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18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

fmboschetto.it

251–260 of 487 posts

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#251
I recently did a history of my old websites:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/a-history-of-personal-and-pro...

Most of the content is still there, but it's been shifted between static pages, Rails, Wordpress and now Jekyll.

It's neat to see one of these gems still out there; a picture of the 90s web that's still functional and being used. Too many of these sites are lost; only available in the Internet Archives.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#252

These simple sites show us something profound: If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. There are a some technologies that will never allow somebody to build a site and leave it unchanged for 20 or 25 years. Cold Fusion comes to mind. Almost nobody hosts it anymore for one. Can you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years? The version of PHP it runs on will be EOL long…

> Looks like Web 1.0 got something right after all :)

The secret is creating a standard early on that thousands of different pieces of software depend on, so that changing it would expensive and require a phenomenal amount of decentralized coordination.

Don't worry about making it good -- just make it good enough that people won't want to tear their hair out and unanimously agree to never touch it again. Make the short term cost of applying hacks on top of it low, and the cost of throwing everything out high.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is hardly a good example. It's terrible on mobile.

I find HN to be one of the best mobile websites. It's fast and text isn't massively oversized. You can actually fit information on screen. Many mobile websites I've seen are horrible to use, because they have very poor information density and the sites seem to be designed for 4" or smaller screens.

I tried to upvote you about HNs great mobile design, but the buttons are so small I accidentally downvoted ;)

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#255
post #243

I had this perception that those spinning gifs and moving text made pages crazy hard to parse but I was pleasantly surprised that this site seemed simpler and easier to parse than half the sites today with pop ups, notifications, and blocking modals. Is it just me, or are these notifications and modals that are getting so prevalent really degrading a lot of the web browsing experience today.

It used to be fun to load the Hamster Dance page on different machines and see how much it would slow each one. And that was just from a bunch of animated .GIFs.

Taboola, Facebook thumbs, Twitter counters, and the like are the Hamster Dances of the 21st century.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#256

I'm surprised to see still exists and works in modern browsers. And saddened to see it updates at ~20fps, at least on Safari. Time for a smooth, GPU accelerated 60+fps marquee implementation?

While support is near universal, I was sad to find out that has not fared so well. I'm sure a lot of you already know this easter egg, but if you search "blink tag" in Google, Google makes all the blink tags actually work (using JS of course but still) https://www.google.com/search?q=blink+tag

I simulate the tag on a 404 page I maintain.

But I use CSS, not JS.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#257
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users should be able to override the default behaviour of their browser if they want to, but the default behaviour should still be defined by the HTML spec rather than the browser vendor. It's really frustrating when two browsers implement important parts the spec differently and push website developers to work around the behaviour one browser or the other with browser-specific code. It doesn't lead to sites being re…

Maybe the solution is to let go of this notion that every device needs to render exactly the way the designers want and embrace that difference. I've been on the internet since the mid 90s. I'm well aware of what was, andit was that way because people then as now wanted things to look and act exactly like they wanted and not embrace that not everyone wants or needs your carefully crafted graphical design.

I don't have any notion that sites should be exactly the same in every browser, but they should be approximately the same. Having two browsers render the same HTML in completely different ways would be very odd.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been fairly good at allowing older binaries to run on newer systems. Apple is pretty annoying in this regard. There’s a lot of software that doesn’t work on versions maybe only 5 years old. A lot of software doesn’t need to change to be honest. Microsoft word for example. Word processing: you sit down and type stuff, maybe change the font once or twice. I guess the collaborative features are nice being…

You haven’t tried to run 16 bit software on 64 bit Windows have you?

You're drawing an equivalence between 5 and 25 year old software?

Microsoft Windows 10 is able to run software that predates all of Apple's supported platforms.

Re: 18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

#260
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be snarky, but if there is a need to do this, it's pretty easy. If there is a real need, it is pretty trivial to do with VirtualBox or DosBox. Those applications from 20 years ago running in emulators will work far better in 20 more years than Apps from today that stop working due to remote service dependencies to force vendor lock-in. It is endlessly amusing to me that the more tightly integrated the cloud se…

So if emulation or a VM is your go to. How is that any different than what yuh can do with older versions of MacOS?

Virtualizating Windows isn't very hard, even back to something like Windows 95.

On the other hand, only OSX 10.7+ are really easy to run in a VM, and .5 and .6 only work for servers, and anything before 10.5 isn't really going to be compatible with virtualization. That's 2007, so OSX lets you virtualize back about 13 years, and Windows you can go back almost 30 years. People even have Win 3.1 running in VMware.

This is probably due to the fact that there isn't powerpc virtualization software, but if you need to run osx software from before 2007, you're basically out of luck.

You can also virtualize windows from just about any OS you can imagine, Mac, Linux, Windows etc, while OSX virtualization has a hard requirement for running on Mac hardware.

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