I was there for some of those early days of the web! My first site went online in 1997. It was hosted on Geocities, a red-text-on-forest-green abomination with auto-playing MIDIs and visit...
I was there for some of those early days of the web! My first site went online in 1997. It was hosted on Geocities, a red-text-on-forest-green abomination with auto-playing MIDIs and visit counters. I had a guestbook. I had a pointless poll. I was part of a webring.
It's on that silly site that I taught myself JavaScript — of course the language looked a good deal different back then! I had a "requires Netscape Navigator" disclaimer. When I started the site, CSS wasn't even a thing yet; though I would later use my it as a sandbox for all sorts of design foolery. I made "games" (really PRNG-driven JS alerts framed by GIFs) and sent badly Photoshopped "award" JPEGs to other webmasters. I ran an email newsletter with fewer than 20 subscribers, full of jokes and short stories and proto-blogging. Those were glorious years.
At some point I hit Geocities' free hosting limit (I think it was a total of 10 or 15 MB of storage) so I divided further expansions between Tripod's and AOL's free services. This was before cross-domain policies and the like, so my site was a tangle of HTML and assets served from different places, more or less seamlessly. My thought process at the time was, no one really cares where a particular resource is coming from as long as it works. Little did I know that decision would prevent 90% or so of my site from archival in the future. Great efforts have been made to save Geocities content... but sites on other platforms, not so much.
Every now and then I'll learn about a new preservation effort and look to see if they managed to save the parts of my site that others hadn't, but to no avail. There's always a chance that someone, somewhere, has a backup but at this point I'm not holding my breath. The site was honestly not very good, and its memory is only meaningful for me, but I would love to see it again. The only surviving portions I've been able to find are the home page, full of broken images and links to nowhere, a page of random quotations I liked, and a fortuitous "history of this site" page I wrote in 1999 that is a nice look back on my mindset at the time.
I still build for the web, but it's a vastly different place today. It makes me wonder where the next 20 years will take us, and what content from today will be worth archiving for posterity.
The historical preservation people and the privacy people need to work something out. A lot of what we know about the past comes from private letters that were inadvertently saved. History papers...
The historical preservation people and the privacy people need to work something out. A lot of what we know about the past comes from private letters that were inadvertently saved. History papers are often based on databases that tracked individuals.
I was there for some of those early days of the web! My first site went online in 1997. It was hosted on Geocities, a red-text-on-forest-green abomination with auto-playing MIDIs and visit counters. I had a guestbook. I had a pointless poll. I was part of a webring.
It's on that silly site that I taught myself JavaScript — of course the language looked a good deal different back then! I had a "requires Netscape Navigator" disclaimer. When I started the site, CSS wasn't even a thing yet; though I would later use my it as a sandbox for all sorts of design foolery. I made "games" (really PRNG-driven JS alerts framed by GIFs) and sent badly Photoshopped "award" JPEGs to other webmasters. I ran an email newsletter with fewer than 20 subscribers, full of jokes and short stories and proto-blogging. Those were glorious years.
At some point I hit Geocities' free hosting limit (I think it was a total of 10 or 15 MB of storage) so I divided further expansions between Tripod's and AOL's free services. This was before cross-domain policies and the like, so my site was a tangle of HTML and assets served from different places, more or less seamlessly. My thought process at the time was, no one really cares where a particular resource is coming from as long as it works. Little did I know that decision would prevent 90% or so of my site from archival in the future. Great efforts have been made to save Geocities content... but sites on other platforms, not so much.
Every now and then I'll learn about a new preservation effort and look to see if they managed to save the parts of my site that others hadn't, but to no avail. There's always a chance that someone, somewhere, has a backup but at this point I'm not holding my breath. The site was honestly not very good, and its memory is only meaningful for me, but I would love to see it again. The only surviving portions I've been able to find are the home page, full of broken images and links to nowhere, a page of random quotations I liked, and a fortuitous "history of this site" page I wrote in 1999 that is a nice look back on my mindset at the time.
I still build for the web, but it's a vastly different place today. It makes me wonder where the next 20 years will take us, and what content from today will be worth archiving for posterity.
The historical preservation people and the privacy people need to work something out. A lot of what we know about the past comes from private letters that were inadvertently saved. History papers are often based on databases that tracked individuals.