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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

#241

Post by phkahler »

ambrosite wrote: post #35
ambrosite wrote: post #12

I love it. I have an unreasonable amount of nostalgia for old websites like this. This is what the whole Web looked like back in the early days, before the usability and design gurus figured out the "best practices" and all sites started looking the same. It really was a wild new frontier. I'm not saying the Web was objectively better back then, but it sure was fun.

I just found my first website (from January 2000) in the Wayback Machine. Not gonna post it here, but it's actually not that bad -- it had a consistent header, sidebar navigation, and a collection of nerdy sci-fi jokes that for some strange reason I thought were hilarious. :/

I found mine on wayback and was shocked that you can actually make one move in the Othello game. The game ran as a CGI script (in C) and was stateless.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010403225345/http://www.oaklan...

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

#244

Post by dev360 »

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

Haha that site was what drove me to flash/actionscript. There was another site too that made 3d popular and I got rabbitholed exporting stuff from 3d studio max into flash. Complete waste of time - clients only wanted boring splash screens and you had to talk them out of it.

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

#246

Post by shakna »

stavros wrote: post #220
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.

I wasn't going to post this yet, but fuck it: I miss that era too, and I wanted to make it easier for people to publish their websites, so I made this with a friend: https://hearth.eternum.io/ It gives you a folder, like Dropbox. Drop some files in, and you have your own website (over IPFS). It's still early, but it should work well enough. I'd love to hear some feedback, if anyone tries it.

It looks great, but there is one question out of the box for me...

What about updating the site?

With IPFS this means a completely new hash unless you're running under (through?) IPNS, to point a domain at a new hash. If it's a new hash every time, you give up quickly because you don't want to propagate a new hash to any potential users every time (in the general case).

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

#248

Post by astura »

ajmurmann wrote: post #227
vvanders wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, Dreamweaver and Frontpage were very much a thing in that era. Plenty of WYSIWYG options existed.

Didn't MS Word even have a "export as HTML" option? I feel like I might have used that initially to build the first version of my CounterStrike clan's website.

They did.

IIRC this site was made in Word: https://web.archive.org/web/20060414015434/http://easternsho... (on mobile, can't look at source to verify)

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

#249

Post by shakna »

rpeden wrote: post #57
noonespecial wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to sign it! You should consider reviving it. Write it in perl. And lets us know its working again with a blink tag.

I just updated it with a guestbook that works. :) First update the site has seen in 19 years.

And everyone is already trying to break it.

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

#250

Post by fendmark »

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.

Tripod pre-Lycos was an amazing learning space for me in the mid nineties. Domains and hosting were significantly more expensive than they are now (especially for a freshman in high school) and Tripod was an amazing lifeline. Little did I know that my time spent building fan sites for punk rock bands more than 20 years ago would end up having such a significant impact on my career even today.

That said, I'm ashamed of all the sites that I built with Image Maps and Frames and glorious tables!

It really is sad that the rise of the social media has meant that so many people will not have the opportunity to have this type of experience in learning front end development from the ground up.

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