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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

#181

Post by Reedx »

marban wrote: post #151
baby wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to write a love letter to Flash and how it made every website look like a christmas tree. There was so much life in there, it was a race to dynamism when we didn’t know how to make things dynamic. Now it’s all about flat design and static pages and don’t make the users learn a new UI and use the same CSS framework everybody else is using.

I don't miss Flash but the jaw-dropping impression when visiting Gabo for the first time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c

Wow, I remember that! I was amazed by it at the time. It was absolutely top notch.

But seeing it now has kind of ruined my memory of it, heh. Like replaying a video game from when I was a kid. But it's interesting to see just how much the standard for design has changed in a relatively short time.

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

#182

Post by wybiral »

All we really needed were embedded comments on pages and RSS feeds.

It's sad that everything turned into bland walled gardens incapable of interaction between services.

Shakes fist at MySpace and Facebook

Edit: What I mean by that is you used to be able to subscribe to RSS feeds from nearly anywhere that published things. But now people are publishing inside of these services that don't really offer access so you have to check Facebook, Twitter, etc, to get updates. Sure there are notification systems now but it's definitely not as flexible.

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

#184

Post by iamcasen »

taurath wrote: post #69

I miss the self expression that was possible when the barrier to entry was so low, and the link chains. It really was a "web" before search engines became the hub for everything. Granted, most people probably aren't gonna design anything well, because they're not designers. But for those who do, or at least try, even a color gives you more info into a person's personality than a facebook list of places they've worked…

So true! Search engines in a way have both invigorated, and ruined the web. They are great because now you can find anything, but they suck because they've removed a lot of the mystery.

I loved hearing about cool websites via word-of-mouth. Starting there, and then just following a rabbit hole of links to places I've never been before.

I suppose it's still possible if enough people agree to host sites that reject crawlers.

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

#185

Post by fitzroy »

Here's a photo page from mine in 1997 (still sitting on my hard drive).

http://seanfitzroy.com/old/1997/fantasyfest/index.html

A GIF "writes out" the title on a notepad background image. Then it "refreshes" to the actual photo page — but it's timed for a 56k modem so the text takes about 10 seconds to appear.

At least it taught me Photoshop and ImageReady. All hand-coded (poorly) in Notepad on Windows 95. Sorry for the Comic Sans.

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

#188

Post by tomdre »

starsinspace wrote: post #108
Legion wrote: 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."

Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget" has some nice thought about this point, claiming that the web in the 90s was a way more creative and personal space than today.

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

#189

Post by kerrsclyde »

TheGRS wrote: post #45
djhworld wrote: post #11

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…

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

https://twitter.com/SpaceJamCheck
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