Very much awesome. Brings back so many horrible memories of web-sites past (including, sadly, some of my own...).
Lemme see how many awesome things I can find...
<MARQUEE>, <BLINK>, and animated backgrounds... three things that just scream professionalism.
<HTML WEB="2.0">
There's some C++ code, except in capitals, some QBASIC code, except with Perl-like $var syntax, and some allegedly-Scheme code, that mentions Common Lisp in an error message.
<FONT STYLE="FORTHRIGHT">
<FONT FACE="COMIC SANS MS">
<TABLE CONS=()>
HTML errors and broken tags everywhere.
Under construction banners!
Calling the forum a "Guestbook", the store "E-Commerce", himself a "Webmaster".
Email link goes to Lycos.
Web rings!
Lots of Netscape-style broken images.
Lots of Win95-era mangled long filenames (XKCDLO~1.JPG, BROKEN~1.png)
I think the term "webmaster" itself now has some crude connotations. Perhaps "web designer" will also be superseeded by other stuff like UX designers and such over time.
The background is still tame by geocities' standards though!
PhoenixEnigma wrote:No midi loops, thank god! Otherwise, it brings back some long buried memories. I'm still deciding if that's a good thing.
Yeah, and especially bad quality midi (is there any other?). Because for some reason visitors will love to hear the same song every time they visit.
and what about auto-pop-ups that inform of something new, or just random welcomes? Also, call me ignorant, but were that big of an issue back in bad-html/geocities webpage maker times?
...I do remember seeing some geocities sites that actually had simple but viewable pages, but maybe because I caught the last few years of it in the mid-2000's.
I was quite surprised about this one. He missed a chance to rick roll everyone 90s style.
But yea looking at this site most definitely brings back memories. While I can say that my site that I had made back in the day was better than this I can't really say it was all that much better. Yea we on the internets had some interesting "tastes" back then.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin
My second thought: I should look into using that Gopher mirror from now on.
The link the OP provided in the Comic discussion didn't work well for me. It pointed to forums.xkcd.com instead of forums.xkcd.com. Thus, my login cookie stopped working.
In a middle school HTML class, I've been playing with hex colors while everyone else used the constants. I got a 95/100 on my (I do think) well arranged and non-blinding page. My friend got 100/100. Because he had green text on black, and the whole page marquee-d, left and right, bouncing, whatever. The teacher said 'it was good use of HTML tags'.
After lurking for years, and receiving my signed book last week (Australia... takes a while), I saw this and had to register specifically to say: Awesome.
So perfectly and wonderfully done - artfully chosen images, overly bordered tables, exposed code... ahhhh memories.
Since I recently installed netscape 4.7 as part of some nostalgia of my own, I decided to load it up just for fun - the page actually looks better* in it.
*For certain definitions** of better **as in, the <FONT FACE="COMIC SANS MS"> tags actually work ***and the <MARQUEE> doesn't.
Last edited by Random832 on Mon Oct 26, 2009 6:22 am UTC, edited 1 time in total.
GENERATION 99: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and subtract 1 from the generation. Social experiment.
This was superb. I actually didn't know Geocities was shutting down - I still use an @geocities.com email address, from back way before Yahoo bought them. Now I should be bothered to wonder if they'll be getting clumsy with the domain name and screw up my mail somehow, but instead all I can do is giggle at the thought of that awesome new site design!
Steax wrote:There were entire CDs with just thousands of those little GIFs...
There was a program I saw once, about a decade ago, in the computer store thats whole purpose seemd to be to make thise little 3D spinning GIFs... it could take some text, or some arbitrary simple shape, extrude it, and render it from various angles or animate it spinning. From what I could see, that was about all it could do... it was basically the 3D part of WordArt but with one or two more options.
It cost several hundred dollars.
I didn't buy it.
While no one overhear you quickly tell me not cow cow. but how about watch phone?
For awhile I was wondering if I could explain why the first thing out of my mouth when I saw this was "Adorable!" Then I realized this is just like looking at baby pictures of the internet.
...though I was rather surprised when I first turned up mostly because I'm part of a team that is creating a website that will be sticking to flashing things, embedded MIDI, animated backgrounds and other terrible things at the moment, and my first thought was "wait, xkcd is doing the same thing? No, can't be a tribute, not a chance, we're not even live yet, go look at things properly, Cheese".
Anyway, yeah, that's me away again! Byee, Individual Comics!
hermaj wrote:No-one. Will. Be. Taking. Cheese's. Spot.
Spoiler:
LE4dGOLEM wrote:Cheese is utterly correct on all fronts.
SexyTalon wrote:That thing that Cheese just said. Do that.
Meaux_Pas wrote:I hereby disagree and declare Cheese to be brilliant.
You forgot about the random scripts that you could use to have useless things follow your mouse around the page, like butterflies or bubbles, or a spinning clock with the date. Thank goodness that died out after about three years, although depending on what you're looking up, you can still run into them every once in a while. Like when I was starting to get into Tudor history and ran into the website of every 15-year-old emo-wannabe girl who "identified" with the tragic story of Anne Boleyn and yet managed to get all the historical facts wrong. One page had ghosts floating all over the page, making it hard to read anything, and also stretching out the page at odd intervals. I later tore her page apart for a class assignment in good vs. bad web design.
All that to say thank you Randall for managing to bring back the good things about cheesy web pages while making sure the evil things didn't tag along for the ride. It was a nice throwback and quite awesome.
The first thing I thought when I saw the page was: "Gee Willikers! Has xkcd been hacked? That must be the reason for all these ad-like flashing banners!" It took me a while to find the real reason. (That might be caused by the page layout...)
phlip wrote:It doesn't do anything, it's not a real attribute.
Well, then, what's the joke then? If it doesn't work for HTML, what does it do in the language or whatever it does work for? Certainly it can't be there just randomly.
This is beyond win. The layout itself would be enough, but the source is hilarious.
jendral_hxr wrote:I am still thinking about how RSS icon could be there. Do we have RSS at that **lovely** time?
RSS dates from 1999. Back in the day, when you clicked an orange "RSS" button you got a page full of XML if you were lucky.
I had my first real "oh my God the WWW is wonderful" experience in 1999: a site full of Transformers biographies. And yes, it was a Geocities site which looked practically identical to this. (I can't believe that was ten years ago. Almost to the day, in fact, as I was in my first month of uni.)
As for what it's missing? The ripply-water Java applet. And a Comet Cursor obviously. The irony is that Firefox now actually supports the CSS3 cursor format, so you can have those in a standards-compliant format these days.
[my father did not take me to see a marching band]
my first foray into my own webpage was not on geocities but on Freewebs, which worked much the same. I still ran into tonnes of horrible geocities sites. I still do on occasion, though they are actually good now. There are a couple of great Japanese RMXP sites on there which I need to quickly remember the URL for so I can save them...
RIP Geocities (ps. why is Yahoo shutting it down? No profits?)
I like it, shouldn't the source code have less line-breaks (not <br>). I remember often looking at them and it would all show on one row. Which made it practicly impossible to find that one piece of source code that produced an awesome pop-up asking for your name, and then the page would say "Hello NAME, welcome to Adams awesome webpage".
*g*
