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Neopets HTML Guide

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Re: Neopets HTML Guide

#21

Post by fenwick67 »

zoba wrote: post #17

Neopets is the reason I’m a software engineer. Along the way looking for “cheat codes” for Neopets, I discovered some people hacking the games. I eventually ran a forum on hacking Neopets, made money from ads, got into PC World Magazine, and had a great time along the way. Sorry to Adam and Donna for any headaches I caused during my teenage years. <3

Neopets was where I first discovered hacking.

There was a user named "blueyoshi82" or something, I wanted to see if I could get into their account (I don't remember why). So I tried guessing their password, and lo and behold, it was just "yoshi"!

Being the white-hat that I was, I tried to PM them a message saying "hey you really need to change your password, it's too easy to guess", but the word "password" was blacklisted so I couldn't tell them.

Re: Neopets HTML Guide

#22

Post by uremog »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #10
aylmao wrote: post #3

Low key, this guide is how I got into programming and probably plays a big role in why I’m now a Software Engineer. Throwback.

I never saw the Neopets guide. For me, it was Joe Burns' site: HTMLGoodies[0]. It was indispensable for me. That and a lot of help from FrontPage Express[1] & viewing the source code of whatever I'd just made. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/19990429010831/http://www.htmlgo... [1] http://www.jegsworks.com/lessons/web/html/fpx/fpx.htm

HTMLGoodies helped me make terrible Geocities sites.

Re: Neopets HTML Guide

#23

Post by problems »

zoba wrote: post #17

Neopets is the reason I’m a software engineer. Along the way looking for “cheat codes” for Neopets, I discovered some people hacking the games. I eventually ran a forum on hacking Neopets, made money from ads, got into PC World Magazine, and had a great time along the way. Sorry to Adam and Donna for any headaches I caused during my teenage years. <3

Yeah, I put a good pile of reverse engineering work into this thing at one point - used Flare and Flasm along with a lighttpd proxy to replace their swfs with my own.

Re: Neopets HTML Guide

#24

Post by tn_ »

The bandwidth at which they produced new flash games was amazing. They were pretty detailed too. I can't think of any html5 gaming community website that even comes remotely close to them.

One of my favorite events with Neopets was participating in a global takedown of enemies during war. I spent so many hours with that website.. from tending my shop, training my pets and tricking out their pages w/ HTML, to collecting map pieces (I remember the economics w/ Secret Laboratory Map Pieces exploding when people realized how valuable they were)..

Re: Neopets HTML Guide

#26

Post by seangrogg »

cnees wrote: post #19

Every once in a while I run into another programmer who started on Neopets, and it makes me happy. :) When I interviewed for my job, they asked me my “programming story.” I remember struggling to make my petpages compatible with Firefox, Safari, and IE5. I remember learning Dreamweaver so I could apply to adopt cool Neopets. I wrote tens of thousands of lines of HTML in TextEdit to make an interactive Lite Brite, and…

To this day I will still cite how Neopets' pet pages were my introduction to the creator's web; later MySpace would help me accumulate some spare lunch money. The good ol' days. =)

Re: Neopets HTML Guide

#27

Post by stordoff »

bpicolo wrote: post #8
aylmao wrote: post #3

Low key, this guide is how I got into programming and probably plays a big role in why I’m now a Software Engineer. Throwback.

Same here, amazing that the site is virtually the same now. Being acquired by viacom was terrible for the site. (Not to mention that it became product placement at every turn). Kind of sad that micropayments are the defacto monetization model for games now, it really kills all sense of accomplishment for finding cool items

Neopets is probably the first place I encountered random item drops - I remember half the cybercafé freaking out when someone randomly found a Paintbrush.

Re: Neopets HTML Guide

#28

Post by stordoff »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #10
aylmao wrote: post #3

Low key, this guide is how I got into programming and probably plays a big role in why I’m now a Software Engineer. Throwback.

I never saw the Neopets guide. For me, it was Joe Burns' site: HTMLGoodies[0]. It was indispensable for me. That and a lot of help from FrontPage Express[1] & viewing the source code of whatever I'd just made. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/19990429010831/http://www.htmlgo... [1] http://www.jegsworks.com/lessons/web/html/fpx/fpx.htm

This is one of the first sites I recall using, around 2002: http://www.lissaexplains.com/ (I'm surprised it's still online TBH.

Before that was a book from my local library (and a library PC), which I vividly remember because it took me _way_ too long to realise that "href" is not "herf".

Re: Neopets HTML Guide

#30

Post by wjoe »

erikrothoff wrote: post #13

This got me into programming as well! The biggest problem I had was when I wanted to expand and build a forum, and tried to understand why Geocities didn't run my .php file (which was from a tutorial). Answer: PHP support was paid option AFAIK

Yep, back then it was very hard to get any free hosting that supported any sort of scripting language. Of course, as a 12 year old on the internet, paying for anything was unheard of.

I remember wanting to set up some forum that required CGI. I had some sort of hosting account that required using their own dialup service to connect to their FTP. Probably cost more on the phone bill than some cheap hosting service, but it was easier to get that by the parents than asking to use their credit card when the internet was still a mystery to them.

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