I remember some of those old free text image sites where you could make stuff like your title. Ah the good old days. I'm disappointed by your lack of frames btw, I feel like every site had frames in frames back in those days. :)
426 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadI 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.
Write it in perl.
And lets us know its working again with a blink tag.
First update the site has seen in 19 years.
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.
http://idiom.com/~beverly/hans_resume.html
1. Get a copy of Dreamweaver 8, or 9[1].
2. Switch it to 'code' view only.
3. Install the HTML5 intellisense updates.
4. Create a new 'HTML template' that has HTML5 header tags.
5. Enjoy!
One perfectly good and usable HTML/JS/CSS editor, with what I feel is still the best intellisense for CSS around.
---
[1] '8' is better, as it's before Adobe took over, added bugs and renumbered it '9'. Seriously... they are functionally the same product.
We don't get a ton of media attention (and when we do it's usually stupid and focused on anachronistic design rather than creative control), but we're still growing steadily and getting a lot of really interesting new web sites and traffic.
My own old page: https://mat.tl/archive/1994.htm
https://hearth.eternum.io/
Neocities has some experimental support for IPFS, but there's much room for improvement here.
For example, when my school first got internet access. It was on two computers in the library. Each class would get scheduled time to come and "surf". You would prepare for your upcoming slot by coming up with a list of urls. I remember wanting to go to the TSN website (Canadian ESPN basically). They would list it during shows and I remember having to watch for a while because I couldn't write it all down at once... http://www.tsn.ca I would get a few characters, then have to wait for the next splash of the url.
Ex. https://www.jeopardy.com/show-tickets/
https://web.archive.org/
It's awesome if you want to see which animated separator GIFs and crazy tiled backgrounds you were using.
https://web.archive.org/web/19990223201901/http://members.xo...
That really brings back some memories.
Although if you search for 'blink tag' or 'marquee tag' on google, you get some fun easter eggs!
https://web.archive.org/web/20010403225345/http://www.oaklan...
http://web.archive.org/web/20000529170547/http://karakedi.vi...
There is supposed to be more content, but it's ridiculously broken under webarchive indexing
Backgroundlar (wallpapers) Gif arşivi yenilendi (gif archive) Duvar Yazıları (some wall texts) YENİ 1 ICQ KULLANICISI(Toplam 17 Kullanıcı) (apparently i had a list of potentially Turkish users). İnter Emlak bölümünde kiralık ev arayan biri var (and my attempt for starting an online real estate site.
http://web.archive.org/web/19981205183936/http://www.shadow....
It might be sitting on an old hard drive in my basement (I never dispose of them with other equipment, instead telling myself I will someday wipe them manually and/or drill through the platters).
Don't do that! Hoard them to sell on eBay for hobby money later. There is a looming retrocomputing SCSI hard drive shortage. You can already get good prices for 50-pin SCSI drives. I don't know about ATA/IDE drives, but I imagine people trying to build "authentic" systems will drive demand in the next decade as well.
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.
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.
...brings back memories.
I hope the younger folk appreciate all the web-design sins we committed before they were born, so that no one else need repeat them, ever again.
I might still have a page or two left over from 1998 or thereabouts, on a PATA hard drive collecting cosmic rays in my garage. But no, you can't see them. I am too ashamed.
http://www.angelfire.com/oh5/koolaid/
I was able to clean it up a bit with Macromedia Fireworks in 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/19991004165614/http://roha.maxim...
I don't remember exactly what I used to build these but it was probably some combination of AOLPress, Macromedia Dreamweaver, FrontPage, and Hotdog Professional FTP
[1]: https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results.aspx?...
Edit: found it http://flamingtext.com/