Blocked by McAfee Web Gateway as pornography. Interesting.
Same here. Now I'm going to get fired. Thanks HN.
Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign
71–80 of 98 posts
Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign
#72I was going to ask: " so how is it that the average non-commercial site can be expected to crash upon reaching ten HN upvotes but this 1996 is still chugging along strong " After all, this was well before such thing as CDNs were in wide use. Then I looked at the source and saw that it's a Frontpage site. * This brings back memories of when you could get at least $50/hr to make something like this.
The average non-commercial site these days is based on an unoptimized Wordpress installation that loads 137 PHP files and does 18 DB reqests to render its main page. This 1996 gem is entirely static content. That's a few orders of magnitude less work for the server to do right there. And it runs on IIS 7, so the the hardware and software that does the actual work is most definitely NOT from 1996.
> And it runs on IIS 7, so the the hardware and software that does the actual work is most definitely NOT from 1996.
And this is the big thing right here. We're running sites designed to be basically usable when served by 1996 hardware on systems orders of magnitude faster with almost two decades' worth of optimizations compared to what was acceptable in 1996. I don't know how much NTFS has changed since then, but filesystems in the Linux world have undergone a sea change in that timeframe, which is directly relevant to how quickly a static page can be served.
Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign
#73I wish sites were still designed this way. Not the animated gifs or the font size 1, but the fact that once the site is loaded, it's completely done. And if I refresh the page, or bookmark the link and come back later, I'm going to see the exact same page. According to the Chrome developer tools the page took 2ms to render and 4ms to paint. I write JavaScript professionally but not all web sites need JavaScript, in f…
Thanks for saying that from your perspective as one who is involved with Web site production professionally.
I'm greatly for the 'flat web' where text and images is involved, but I would also like to see interactive pages such as
http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
used more to allow readers to explore models and maths where relevant.
Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign
#74I wish sites were still designed this way. Not the animated gifs or the font size 1, but the fact that once the site is loaded, it's completely done. And if I refresh the page, or bookmark the link and come back later, I'm going to see the exact same page. According to the Chrome developer tools the page took 2ms to render and 4ms to paint. I write JavaScript professionally but not all web sites need JavaScript, in f…
I code my site by hand... each and every page... for these same reasons. I need to figure out templating because it has become quite tedious to update links and I'm only at <50 pages!
MacOS X people might want to investigate Eastgate Systems Tinderbox. Can handle the navigation links for huge ad-hoc Web sites using a local template then generate the Web pages.
I use Linux at home, and use a couple of bash scripts to make the index page and navigation links on individual pages that I write in markdown (but can hand edit html if the mood takes me).
Windows: powershell? A few scripts for indexing?
There are also large, flexible applications such as jekyl that can generate static Web sites.
Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tightness of the layout probably stems from low resolution screens. In '96 the most typical display size was something around 640x480 or 800x600, not a lot of room to breathe there.
In the last month, I've had 2 people tell me (unsolicited of course) that my website looks like it was made 10 years ago. I went to this 1996 campaign site and said with dismay, it looks like my website. I recognized many of of the above historical attributes (table-based layout, centered narrow, body bgcolor attribute) in my own site. I've got a full-time job as a UNIX system administrator, and a part-time business…
Unless your site is a differentiator for your business, I wouldn't go hog-wild on it. I'd start by looking at something like ThemeForest, where you can browse around, see if you find something you like, and buy it for not-a-lot-of-money.
Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign
#76"DEBATE MENTION OF WEB SITE CAUSES FLOOD OF VISITORS" Goes on to say that the site received more than 762,000 "hits" in a four hour period: http://www.dolekemp96.org/news/releases/proct0796a.htm edit: hours
Before I read the link, I thought those 762,000 hits were HN users over the last four hours. :)
Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign
#77Makes you wonder who, if anyone, is still paying to host the site. Someone must be keeping it online on purpose, right?
Domain whois shows it's registered to "4President Corporation" and it shares a host with http://4president.org/ with provider 'hostmysite'. Looks like this is someone's intentional effort to archive these things.
Was dolekemp96.org the original website? whois says the domain was registered in 2003 and archive.org first crawled the site in 2001.
Domain Name:DOLEKEMP96.ORG Created On:27-May-2003 14:15:22 UTC Last Updated On:25-Jan-2012 00:36:47 UTC
Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign
#78I wish sites were still designed this way. Not the animated gifs or the font size 1, but the fact that once the site is loaded, it's completely done. And if I refresh the page, or bookmark the link and come back later, I'm going to see the exact same page. According to the Chrome developer tools the page took 2ms to render and 4ms to paint. I write JavaScript professionally but not all web sites need JavaScript, in f…
I code my site by hand... each and every page... for these same reasons. I need to figure out templating because it has become quite tedious to update links and I'm only at <50 pages!
Lots of static-site generators to choose from. Jekyll's the most popular choice. Link: http://jekyllrb.com
Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign
#79So what is it about this design that makes it look "dated"? It's not just the grainy images, right? Is it the smaller text? More compact style?
The thing that stands out to me is that the text styles are basically browser default, in particular the Times New Roman (i.e. serif) font, and that distinctive dark blue for all links. Most sites use sans-serif fonts, which are more readable at lower resolutions. While most sites retain blue as the color for in-line links, links that are structural (e.g. the menus on left and right) tend to be given styles more akin to the rest of the site.
Also those graphics would be JPG on a modern site, not GIF. The lower bit depth on the colors is quite apparent.
Re: Dole/Kemp '96 Online Campaign
#80I wish sites were still designed this way. Not the animated gifs or the font size 1, but the fact that once the site is loaded, it's completely done. And if I refresh the page, or bookmark the link and come back later, I'm going to see the exact same page. According to the Chrome developer tools the page took 2ms to render and 4ms to paint. I write JavaScript professionally but not all web sites need JavaScript, in f…
Pretty stark difference between the two when you compare WebPageTest.org results. Dole/Kemp: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121114_X9_HEY/ ReadWrite: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121114_GB_HEZ/
Wow. 19 seconds for ReadWrite to load.