Under Construction (2015)

I never could decide if the design of pagesthatsuck was deliberate satire or accidental, but it was always an ugly site itself.

It used to be fun back then browsing sites like clientsfromhell, the similar programming one who's name I now forget, and pagesthatsuck over lunch. Nowadays that's much less satisfying. Time was you could kill 20 minutes looking at some awful sites and terrible VB code. The comments were usually most fun. Now they've all reduced content so much that you get about 1/4 the content in a long column that takes 1/5 browser width. Of course now a clean modern site with 3 mile long ad interstitials between each piece. Progress?

Oddly haven't visited any of those for years now!

Always fun to look and see which of the 226 different ways to get Mew a Pokemon site would post, or which of the equally large number of ways to get the Triforce in Ocarina of Time you'd see on a Zelda site.

Topsites were another big thing there too. Bit like webrings, except clicking on the button would vote the site you're on up the rankings and make it more likely to appear on others. These fell apart about as quickly as webrings did, especially when people gamed the hell out of them.

There was also:

Awkward Javascript animated objects moving around with the mouse cursor. Those were pretty big at one point.

The inevitable blink tags, which got so annoying that browsers dropped all support for them.

Jokey 'I agree to proceed to this site' splash pages, where the other link would send you to Google. Or perhaps something like the Barbie website.

Sites hotlinking to images and resources on other sites. Which then made a comeback for a while on Myspace, and still remains a large issue on internet forums. Bonus points if the original webmaster got so annoyed with the bandwidth costs, he replaced the image link with a porn picture instead.

Various awkward ways to try and 'block' right clicking, as if this could 'protect' the content from thieves.

Songs or sound effects playing in the background, which usually gave you quite a shock if you speakers were up and you moved to another site:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1BJVN8zD0

Various extremely basic HTML tutorials that basically said how to add bold text, italic text, underlined text, images and links.

Javascript used for 'password protection' (in the slightly later days). You can probably guess why this wasn't the best idea in the world.

Oh, and fanlistings. Where you had a big old list of people who liked something (a series, a game, a celebrity, a band, etc), and you could send an email with a name and contact address to be added to it.

It was certainly a different era then, though a surprising amount of stuff common then is actually still around. For example, this site still seems to offer webrings:

http://www.webringworld.org/

And sites like Bravenet still offer everything that was popular in 1996 or so.

But somehow, to me, it doesn't feel right to use IRC from anything other than a fuzzy and flickery orange screen.

> (while writing this article, I discovered that if you Google for the phrase "blink tag", you get... well...)

You should definitely do this.