Hacker News wasn't around that whole time. But the fact that spacejam.com was still around was a big deal a few years ago (don't remember when I first heard that.)
From some googling, it looks like 2010 is when this made news (via reddit).
What's truly impressive is if you decide to creep a bit, you'll see that loads of users from that thread still post on HN pretty actively.
HN has an insanely high retention rate for being just a little news sharing site. Most people get bored, pissed off, or uninterested at some point and leave. Looking at 10 year old tweet threads or reddit comment sections is basically a graveyard in comparison. Not sure what keeps people sticking around here.
In a couple days, it'll have been 10 years for me. Crazy.
I clicked about 20 profiles, at least 70% are still active.
Actually, I think this phenomenon probably is pretty common for websites that are still on rising or at least hold still (like both HN and Reddit). Their initial users don't just leave for no reason. Less active, perhaps.
I remember seeing that in the news when I was 16 years old. At that time the Internet was just starting in my country so the news came in a local news broadcasting. It was crazy.
Two members stayed behind. I heard recently they still respond to email.
>two group members were briefed about a side mission. They would remain on Earth – the last surviving members – and their job was to maintain the Heaven’s Gate website exactly as it was on the day the last suicides took place.
>And for two decades, the lone Gaters have diligently continued their mission, answered queries, paid bills and dealt with problems.
Alan Moore wrote a comedy comic where a traumatized Cool-Aid Man is publically accused of involvement at Jonestown and insists on the record in a tell all interview it was the Flavor Aid man who committed the crime.
I know it's partly nostalgia, but something about both of these sites feels more fun to interact with and browse through than almost any modern website I visit. The web used to be so much fun.
Navigating these sites feels like exploring a labyrinth. I feel like I can spend an hour on those pages, clicking all the hyperlinks, trying to consume all the content it has to offer
That’s an extremely small variation in score. Why would that make you think they’re making stuff up? Networks and servers don’t always respond with identical timings.
It's pretty darn hard to hit their page delivery targets unless you're serving from something close to their testing site. https doesn't help, because it adds round trips (www.spacejam.com doesn't support tls 1.3, and I wouldn't want pagespeed to be using a resume handshake for initial load anyway).
The main tips I can give for a high page speed that most websites don't do are avoid large header images, make sure text is visible before custom fonts load, use minimal CSS (and/or inline the CSS for the header into the top of the HTML), don't use blocking JavaScript and especially avoid huge JavaScript triggered cookie popups (the blocking JavaScript + big delay for the Largest Contentful Paint will kill your score).
Its quite possibly literally just a bunch of static html files. There is not much maintenance cost there. They probably run all their static sites from the same webservers. It may very well be the same effort to keep it as to delete it.
It's running on a fairly current version of Apache, but aside from keeping the server up to date, it conceivably could be running the same setup for years.
For an organization the size of Warner Bros, it's essentially free, as they are literally doing nothing to the server for that site specifically.
However, it does look like it's running on AWS using their global accelerator (globally optimized traffic) so I assume it's sufficiently robust.
I would guess because of the trademark: keeping a bunch of static HTML files around is not much cost otherwise, and certainly gathers some attention like this post on HN indicates.
“The site owner” is Warner Brothers, they likely have a department responsible to keep movie-related websites up - and might well do it in-house, after the AOL acquisition. A site like this is basically free to host: a domain registration for 20 or 30 years will attract a massive discount, space on disk is probably less than 50MB, used bandwidth is minuscule... after you set up log rotation by file size and automated domain renewal, you can basically forget it exists.
I made a few close friends there in the chat, where other hacker wannabes and philosophy neophytes would gather. The chat forum had fun weird bugs that my friends and I would play with in order to edit past posts, or obliterate each other's posts. It was wonderful little corner of the web for a short while.
That was just one part of that great site. In 1999, the Internet still felt new and full of potential. I loved all the concept art posted there, the trailers, and finding easter eggs.
Years later I recreated the full chat for my friends, including the bugs. It
Interesting. I would have sworn that I remember “the Space Jam website is still up” being a common fun fact on the internet when I was in college 10 years ago.
It’s such a nostalgic feeling of the earlier web back when just interest groups, universities, fan pages, web-rings ruled the web. Back before it became commercialized by greedy folks that threw ads all over the place, tracked everything you do and spammed the hell out of your inbox.
I miss the good ‘ol days for what the web was intended for.
One of my first projects was maintaining the site for: Looney Tunes Teaches the Internet.
The best thing about the early web was that nobody knew what it was for. So people just did things, without considering if it was "right."
Nowadays, you'd never get Bob's Labrador Page. Because "Hi! I'm Bob. I live in Lebanon, Kansas. I like Labrador dogs. Here are some pictures of my favorite Labradors!"
I don't really find this argument convincing because it was plenty easy to publish your own webpage. I did it at 9/10 years old and I don't want to believe that your average adult has less capability than a child.
I think we're doing a disservice by infantilizing people.
People around the world are more educated than ever in humankind history [0][1] , including ability to code
Possibilities are still out there, it's not like people are forbidden from building their own web stack from scratch - you can still buy vps, bare metal, R-Pi and static IP or dyndns - and just code whatever you want.
Of course, Internet is not what is was in 1996, doing trivial things like publishing cat/dog videos and photos is easy - as it should be. Amount of the content is enormous and one can find amazing, incredible, briliant things - maybe not necessarily on the top of FB/IG feed, but it is still out there.
I am no more infantilizing people than pointing out that most people can’t change the oil in their car. It’s a speciality where most pay a service fee to get it done for them. And they go about their lives just fine.
Publishing a webpage with 1990s tooling is roughly in the same category of complexity.
It is far easier to pay Wix, or even better, to use one of the myriad photo sharing sites like Instagram, Flickr, Or Facebook. Which is why they’re so successful, and why the internet is a far more widely used and useful platform today than it was 20 years ago. It’s a disservice and carries no virtue to insist on unnecessary complexity for those that really could care less about computers or how networks work.
To my knowledge, they typical ISP of the 1990s provided free web hosting. (At least it was in my neck of the woods.) It may not have been much, but it was enough to put up a personal website that was not plastered with advertising.
The necessity to write your own HTML (or use tools like Dreamweaver and Frontpage) and the anything goes design mentality may have resulted in some atrocious sites, but it also made the web feel more personal. While there may be some ability to tweak the design while using a CMS, it is much more constrained and sites feel much less personal.
Yep. I took a high school computer science class back in 1995. My end of year project was a website about my MUDing adventures and I put it up on the free web hosting from our ISP. I wish I still had it. I remember thinking it was pretty terrible even back then.
Quite different. Old homepages were more "building" less "sharing". Beyond the coding, there was planning and categorising. You put thought into the interface and structure.
Seems like a small thing but its the difference between being a hobby mechanic or just owning a car. Or buying a desktop vs building one. You end up with the same thing, but "feels" like a very different endevour.
This is rose colored glasses IMO. The vast majority of pages were just no standardization
...
<img>
<br>
<br>
<img>
...
placed images.
If you want all that hobby mechanic stuff you can do all the same now with firebase or pages or whatever just like you were with frontpage or dreamweaver back then.
That's true, but that small amount of effort is still about 1000x more than is required to use Instagram.
And it was really the discovery of such web pages back then that was the thrill. It really did feel like exploring an alien planet or following a treasure map of link exchanges. Each click was an investment of a couple minutes at the rate pages loaded, so you really couldn't explore every link. And browsers didn't have tabs -- you were looking at one page at a time and maybe bookmarking it for later.
The editorial and stylistic independence is what I miss.
Absolutely: there is more stuff on the internet than there was then.
But! How much of that stuff is creatively controlled by actual end users? I'd say < 10%.
The large platforms are right out - restyling Facebook?! The build-a-site platforms all look somewhat similar because form follows tooling defaults. And because of the professionalization of web technologies, laypeople are locked out from just making their own page (or at least don't believe they can).
I think that’s a beautiful way of describing the differences.
These days the web is all Ikea flat pack. It does it’s job and in many cases it works really well for the price. But the individuality has gone since people aren’t just hacking together something based on their own tastes and limited carpentry/web development skills.
While true, it also puts up a hurdle - most people wouldn't bother learning how to build a website because of how difficult it looks.
But now putting pictures of your labrador on the internet is accessible to everyone. In practice, there's thousands of times more labrador pictures on the internet now. However, it's lowered the value and uniqueness of said labrador pictures.
Nah, it feels very different because Instagram et al has gamified the whole thing. Bob's labrador page is its own space, separate in a way from the rest of the internet. Bobslabs on Instagram is implicitly competing with celebrities and 'influencers' whether Bob likes it or notand that changes the feel.
Nostalgia factor is very real, but I don't think it captures just how novel the internet was. Communicating en masse across the world had never happened in human history. And it made you feel like an explorer of an alien planet, at least until one too many "under construction" pages of the night.
So yes, Space Jam site itself was less about wowing, but gave a feeling of interacting with its creators on a more intimate level than other movie marketing. They were using the same tools that any one of us could do ourselves, unlike the millions spent on the movie. The Space Jam site looked much like dozens or hundreds of others from hobby coders or engineers in their free time.
And for me it's more melancholy than fun now, because it reminds me of that feeling of unbounded optimism that the early internet had.
It was very different. It was different in construction, discoverability, intent, and consumption. This isn’t nostalgia. I’m not particularly nostalgic about that time for other reasons and I was neither a kid nor a teen.
Nothing I do on Instagram can possibly make it as personal as my personal sites were. That’s not how I interact with Instagram at all and it couldn’t be even if I tried really hard. And even if I managed it, it’s not how it is offered by Instagram and not how it would be consumed.
That said, I don’t think that web is dead. It’s just a lot less discoverable and there’s a lot more noise. One of my favorite “old web” sites: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ I’m not even sure it’s actually old. It just is more like the old web.
Notice the first comment (towards the bottom of the page): “Low on modern-web-BS...” There’s a qualitative difference.
The shoelace site is wild, but it got me thinking. Detractors might say that Wikipedia would fill the void for this type of information.
...but I don't think that's true. Ian's shoelace site information would instead be edited ad-nauseum by a consortium of shoelace enthusiasts. It doesn't allow for personal opinion or in some cases specific things that aren't well known that can't have their history sourced properly (citation needed?)
I mean I get it. I still call it nostalgia because as you point out, it's still completely possible to do it's just a smaller overall percentage of what is on the web. I run a niche site that gets ~20k MAU:
I consider it the ultimate in no-modern-web BS. The only "modern" thing I use is GA, which even then, honestly I'm looking at replacing it with one of those 90s counters.
I was surprised to find a great example of a site like this recently, "How to Care for Jumping Spiders": https://kozmicdreams.com/spidercare.htm , which is part of someone's broader personal home page with random bits of art, photography, and a guestbook(!). The geocities-esque design bowled me over with nostalgia... the header is an image map!!
Funny you mention tracking, one of the few modifications made to the Space Jam website at some point in the past 24 years was the addition of both Adobe and Google analytics.
I try to leave little notes and jokes in HTML source because from when I was growing up playing with computers to now I still look at the source just to see if someone was expecting me. It's not very common now, unfortunately.
We called them "swirlies" in middle school/high school. But I've never actually seen someone get one, and it could well be mostly apocryphal. And it wasn't something you sought out, it was like, you were getting bullied.
I liked this quote from the page: "Tim Berners-Lee on home page:
Q. The idea of the "home page" evolved in a different direction.
A. Yes. With all respect, the personal home page is not a private expression; it's a public billboard that people work on to say what they're interested in. That's not as interesting to me as people using it in their private lives. It's exhibitionism, if you like. Or self-expression. It's openness, and it's great in a way, it's people letting the community into their homes. But it's not really their home. They may call it a home page, but it's more like the gnome in somebody's front yard than the home itself. People don't have the tools for using the Web for their homes, or for organizing their private lives; they don't really put their scrapbooks on the Web. They don't have family Webs. There are many distributed families nowadays, especially in the high-tech fields, so it would be quite reasonable to do that, yet I don't know of any. One reason is that most people don't have the ability to publish with restricted access."
Basically was describing the concept of social networks before they existed on the web.
It's even crazier than that. That page suggests using ResEdit to modify the Netscape application to feature their spinnning basketball icon rather than the standard "N".
(ResEdit was Apple's editor for data in the resource fork of HFS files, which classic Mac apps used to store their assets. Mac OS X abandoned this interesting but unusual approach in favor of the NeXT way, ".app" directory hierarchies.)
I was surprised by that too, it would be kind of like the new Trolls movie advising kids to make tweaks in windows registry. Hope they don't make any mistakes :D
Well that really takes me back! It was pretty cool how classic Mac apps had most images, text strings, that sort of thing in the standardized resource fork structure. Which meant that you usually could alter a bunch of things about an app's appearance and sometimes behavior by editing those resources with a standard editor.
It’s not really a message about browser compatibility. They’re explaining how to change a specific icon on a Mac. Unsurprisingly, a tutorial written for a specific system will only work on that system.
When I was in college I remember discovering the "Master Zap" website on this domain. It was a musician/software developer who made a few software odds and ends. One of those being Stomper an analog style drum synthesis program. I have great memories of spending hours trying to re-create each sound from a TR-808. Taught me a lot about synthesis. Also really got me writing code and learning C...
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[ 7.3 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] thread2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20473522
2020 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22216203
(apparently it took 23 years to notice: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=spacejam.com)
From some googling, it looks like 2010 is when this made news (via reddit).
For example, here is a discussion about it on HN from 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2050807
I remember because it was around that time I first started browsing HN.
HN has an insanely high retention rate for being just a little news sharing site. Most people get bored, pissed off, or uninterested at some point and leave. Looking at 10 year old tweet threads or reddit comment sections is basically a graveyard in comparison. Not sure what keeps people sticking around here.
In a couple days, it'll have been 10 years for me. Crazy.
Check this thread someone linked above from 9 years ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/esxwd/til_th...
I clicked about 20 profiles, at least 70% are still active.
Actually, I think this phenomenon probably is pretty common for websites that are still on rising or at least hold still (like both HN and Reddit). Their initial users don't just leave for no reason. Less active, perhaps.
Reddit from 2010:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/esxwd/til_th...
>two group members were briefed about a side mission. They would remain on Earth – the last surviving members – and their job was to maintain the Heaven’s Gate website exactly as it was on the day the last suicides took place.
>And for two decades, the lone Gaters have diligently continued their mission, answered queries, paid bills and dealt with problems.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/two-decades-after-h...
Fun fact: the folks at Jonestown didn't drink Kool-Aid either, it was grape Flavor Aid.
<div id="linkbyme" style="display: none;"><li><a href="http://www.heavensgate.com/img/index.asp?index=bogner-ski-we... ski wear</a></li></div><script>document.getElementById('linkbyme').style.display='none';</script>
Weird.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
Looks like 80kb and they still find things.
But when I punched in Google.com, I got 84, and then 78, then 90. That's a pretty wide range.
I'm such a perfectionist that I'd kinda rather not do it at all, than do a crappy version.
Seems that Google's software shares that mentality.
An ultra small, static site can sometimes get 100 though: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
Are you sure? Have you tried using a CDN?
> An ultra small, static site can sometimes get 100 though
Here's an example site I run that gets a close to perfect score that has a fairly complex landing page:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
(it should load close to instant once it connects in your browser: https://www.checkbot.io/)
The main tips I can give for a high page speed that most websites don't do are avoid large header images, make sure text is visible before custom fonts load, use minimal CSS (and/or inline the CSS for the header into the top of the HTML), don't use blocking JavaScript and especially avoid huge JavaScript triggered cookie popups (the blocking JavaScript + big delay for the Largest Contentful Paint will kill your score).
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
Should I contact Warner?
Obviously the site owner is intionally keeping the site up and dealing with outages.
But I wonder why?
Publicity for Space Jam 2?
so how would you make it bullet proof, just s3 and cloudfront?
so what would you say it costs a year to run?
Warner is hosting it, it probably cost them almost nothing more than usual.
For an organization the size of Warner Bros, it's essentially free, as they are literally doing nothing to the server for that site specifically.
However, it does look like it's running on AWS using their global accelerator (globally optimized traffic) so I assume it's sufficiently robust.
It just redirects to www.warnerbros.com/movies/matrix/ now :(
That was just one part of that great site. In 1999, the Internet still felt new and full of potential. I loved all the concept art posted there, the trailers, and finding easter eggs.
Years later I recreated the full chat for my friends, including the bugs. It
Some years it redirects to WB's website, sometimes to an archive website, etc.
It seems that the original was not accessible between 2000 and 2018.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3554046/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
Anyone who has even casually followed the NBA over the last two years probably knows this too, so you've got plenty of company.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/esxwd/til_th...
It’s such a nostalgic feeling of the earlier web back when just interest groups, universities, fan pages, web-rings ruled the web. Back before it became commercialized by greedy folks that threw ads all over the place, tracked everything you do and spammed the hell out of your inbox.
I miss the good ‘ol days for what the web was intended for.
One of my first projects was maintaining the site for: Looney Tunes Teaches the Internet.
If you look hard enough it’s still out there.
Nowadays, you'd never get Bob's Labrador Page. Because "Hi! I'm Bob. I live in Lebanon, Kansas. I like Labrador dogs. Here are some pictures of my favorite Labradors!"
Not that much of a difference really IMO
I think we're doing a disservice by infantilizing people.
People around the world are more educated than ever in humankind history [0][1] , including ability to code
Possibilities are still out there, it's not like people are forbidden from building their own web stack from scratch - you can still buy vps, bare metal, R-Pi and static IP or dyndns - and just code whatever you want.
Of course, Internet is not what is was in 1996, doing trivial things like publishing cat/dog videos and photos is easy - as it should be. Amount of the content is enormous and one can find amazing, incredible, briliant things - maybe not necessarily on the top of FB/IG feed, but it is still out there.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/literacy#historical-change-in-lit... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-education
Publishing a webpage with 1990s tooling is roughly in the same category of complexity.
It is far easier to pay Wix, or even better, to use one of the myriad photo sharing sites like Instagram, Flickr, Or Facebook. Which is why they’re so successful, and why the internet is a far more widely used and useful platform today than it was 20 years ago. It’s a disservice and carries no virtue to insist on unnecessary complexity for those that really could care less about computers or how networks work.
The necessity to write your own HTML (or use tools like Dreamweaver and Frontpage) and the anything goes design mentality may have resulted in some atrocious sites, but it also made the web feel more personal. While there may be some ability to tweak the design while using a CMS, it is much more constrained and sites feel much less personal.
Seems like a small thing but its the difference between being a hobby mechanic or just owning a car. Or buying a desktop vs building one. You end up with the same thing, but "feels" like a very different endevour.
placed images.
If you want all that hobby mechanic stuff you can do all the same now with firebase or pages or whatever just like you were with frontpage or dreamweaver back then.
And it was really the discovery of such web pages back then that was the thrill. It really did feel like exploring an alien planet or following a treasure map of link exchanges. Each click was an investment of a couple minutes at the rate pages loaded, so you really couldn't explore every link. And browsers didn't have tabs -- you were looking at one page at a time and maybe bookmarking it for later.
Absolutely: there is more stuff on the internet than there was then.
But! How much of that stuff is creatively controlled by actual end users? I'd say < 10%.
The large platforms are right out - restyling Facebook?! The build-a-site platforms all look somewhat similar because form follows tooling defaults. And because of the professionalization of web technologies, laypeople are locked out from just making their own page (or at least don't believe they can).
These days the web is all Ikea flat pack. It does it’s job and in many cases it works really well for the price. But the individuality has gone since people aren’t just hacking together something based on their own tastes and limited carpentry/web development skills.
But now putting pictures of your labrador on the internet is accessible to everyone. In practice, there's thousands of times more labrador pictures on the internet now. However, it's lowered the value and uniqueness of said labrador pictures.
I totally get where you're coming from - and I agree that it is different in many ways, but in the important ways it was the same, IMO
[1]https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NostalgiaFilter
So yes, Space Jam site itself was less about wowing, but gave a feeling of interacting with its creators on a more intimate level than other movie marketing. They were using the same tools that any one of us could do ourselves, unlike the millions spent on the movie. The Space Jam site looked much like dozens or hundreds of others from hobby coders or engineers in their free time.
And for me it's more melancholy than fun now, because it reminds me of that feeling of unbounded optimism that the early internet had.
Nothing I do on Instagram can possibly make it as personal as my personal sites were. That’s not how I interact with Instagram at all and it couldn’t be even if I tried really hard. And even if I managed it, it’s not how it is offered by Instagram and not how it would be consumed.
That said, I don’t think that web is dead. It’s just a lot less discoverable and there’s a lot more noise. One of my favorite “old web” sites: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ I’m not even sure it’s actually old. It just is more like the old web.
Notice the first comment (towards the bottom of the page): “Low on modern-web-BS...” There’s a qualitative difference.
...but I don't think that's true. Ian's shoelace site information would instead be edited ad-nauseum by a consortium of shoelace enthusiasts. It doesn't allow for personal opinion or in some cases specific things that aren't well known that can't have their history sourced properly (citation needed?)
http://airforcefitnesscalculator.com/
I consider it the ultimate in no-modern-web BS. The only "modern" thing I use is GA, which even then, honestly I'm looking at replacing it with one of those 90s counters.
Website and Movie :)
https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/patternsframes.html
https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm
http://totic.org/nscp/index.html
Personally I enjoyed this bit:
http://totic.org/nscp/swirl/swirl.html
If Aleksandar reads hacker news I hope he never takes that down.
Hard to believe, isn't it...
A. Yes. With all respect, the personal home page is not a private expression; it's a public billboard that people work on to say what they're interested in. That's not as interesting to me as people using it in their private lives. It's exhibitionism, if you like. Or self-expression. It's openness, and it's great in a way, it's people letting the community into their homes. But it's not really their home. They may call it a home page, but it's more like the gnome in somebody's front yard than the home itself. People don't have the tools for using the Web for their homes, or for organizing their private lives; they don't really put their scrapbooks on the Web. They don't have family Webs. There are many distributed families nowadays, especially in the high-tech fields, so it would be quite reasonable to do that, yet I don't know of any. One reason is that most people don't have the ability to publish with restricted access."
Basically was describing the concept of social networks before they existed on the web.
Oh wait TVs do that now. I guess the real world evolved to be more like social networks...
This is the most specific "best viewed with..." message I have seen.
[1] https://www.spacejam.com/cmp/souvenirs/iconsframes.html
(ResEdit was Apple's editor for data in the resource fork of HFS files, which classic Mac apps used to store their assets. Mac OS X abandoned this interesting but unusual approach in favor of the NeXT way, ".app" directory hierarchies.)
The only remaining ones are ones I already knew about - nba.com and Yahoo! Sports.
http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/expo/
Is anyone from Linköping University reading this? I need to thank them for 26 years of free hosting. :-)
EDIT- ITS STILL THERE :D http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/