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Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s

boglin.iwarp.com

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Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s

#101
post #54

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.

Are you sure that they were average people? In my experience, average people only started to publish things on Web after blog platforms enabled them to do so. The only people who published in the web at that time were people with technical background (or people who had enough free time and will to learn). HTML is not easy for someone, who's not computer-savvy and a quest to publish and support your website might frig…

I recall kids who weren't computer geniuses would still start websites about their hobbies / interests using geocities or tripod. They have wysiwyg editors that were easy.

But of course, just having access to computers and the internet wasn't a given for many families

Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, this one's actually in use, which makes it even more interesting. Not sure when it was built though.

The copyright footer says 2004-2018.

Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s

#105

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…

That's what the wayback machine is for! It's good for most personal pages back to about '99.

https://web.archive.org/

It's awesome if you want to see which animated separator GIFs and crazy tiled backgrounds you were using.

Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s

#106
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.

Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it needs more blink and marquee tags, and a tiled background.

I actually get a little excited when I see the blink and marquee tags still being used on current websites. (yeah I know, I'm psychotic!)

Blink is unfortunately dead: https://anonym.to/?https://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/08/a-light-...

Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s

#108
post #54

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.

When talking about this, people often like to joke about the webdesign back then. But the personal websites had personality. Facebook profiles feel like government forms to me... "here, fill in this standardized array of fields with your personal data."

Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s

#109
Suddenly remembering when Geocities was so new, their ToS required that you manually place a banner image and link back to geocities.com on your site. It wasn't auto-injected server-side. They actually would browse through the sites and manually verify you link back to them. I remember how affronted I felt when they started doing their auto-frame/banner thing server-side. haha :)
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