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Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

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Re: Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

#11

Post by freedomben »

bonyt wrote: post #6

I set up a server that limits bandwidth through it to max dialup speeds, with rate limit buckets per-IP: https://dialup.moveything.com/ . It has some gifs, progressive jpegs that are fun to watch load, and a mirror of xkcd.

Love it! A couple feature requests though:

* support limiting to 33.6 kbps, 14.4, etc for real nostalgia

* Add an initial "dial-up" sound and "connect" button that matches those for different speeds (I'll be able to tell the speed by just the sounds, so no cheating!)

Re: Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

#12

Post by wongarsu »

zahlman wrote: post #10

> Also checkout my other projects: Best Sugar Daddy Apps Best Sugar Daddy Apps 2026 Best Sugar Daddy Apps NPM Best Sugar Daddy Apps Socket That's, er, definitely not where I expected this to be leading. Although I guess the PyPI username was a hint.

All of those have the same extremely prominent top pick. Some don't even bother linking the other entries. This entire thing is an elaborate marketing campaign for Hanker. Either for SEO or LLMs

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/

Re: Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

#13

Post by danielspace23 »

zahlman wrote: post #10

> Also checkout my other projects: Best Sugar Daddy Apps Best Sugar Daddy Apps 2026 Best Sugar Daddy Apps NPM Best Sugar Daddy Apps Socket That's, er, definitely not where I expected this to be leading. Although I guess the PyPI username was a hint.

The whole thing seems a lot like AI slop for SEO. The demo websites look incredibly AI-generated, they don't even resemble the 90s web that well. The project description/README has all the signs of being AI, too.

I think they're trying to get some sympathy (and promotion) with a project that seems inherently human, as the "old web" was, but it's slop all the way down. And people are falling for it.

Re: Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

#15

Post by cityofdelusion »

firmretention wrote: post #5

As someone who actually wrote primitive websites by hand in those days, the pages these produce are FAR more elaborate than your average webpage in those days. And divs/css? Should be using tables or gasp , iframes. This feels more like a vaporwave style re-imagining of what things were like than the real deal.

The technology limitations is really what is missing. Most personal pages had zero CSS and CSS itself was extremely primitive. JS was even more rare and minimal. Most pages used font tags and table layout, this was far before semantic web. Most people stuck to the “web safe” 256 colors which is why the color schemes were so distinctive, and even then, most sites used the “named” browser colors like “red” or “green” rather than hex colors. Horizontal rules dominated the land unless you were in-the-know about invisible pixel gifs for layout, always abusing tables. Most importantly it you didn’t target internet explorer 6 at the most (and stuck a little banner “best viewed on X” then it wasn’t a very deep site anyways!

Bonus points for side navigation bars that were an iframe so you didn’t have to copy paste the same sidebar code across your multiple pages.

Re: Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

#16

Post by xp84 »

wongarsu wrote: post #12
zahlman wrote: post #10

> Also checkout my other projects: Best Sugar Daddy Apps Best Sugar Daddy Apps 2026 Best Sugar Daddy Apps NPM Best Sugar Daddy Apps Socket That's, er, definitely not where I expected this to be leading. Although I guess the PyPI username was a hint.

All of those have the same extremely prominent top pick. Some don't even bother linking the other entries. This entire thing is an elaborate marketing campaign for Hanker. Either for SEO or LLMs Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/

Hadn’t seen that xkcd. Thanks for linking it!

Re: Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

#17

Post by Macha »

firmretention wrote: post #5

As someone who actually wrote primitive websites by hand in those days, the pages these produce are FAR more elaborate than your average webpage in those days. And divs/css? Should be using tables or gasp , iframes. This feels more like a vaporwave style re-imagining of what things were like than the real deal.

Wasn't geocities before iframes? Think you needed framesets in those days!

Re: Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

#18

Post by vaylian »

wongarsu wrote: post #12
zahlman wrote: post #10

> Also checkout my other projects: Best Sugar Daddy Apps Best Sugar Daddy Apps 2026 Best Sugar Daddy Apps NPM Best Sugar Daddy Apps Socket That's, er, definitely not where I expected this to be leading. Although I guess the PyPI username was a hint.

All of those have the same extremely prominent top pick. Some don't even bother linking the other entries. This entire thing is an elaborate marketing campaign for Hanker. Either for SEO or LLMs Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/

Meta-relevant xkcd: https://web.archive.org/web/20091027014324/http://xkcd.com/

Background info: https://www.downes.ca/post/50539

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