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Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

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111–120 of 130 posts

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#113
post #35

* Personal websites from before blogging become commonplace - often part of web rings where you could visit one after another page. * My own and my friends silly pages. * Not a page but a feature: referrers weren't blocked so we could check who sent us traffic and visit their pages. * searching with the old google.com before SEO became popular.

I visit https://monkey.org/ every couple of years just to bring back memories.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#115
post #25

I miss Google Reader. I used to read ~100 longer-form blogs that didn't publish daily. After Google Reader went away, I tried other RSS readers but they just weren't as convenient, and my online reading habits shifted to more Twitter. At first that seemed fine but over time it has become hard to keep my Twitter feed free of distracting trivia. Nowadays I just have a much smaller list of blogs I read regularly. I also…

I've managed to replace it with inoreader.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#116

I'd like to mention Geocities. And not in a completely jokingly manner as others have. I'm not mentioning them because of the quality of the content on there, which was mostly terrible. I'm mentioning them because they represent a different time, they represent all that was particular about the Internet of that time. Today's Internet is faster, easier to access, with better services and if really want the weird stuff…

Geocities was my gateway to learning basics of HTML & JavaScript. Didn't take much to impress friends with coding in those days (high school / early 00's).

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#117

OLGA.net : On-Line Guitar Archive. Basically a collection of text files people submitted of guitar tablature for popular songs. If I remember right, they got slammed with DMCA and were forced to shut down. Now we have fantastic tools like Songsterr and anti-user pieces of shit like UltimateGuitar. I miss OLGA.

OLGA was heaven. I still have the print-outs of Metallica tabs I made all those years ago. My first experience of bitterly hating the 'thorities... Iirc there was a torrent which had hundreds of thousands of tabs saved in plaintext from OLGA.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#118
Back in the late 90s and early 2000s I spent a lot of time reading these articles about a guy who'd travel to train martial arts all over the world. It was hosted on Geocities. I thought the site was gone forever, but because of this thread I did a search and found that it's now on its own domain. http://www.global-training-report.com/

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#119
post #63
post #30

Forums in general. I'd just check them daily(ish) and participate in various conversations. These days this kind of communication is either in chat groups on Telegram or ephemeral threads on HN and reddit. Rarely are those threads referred back to, unlike topics were. I still do things online that last, such as blogging, pushing to Github and writing stackexchange answers, but none of those are very informal and incl…

I used to be the Administrator of several different iPBFree forums before iPBFree suddenly disappeared. I really miss the graphics/writing communities that were scattered around forums - it's actually how I learned how to use Photoshop and do front-end programming with HTML/CSS/JS! Messing around with free forums is what landed me my career today - but forums are all but dead due to social media platforms. Even dedic…

Actually, you might find something on JCInk, a lot of the IPBFree communities moved there (having abandoned Invisionfree/Zetaboards).

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#120

webmonkey.com because that's where I learnt a lot of my craft, and TalkCity (which probably still exists) because of the community I discovered when I was going through a rough personal patch, and that community no longer exists.

Was going to say webmonkey too, internet connections at that time were dial up and pretty expensive at the time in Spain (you were charged by the minute)

So I downloaded the entire archive using a shareware scraper , and learned a lot from that offline copy.

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