4 ms·

I think the word you're looking for is "personality". Sure half the sites were blinding and had background music and blinking crap and were pretty terrible, but

by geddy 8y ago

I think the word you're looking for is "personality". Sure half the sites were blinding and had background music and blinking crap and were pretty terrible, but it perfectly reflected the person that built it, however shoddily. Now, everything is sterilized. Run through a million filters to be picture-perfect, work on everything beautifully, etc. This is great for the bulk of the web (businesses and web apps and what-not), but personal websites disappearing was a _huge_ blow to the personality of the internet. Heck, MySpace pages were a disaster, letting users run arbitrary HTML and CSS everywhere, and when Facebook came along everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief that _finally_ we'd be free of those horrendous MySpace pages. Now, looking back, I miss the crap out of those pages. I also ditched social media entirely but I consider everything I just mentioned as playing a large role in that. No charm, no personality. Rigid. Walled gardens. It's like a microcosm of the state of technology in 2019. And I mentioned personal sites disappearing, and I still stand by it - yes, of course there are blogs and what-not, but they're not the same. They're hosted, fast, efficient, and typically use approved themes. If you want to get down and dirty and actually make your own site, it'd be looked at as a gigantic waste of time. Technology has come too far for it to be practical to build a fancy site out of pure flat HTML files that looks like the worst 90s sites. Why do that, when you could just have an out-of-the-box Wordpress or Tumblr site? Plus, no one would visit it anyway. If it's not spammed or marketing, no one's visiting anything these days. It's just too saturated. The average internet user visits a tiny fraction of the number of websites they used to. Typically, aggregators. Reddit and Facebook and whatever. Worse yet, aggregators that pull in only things they agree with, shared by people they agree with. And that is their version of the internet, and not to mention, the world. No dissenting opinions, nothing original. It's depressing and I hate it. I grew up learning to build websites from copying source code into Notepad and running it locally. It was a hot mess, but so much fun and super rewarding. The 90s web, even early 2000s until ~2006 or so (when I personally consider it went "too mainstream" to put on my hipster hat, and everyone was suddenly on it), I miss it all. Sorry for the rant but this all hits close to home and, as a web developer who got started in the mid-90s, I'm subjected to the "modern web" for many hours a day, and I'd give anything to see it regress.

unimpressive 8y ago
>And I mentioned personal sites disappearing, and I still stand by it - yes, of course there are blogs and what-not, but they're not the same. They're hosted, fast, efficient, and typically use approved themes. If you want to get down and dirty and actually make your own site, it'd be looked at as a gigantic waste of time. Technology has come too far for it to be practical to build a fancy site out of pure flat HTML files that looks like the worst 90s sites. Why do that, when you could just have an out-of-the-box Wordpress or Tumblr site? I still write my website by hand. I use a static site generator to do things like make a blog index and stuff, but I don't use any templates. Everything you see is designed by me. http://www.jdpressman.com/ http://www.jdpressman.com/
- badsectoracula 8y ago
  Note that a lot of people in the 90s used WYSIWYG editors, both Netscape Gold (later Communicator) and Internet Explorer (as of Windows 98) came with WYSIWYG editors (Composer and Frontpage Express respectively). Personally i had my own site since the mid-90s (initially on Geocities, later on Tripod) and always used WYSIWYG editors (initially Netscape Composer, later Frontpage Express and after that Mozilla Composer) and AFAIK most people i know used and most oldschool sites i remember were made using such editors. TBH i never understood, even at the time, the point of writing static pages by hand (i remember even proud web buttons like "Made in Notepad" :-P) - the main explanation i was given was that the WYSIWYG editors created messy code, but to me that never sounded like a good reason since the entire purpose of such an editor is to not have to bother with the code. I only started making sites by hand when i got into (classic) ASP (i made single pages before, but mostly for javascript demos or learning HTML and the like) and later PHP. Even then, the first time i used ASP was for a hobby site i worked on with some friends over the net about (point and click) adventure games where we'd put articles and such and the articles themselves were written in Frontpage Express for formatting and such (with the code just copy/pasted into a textarea i had in the "admin" section :-P). I'm still using Seamonkey Composer and Frontpage Express (well, more the latter than the former since i'm not using Seamonkey much anymore whereas the latter is just a 1.5MB zip file i carry on my external hard disk that works out of the box anywhere) for very simple pages like [0], [1] and [2]. Although my "bigger" sites (that is, sites with more than a couple of pages and a need for a theme) are made using custom generators (usually in Free Pascal or Python). And FWIW one of my favorite software that isn't developed anymore is Apple's iWeb - i haven't seen a tool as easy to use for making static sites as this one. Sadly Apple cares much less than Microsoft ever did about backwards compatibility and i'm certain my copy of iWeb will stop working soon (and there isn't any Wine equivalent to fall back on whereas in the unlikely even that old Windows programs stop working, i can still use them via Wine) so after Apple abandoned it, i stopped using it myself. [0] http://runtimeterror.com/tech/jtf/ http://runtimeterror.com/tech/jtf/ [1] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/ [2] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/ol/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/ol/

by geddy 8y ago

unimpressive 8y ago

>And I mentioned personal sites disappearing, and I still stand by it - yes, of course there are blogs and what-not, but they're not the same. They're hosted, fast, efficient, and typically use approved themes. If you want to get down and dirty and actually make your own site, it'd be looked at as a gigantic waste of time. Technology has come too far for it to be practical to build a fancy site out of pure flat HTML files that looks like the worst 90s sites. Why do that, when you could just have an out-of-the-box Wordpress or Tumblr site? I still write my website by hand. I use a static site generator to do things like make a blog index and stuff, but I don't use any templates. Everything you see is designed by me. http://www.jdpressman.com/ http://www.jdpressman.com/

badsectoracula 8y ago
Note that a lot of people in the 90s used WYSIWYG editors, both Netscape Gold (later Communicator) and Internet Explorer (as of Windows 98) came with WYSIWYG editors (Composer and Frontpage Express respectively). Personally i had my own site since the mid-90s (initially on Geocities, later on Tripod) and always used WYSIWYG editors (initially Netscape Composer, later Frontpage Express and after that Mozilla Composer) and AFAIK most people i know used and most oldschool sites i remember were made using such editors. TBH i never understood, even at the time, the point of writing static pages by hand (i remember even proud web buttons like "Made in Notepad" :-P) - the main explanation i was given was that the WYSIWYG editors created messy code, but to me that never sounded like a good reason since the entire purpose of such an editor is to not have to bother with the code. I only started making sites by hand when i got into (classic) ASP (i made single pages before, but mostly for javascript demos or learning HTML and the like) and later PHP. Even then, the first time i used ASP was for a hobby site i worked on with some friends over the net about (point and click) adventure games where we'd put articles and such and the articles themselves were written in Frontpage Express for formatting and such (with the code just copy/pasted into a textarea i had in the "admin" section :-P). I'm still using Seamonkey Composer and Frontpage Express (well, more the latter than the former since i'm not using Seamonkey much anymore whereas the latter is just a 1.5MB zip file i carry on my external hard disk that works out of the box anywhere) for very simple pages like [0], [1] and [2]. Although my "bigger" sites (that is, sites with more than a couple of pages and a need for a theme) are made using custom generators (usually in Free Pascal or Python). And FWIW one of my favorite software that isn't developed anymore is Apple's iWeb - i haven't seen a tool as easy to use for making static sites as this one. Sadly Apple cares much less than Microsoft ever did about backwards compatibility and i'm certain my copy of iWeb will stop working soon (and there isn't any Wine equivalent to fall back on whereas in the unlikely even that old Windows programs stop working, i can still use them via Wine) so after Apple abandoned it, i stopped using it myself. [0] http://runtimeterror.com/tech/jtf/ http://runtimeterror.com/tech/jtf/ [1] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/ [2] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/ol/ http://runtimeterror.com/tools/ol/