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Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s
171–180 of 427 posts
Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s
#172I 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.
I still have a site of this sort: a site I used to publish, which I created in the very early 2000s using my 90s html knowledge. It still uses frames.
Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yup, Dreamweaver and Frontpage were very much a thing in that era. Plenty of WYSIWYG options existed.
Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s
#174http://brendanberkley.com/first-site/brendan.html A lot of gems in mine: - "Gar Trek" shirt on a Star Wars site - Phantom Menace my favorite Star Wars movie (ask me anything) - Mamma and Dogpile, CDNow, and Pepsi World - JavaScript Alert!
I cannot express my disappointment in the "The Ultimate Quiz" being unavailable.
Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
I think MySpace ultimately represented the final form of the essentially unlimited customization of the early web. The terribleness of MySpace pages was, I believe, the catalyst that pushed the design trend in the opposite direction, resulting in the "standardized array of fields" as popularized by Facebook. That said, given the cyclical nature of design trends, I strongly suspect that we'll eventually start to see a…
Tumblr has never really lost its wide variety of customization. I'd argue it carried on the Geocities and MySpace individual touch. If you go from one personal tumblr to the next, they often vary to a great degree in atmosphere, color scheme, content posted, purpose, layout, etc. You also still see all the expected bizarre design choices, broken layouts, etc. that one would expect given that. Being able to customize it to a large enough degree to give a sense of one's personality, was one of tumblr's primary appeals to its large younger userbase.
Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s
#176Great stuff, I miss the old web sometimes
I was reminded by your post that I had a game dev website back in 2000-2001 but I couldn't remember the url. After half an hour of google-foo I managed to find it. Tried wayback machine and, unbelievable, it's archived!
If anyone is interested in visual basic gamedev in DirectX 7 written by a 19 year old non-native english speaker, here you go:
https://web.archive.org/web/20011201013648/http://www.ancien...
Scroll to the bottom to find the glorious
Best viewed at 1024x768 with IE 4.0 and above
Good times :)
Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s
#177http://brendanberkley.com/first-site/brendan.html A lot of gems in mine: - "Gar Trek" shirt on a Star Wars site - Phantom Menace my favorite Star Wars movie (ask me anything) - Mamma and Dogpile, CDNow, and Pepsi World - JavaScript Alert!
I cannot express my disappointment in the "The Ultimate Quiz" being unavailable. http://brendanberkley.com/first-site/ultimatequiz.html
Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s
#178Considering that this is #1 on HN, that free, 20-year-old server has some damn good uptime!
Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s
#179This is what internet is to me. What internet is today isn't really 'internet' anymore. Well at least not from my perspective.
Are we still on Web 2.0? I'm guessing you're referring to Web 1.0. I find it amusing that nobody called it Web 1.0 even after they started talking about 2.0.
Re: Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s
#180I 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.
Most who were just tinkering still posted to something like geocities, but I agree that spirit has been lost. What do they do in middle school / high school web development classes these days anyway? Kind of the appeal 20 years ago was that you could learn HTML pretty easily and whip up a simple personal website like this and have fun doing it. It didn't exactly "teach" much, at least in my experience, but it was ins…
geocities simply made it "free" to publish on the web I thought? As opposed to being a platform that enforced complex policies