I started my blog 15 years ago. I established the basic style and format in the first year and have stuck with it. The old web still exists if you look for it.
Resurrect the Old Web
231–240 of 263 posts
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#232So why don’t we have a current day geocities? Why don’t we have people building their own thing any more on a free hosting platform?
My guess is: part of that itch is scratched by social media, especially for people who don't have the time or knowledge to set something up. At the same time, you have platforms like Medium or WordPress which could be considered successors at least in some aspect. And they have tons of users.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
That wasn't the case in the beginning, on Geocities at least. It was a pretty big deal when they started introducing popups and mandatory banner ads.
That's exactly right. They were REALLY chill in the early days: "The only code that we require to be on all of your html pages is a reference back to GeoCities. This can be a reference to the main Neighborhood page that you reside in, or to the GeoCities Home Page. Please see the FTP Procedures Page for the preferred source code." from https://web.archive.org/web/19961220170537/http://www.geocit... The other rules ar…
And in order to find those neighbors in my neighborhood, we started web rings...
Sites I liked were added to mine. My friends added me to theirs. Next thing you know we have curated journeys through web design - graphics - music - literature - art - trade skills - DIY - and well... let's just say they like four channels.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#234The old web was great but it broke society in a different way and formed the basis of social media's current problems. Writing about your situation and expecting other people to desire to know you so much that they go out of their way to learn about you is not a substitute for 1-1 or 1-group interaction that formed the basis of human culture for centuries. If you want to do something revolutionary to start restoring a healthy society, once a day, call (or DM or text) someone from your contacts list and say "I saw something today that made me think of you, so I wanted to see how you're doing. What's new in your life?"
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#235Not closely relevant but I've revamped my personal website earlier this year to bring the old web vibe into it. I've got a 88x31 GIF section and I wonder where I could look for other old web sites to cross link with my site.
I have 88x31 banners on my homepage, https://webb.page , what’s yours?
Dropped you an email. :)
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#236Back in the "Old Web" time I spent time with people who wanted to resurrect dial-up BBSes. There were people who wanted to resurrect CB radios.
The lesson: Embrace change, and accept that your kids are independent with their own identities and experiences.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash. Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so. The iPhone had about 14% marketshare at the time, so it's not like Apple was in a commanding position to dictate terms to the industry. But if you read his letter, what he said made total s…
Given Steve Jobs' character, there may be another reason behind it: that year, before the decision to stop supporting Flash, Adobe broke their agreement with Apple by releasing Photoshop for PCs before the version for Mac for the first time. This could sound as a conspiracy teory, and I don't know how much evidence we have that this might have been the reason (or one of the reasons) behind the decision. But, given Jo…
Flash and open source actionscript allowed devs to completely circumvent the Apple App Store. That was a direct threat to the iOS business model at the time.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#238The "old web" never really went a way. The "new web" just got better and more engaging. I still use my rss reader as my primary way to connect to the internet, but rss has problems and the readers did not evolve to solve them. The main problems are it is easy to drown in articles and hard to discover new feeds. Social media sites solve booth of these problems with their algorithms, but rss never found a solution for that. Thats why I started my own reader https://ivyreader.com to reduce the issues rss has, because I really hope it stays.
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may be better than Google, but I don't understand why a blog needs a font CDN at all. Just use standard fonts or host them yourself if you really can't do without your SuperCoolFont.
For real - computers come with a shitton of nice fonts these days. Plus like, font styling allows fallbacks -- choose a nice font stack where all the fallbacks look nice, and you're good to go.
True, you can get pretty far with https://modernfontstacks.com
Re: Resurrect the Old Web
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may be better than Google, but I don't understand why a blog needs a font CDN at all. Just use standard fonts or host them yourself if you really can't do without your SuperCoolFont.
For real - computers come with a shitton of nice fonts these days. Plus like, font styling allows fallbacks -- choose a nice font stack where all the fallbacks look nice, and you're good to go.
The problem is that you also can't use the majority of local fonts people already have installed because advertisers started requesting those on hidden canvases to try to pinpoint segments of users based on which fonts you have installed, so `local('Some Font Name')` in CSS now sometimes just doesn't work in some browsers to prevent that privacy leak.
Advertising networks: the exact evil for why we can't have nice things on the web.