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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

#231

Post by [deleted] »

FreakyT wrote: post #148
starsinspace wrote: post #108

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

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

#233

Post by andrethegiant »

c22 wrote: post #123
vbezhenar wrote: post #80

Earlier 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…

Anecdotally I know at least three people who gained literacy with computers through their efforts to publish personal web pages so it must be at least somewhat accessible. Incidentally it is not any harder to publish a personal web site with basic HTML than it was 15 years ago, there are just other ways to "publish" online now that are easier.

Agreed. I've lost count of how many people I've met that owe their web programming careers to the Pokemon webpage they built as a kid.

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

#234

Post by derefr »

FreakyT wrote: post #148
starsinspace wrote: post #108

Earlier 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 themes still work like this. Tumblr is actually an almost-perfect natural experiment on the value of customization, because there are two views of any given blog post: a public-indexed static HTML view, that the post's author can theme with whatever HTML+CSS+JS they desire; and an RSS-reader-like "dashboard" view, with no theming at all.

Polling Tumblr users on how they prefer to read pages—whether in the dashboard web-app, or by opening the links to the standalone HTML versions—would be pretty solid data on whether customization makes content overall better or worse from consumers' perspective.

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

#237

Post by vvillena »

tomcam wrote: post #140
athenot wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just stumbled on W3's ActivityPub and hope this takes off. If we can combine the independance of publishing and a way to link stuff together, it might go a long way to reduce our dependency on big platforms. https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

>a way to link stuff together Maybe... hyperlinks via tags?

Last I saw, hyperlinks didn't "provide a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content".

Are there any practical applications of this protocol on the wild, or on paper? This server-to-server communication reminds me of email in a good way. It could open a door for websites to talk to each other without Facebook or Twitter chaperoning the whole thing.

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

#238

Post by debaserab2 »

amasad wrote: post #214

Kids, btw, still like to build websites like this. At Repl.it we have a lot of teenagers using our product. Here are some of my favorite 90s style website: - Turn the volume one for this one and peep the marquee in the title: http://erikflynn.repl.co/Website/ - A music website "imma be link yall up with some good playlists" http://lexiecampbell.repl.co/Music/ - JACK WEBSITE: with a fun animated background and his "ba…

>I'M 13 AND CURRENTLY LEARNING 3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES, C++, CSS AND HTML.

>I OWN A CSGO CHEAT THAT YOU CAN BUY FOR 3 POUNDS A MONTH.

>I'M UPDATING IT ALOT AND NO ONE HAS EVER BEEN BANNED FROM IT.

little shit!

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

#240

Post by cylinder »

oldcynic wrote: post #155
vbezhenar wrote: post #80

Earlier 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…

Not true. Plenty of non-technical people had a web page up like this one. Nearly all ISPs included some webspace, and enough instructions to get going. Lots of people put up something on user.demon.co.uk or geocities about themselves, their hobbies or their pets etc. Having a web presence died off somewhat as people moved over to myspace and Livejournal then geocities and tripod started being abandoned. Then it start…

Yep. I miss the magic of FTPing into your ISP and having that little folder where you could drop simple HTML files.
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