I remember learning how to write html w my friend when we were in middle school. The hardest part was content. We decided just on lists of things we liked and didn’t like. I remember adding things to these lists was super fun and we put a lot of thought into what was there and why.
Building a website like it's 1999
61–70 of 99 posts
Re: Building a website like it's 1999
#62I think mmm.page[1] gets at a good 2022 model of this. People can create very personal websites without learning about HTML and those sites can be conveniently viewed on mobile. [1] https://mmm.page/
This is impressively bad. Excellent.
Re: Building a website like it's 1999
#63I bet you some people got really annoyed when written language was standardized and people couldn't simply spell things willy nilly using "their creativity". Every time you read a book you are looking at thousands of years of typographical standardization, but you don't lament the fact that they "all look the same". In fact, if you took a book out of the library shelf and saw it was written in a weird font (i.e. papy…
I think you and the author both misunderstood what we really lost. I don’t think that what we miss the most is the old 90’s patchwork of gif style. Not that I’m not nostalgic of it, of course I am. But what I miss is the fact that back in the day, owning a little part of the internet was the normal thing and, contrary to nowadays profiles on social media, this space was really yours. It was as awful as what people’s…
This is the most salient point. The lost feature of the 90s web is the content, not the GeoCities aesthetic.
Web pages were quirky not because of gifs but because someone lovingly collected a bunch of Dragonball Z images or wrote summaries of X-Files episodes and put those up for others to enjoy. Some people put up recipes or stories or whatever. Most amateur homepages weren't a monetized side hustle, just content about the creators' interests.
Unfortunately today a lot of passion content lives in social media silos. Some still survives on the web, though now on Wikis rather than homepages.
I don't miss the GeoCities aesthetic of the 90s web, I suffered through the design to get to the interesting content. The design wasn't the important part.
Re: Building a website like it's 1999
#64Incidentally, my homepage in 1999 was “localghost.net”.
Re: Building a website like it's 1999
#65This is fantastic, but not fully in the spirit of the old web. Personal pages looked like they did because they were essentially outsider art: the product of experimentation by teenagers and rank amateurs, who had no idea what we were doing. In 1999 we were using Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, because they came with our browsers and were fun to explore. Only a web professional could use these tricks today t…
I used coolpage :D http://web.archive.org/web/20010517033954/http://www.klimane...
HotDog Professional, anyone? https://archive.org/details/tucows_194462_HotDog_Professiona...
Re: Building a website like it's 1999
#66Ok you got me, I feel nostalgic. What strikes me most is that those people from 90th were putting their creativity into something only handful of people will ever see, they were effectively shouting to void. I would love to be still able to discover low-ranging websites like this. I remember somebody shared some alternative search engine?
> What strikes me most is that those people from 90th were putting their creativity into something only handful of people will ever see, they were effectively shouting to void. Well you had visitor counters and guestbooks. There was obviously no expectation to go "viral" and have millions of visitors, but it felt social in a different way. More like a small cozy neighborhood, less like a train station.
I made a website for my amateur games at the time, with the requisite visitor counters and guestbook. I was fortunate enough to find an archive somewhere, and saw someone who worked at a library had come across my site and left some encouraging words. For me, that was the best part of the web back then.
Re: Building a website like it's 1999
#67I think mmm.page[1] gets at a good 2022 model of this. People can create very personal websites without learning about HTML and those sites can be conveniently viewed on mobile. [1] https://mmm.page/
Some of these are actually really cool!
Re: Building a website like it's 1999
#68Ok you got me, I feel nostalgic. What strikes me most is that those people from 90th were putting their creativity into something only handful of people will ever see, they were effectively shouting to void. I would love to be still able to discover low-ranging websites like this. I remember somebody shared some alternative search engine?
Oh, I feel like it’s quite the opposite! As a teenager I created a crappy non-English website about a topic that interested me, added it to a few local search engines (which worked more like directories) and it got tons of traffic, engagements with the guest book etc. Today, if you just create a website and have it crawled by the search engines, it will get no traffic at all.
Re: Building a website like it's 1999
#69This is fantastic, but not fully in the spirit of the old web. Personal pages looked like they did because they were essentially outsider art: the product of experimentation by teenagers and rank amateurs, who had no idea what we were doing. In 1999 we were using Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, because they came with our browsers and were fun to explore. Only a web professional could use these tricks today t…
> FrontPage
Confluence does the same thing now.
Re: Building a website like it's 1999
#70This is fantastic, but not fully in the spirit of the old web. Personal pages looked like they did because they were essentially outsider art: the product of experimentation by teenagers and rank amateurs, who had no idea what we were doing. In 1999 we were using Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, because they came with our browsers and were fun to explore. Only a web professional could use these tricks today t…
> FrontPage
Now I have to do stuff like this manually. Seems like things are regressing.