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18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated
- RdRocket16 7y agoCheck out Butkus.org - my dad has had it since before 2000 and updates it regularly, with an ancient copy of frontpage.
- RdRocket16 7y agohttps://www.butkus.org/chinon/index.html https://www.butkus.org/chinon/index.html
- anacoluthe 7y agoReminds me of http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/ http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/
- cwoolfe 7y agoOnly 520 lines of HTML. And readable! view-source:http://www.fmboschetto.it/ http://www.fmboschetto.it/
- marai2 7y agoWhat is the oldest website still standing?
- retube 7y agoand it loads at light speed
- jagger27 7y agoHosted in Italy too!
- galacticdessert 7y agoWhich makes the speed even more surprising!!
- peteretep 7y agoThe mass of the Alps cause a dilation in space time
- goshx 7y agoI love that you kept the style too. This brings back good memories. I’ve learned HTML using Frontpage and gifs were a must in my geocities hosted websites.
- nalesnik3000 7y agoThe spinning e-mail symbol GIF evokes pure nostalgia, bro. Came here to laugh, not to feel.
- Lagogarda 7y agoThis site is best viewed with Netscape Navigator
- criddell 7y agoI was looking for the web ring links.
- hieudang9 7y agoI missed the tools like FrontPage/DreamWaver and gorgeous Flash websites.
- juskrey 7y agoNever missed FrontPage/DreamWaver..
- pixelrevision 7y agoDreamWaver is an appropriate name...
- rickyc091 7y agoAgreed. The modern-day version of those would be Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/) which kids use to start exploring coding, but it's not the same.
- rchaud 7y agoYou're right, it's not the same. Scratch is too Computer Science-y for something that can be as simple as a website. Text, images and video, plus hyperlinks that link one page to another. That's enough for the majority of people to share information. I really hope something comes along that reinvigorates the public's interest in creating content that resides on their own website, rather than a walled-garden social media account.
- jannyfer 7y agoHere’s an archive link in case this gets hugged to death: https://web.archive.org/web/20200214134509/http://www.fmboschetto.it/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200214134509/http://www.fmbosc...
- pmlnr 7y agoIt's actually quite hard to hug static HTML pages to death, unless on purpose, with things like slowloris.
- drops 7y agoOne of the most prolific and well-known music reviewers - Pierro Scaruffi - has a website built in 1995 with a design not updated much, or at all, since: https://www.scaruffi.com https://www.scaruffi.com
- jacquesm 7y agoThat's a great website, thank you.
- attil-io 7y ago> This website does NOT use cookies. Period. Love it!
- ctruelson 7y agoSimilar to Robert Christgau! https://robertchristgau.com/ https://robertchristgau.com/
- alexmorenodev 7y agoHe even reviewed one of my favorites albums launched recently: https://www.scaruffi.com/vol8/bentknee.html https://www.scaruffi.com/vol8/bentknee.html
- rchaud 7y agoI've come across this site many times when looking up different bands...the breadth and diversity of bands and genres covered here is truly amazing!
- Santosh83 7y agoThe biggest drawback of sites from this era is they don't reflow on mobile screens. On a desktop they still work as well as they ever did. I'm still searching for a good WYSIWYG HTML composer that can generate clean, responsive pages. Seems like this is a problem where there isn't sufficient incentive for the big tech companies to tackle, and the only s/w that seems to come close is BlueGriffon.
- jacquesm 7y agoThat's a client side problem, not a server side problem. The rendering and presentation of a webpage are entirely up to the client, absolutely nothing dictates that a page should look a certain way on a certain client.
- lultimouomo 7y agoThen again, the whole page is laid out in a table element, so I could see why mobile browsers won't reflow it perfectly.
- onion2k 7y agoThere are a ton of attributes in the HTML that dictates how the website should render - it has a bgcolor and a margin on the body tag, a width and height on the main table, center tags all over the place, etc. Suggesting that a browser should ignore the HTML spec and do something else would completely destroy the web.
- jimktrains2 7y agoUser agents already can ignore css and have user defined stylesheets and even JavaScript. None if this is new and it's a failure of our profession that that is abnormal and produces spectacularly poor results for users.
- onion2k 7y agoUsers 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 rendered differently as developers embrace the variety of user agents. It leads to people adding "This site is best viewed in Netscape Navigator" gif or "This application requires Chrome" on log in pages. Those are bad things.
- jgrahamc 7y agoMy 23 year old web site: https://jgc.org/ https://jgc.org/ It's still updated from a Perl script that generates static HTML.
- azimuth11 7y agoI guess you have some sort of "classic car" feelings towards it? How often does the perl script get updated?
- jgrahamc 7y agoWhenever I need to update the site.
- dna_polymerase 7y agoImagine stumbling upon an old-fashioned website, reading it is maintained by the CTO of Cloudflare, of all people.
- jgrahamc 7y agoI think from time to time that I should completely change it and update it. But I can't really be bothered, Cloudflare takes a lot of my time.
- gerdesj 7y agoI shouldn't bother mate. It is fast and the content is easily accessible. I've just spent a happy half hour browsing your blog. It looks like you'll be "needing" a 3D printer soon to really waste time on building IoT stuff. I have five different models of ESP8266 and ESP32s scattered across my desk along with Dupont wires, assorted sensors and a soldering iron, breadboards etc. Its a great way of taking your mind off the daily grind - my job title is MD.
- jenshk 7y agoHaha that's pretty awesome. I have dedicated this year to simplicity and building my company's new website in Hugo with plain vanilla javascript.
- dbalatero 7y agoMy favorite like this site is http://www.burger.com http://www.burger.com - this dude has a hilarious array of hobbies and awesome beveled button links.
- dabeeeenster 7y agoHave to wonder how much that domain name is worth...?
- cameronbrown 7y agoProbably expensive, but I doubt it's actually worth anything. I reckon it's much harder to build a brand when you start with a generic word.
- tdons 7y agoUSD 25.000 according to GoDaddy https://godaddy.com/domain-value-appraisal/appraisal/?checkAvail=1&tmskey=&domainToCheck=burger.com https://godaddy.com/domain-value-appraisal/appraisal/?checkA...
- notaplumber 7y agoThey mean USD $25,000 and not $25.
- 0xferruccio 7y agoThere’s so many italian old italian sites with this design My favorite in High Scool was http://ripmat.it http://ripmat.it That site is the only reason I managed to learn Math school
- skc 7y agoThe source is refreshingly sparse and tidy which was kind of jolting for a second.
- webscalist 7y agohttps://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fmboschetto.it%2F https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... 100 Points. Mobile First. Better than React Native.
- stabbles 7y agoThis is hilarious! Turns out 18 year old websites were mobile friendly after all
- jsaldes 7y agoHave you actually tried the site on a mobile device? It's impossible to read the text and navigation is hell. Wouldn't classify that as "mobile friendly".
- dchest 7y agoI just tried, it works well (Chrome/Android on a 5.5"-something screen).
- vesinisa 7y agoIt's not so bad if your mobile browser supports pinch to zoom.
- rchaud 7y agoMost mobile browsers support it out of the box. If the site designer set "user-scalable=no" in the meta viewport property, than that will prevent zooming. It's an accessibility issue and should be avoided.
- mcintyre1994 7y agoiOS has ignored that meta tag for a while now.
- dahart 7y ago
- throwaway_fbnet 7y agoHere is a life-saver maintained by a 77 year young lawyer for a lot of public good: http://www.drtsolutions.com/ http://www.drtsolutions.com/. Case laws against SARFAESI, an Indian law that expedites bank recovery for non-performing assets. He updates it manually in FrontPage even today!
- jannes 7y agoWow, that page is amazing! I hadn't seen the old Google logo in years: http://www.drtsolutions.com/drtqueries.htm http://www.drtsolutions.com/drtqueries.htm The search widget doesn't even use an <iframe>. Just a plain <form>.
- ta999999171 7y agoPage colors are ugly as shit, but so readable - modern web devs/people who make them do "modern" stuff, you suck compared to these sites in this thread. Sorry, not sorry.
- geocrasher 7y agoMy favorite "Retro awful": Site: https://www.lingscars.com/ https://www.lingscars.com/
- cosmodisk 7y agoI remember how she was ridiculed on Dragon's Den,yet she's the one employing a bunch of people and having a successful business. I remember reading that she's even hired someone to do some maintenance in the town,because the local council couldn't afford it anymore.
- ahmetkun 7y agothis one looks very retro but the code is actually quite modern. it has custom fonts, css animations, gradients, etc. and no tables.
- notahacker 7y agoAlso, beneath the intentional craziness, it's very clever marketing.
- reaperducer 7y agoIt's like the visual equivalent of chiptunes.
- ceejayoz 7y agoI made a lot of sites in Frontpage in high school. My favorite bit was the rollover buttons that used a Java applet to do so.
- matteuan 7y agoIt's impressive the amount of content inside! There are countless pages about literature, religion and physics. It's a good reminder of the original goal of WWW: share information.
- rlv-dan 7y ago> It's a good reminder of the original goal of WWW: share information. That is what I miss the most about the old web. We wanted to build something better by sharing knowledge. And for a while we did. Then mainstream came and corporates took over.
- reaperducer 7y agoWell, to be honest the corporations were always there. It's just when the marketers discovered "cyberspace" that everything went to hell.
- codegeek 7y agoBut thats so not web 2.0/3.0. You gotta add more padding so we can create smooth scrolling. /s. I am a culprit of this too now btw.
- blakesterz 7y agoAnyone else still sad over the demise of FrontPage Express? It did everything I needed at the time, it was free, and really easy to use. The HTML wasn't as bad as FrontPage either.
- gtk40 7y agoI got my start with web dev using Netscape Composer, which was a similar enough tool. Seamonkey, the successor of Netscape and Mozilla Suite, still includes it to this day and it works well! https://www.seamonkey-project.org/ https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
- cat199 7y agoNot to forget the geocitiesizer: https://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/ https://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/ "Make Any Webpage Look Like It Was Made By A 13 Year-Old In 1996"
- 1_player 7y agoI'm surprised to see <marquee> 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?
- seisvelas 7y agoWhile <marquee> support is near universal, I was sad to find out that <blink> 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 https://www.google.com/search?q=blink+tag
- reaperducer 7y agoI simulate the <blink> tag on a 404 page I maintain. But I use CSS, not JS.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoWait, how do the rest of you test if a field accepts or rejects html?
- why-oh-why 7y agoWhat field accepts or rejects html? What are you talking about?
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoIf, say, an admin text field is supposed to have the ability to support and display HTML on an end users machine.
- pjc50 7y agoAnother classic from an electronic music pioneer, author of the original TRON score: http://www.wendycarlos.com/ http://www.wendycarlos.com/
- afwaller 7y agoThe content is super wholesome as well.
- rlv-dan 7y agoMy personal/hobby business web site (https://www.rlvision.com https://www.rlvision.com) is based on code 22 years ago. It's built with tables, because that's how you did things back then. The age shows. But I haven't found reason to rebuild it yet. Simply put, it works. It may not be mobile friendly, but the goal is to make available my Windows software, so my aim is desktop users.
- tbdr 7y agohappy user of RLVision Artgem - thank you !
- alvarezo 7y agoHoly, that was it - ArtGem! Perfect middle ground between Photoshop and Paint. Great features, pleasant feel to use.
- alvarezo 7y agoThis website looks extremely familiar. I think I visited it about 15 years ago and I am not completely sure but didn't you have a nice drawing and photo editing software there? I can't remember the name of it but it was the best ever, until it was disappointingly discontinued because of lack of buying customers :(
- rlv-dan 7y agoYes, ArtGem (https://rlvision.com/artgem_about.php https://rlvision.com/artgem_about.php). We were a couple of guys that tried at making shareware, but sadly failed. I continued running the site to host my own utilities, some of which eventually turned into shareware. I don't earn much money from it, but I enjoy making software and it makes me happy when other people find them useful as well!
- alvarezo 7y agoSo nice to hear from the developer of some software I very much liked and used as a kid. I especially liked the smudge feature. You definitely made me happy and I thank you for that.
- devalnor 7y ago<bgsound src="ue.mid" loop="-1"> is princeless
- jeremyswank 7y agoMy first site is still live. It went live in 1997, hand coded (using tables). Went through a few redesigns but the 2000 version has been left online as a fixed digital artifact from the time: http://pwp.detritus.net/ http://pwp.detritus.net/
- mmmBacon 7y agoSeriously very nice design for 2000.
- rhblake 7y agoMy personal favorite, which is in a similar vein - an Italian, although the site is in English; Frontpage; still updated - is https://www.luigicases.com/ https://www.luigicases.com/. He makes leather straps and cases for cameras. Famous in the classic camera community. Only active site that I can think of that still uses frames.
- toyg 7y agoThose pics tell a glamorous story worth of a movie.
- pmlnr 7y agoI started with FrontPage 98 in '99. Moved to a self-written PHP CMS, then WordPress, then back to static HTML. Had I stayed with FrontPage, my life might have been simpler - porting 20 years of content is not simple - but I would have missed out on learning a lot of HTML, CSS, PHP, Python, MySQL, character set conversion, MySQL vs UTF-8, etc.
- arm64future 7y agoWhere can I find more sites like this
- jk7f 7y agoAnother gem: http://www.tyrrell.de/startseite.htm http://www.tyrrell.de/startseite.htm
- abruzzi 7y agoMy father still updates his website with Frontpage (he had a recent 6 month outage because he inadvertently deleted the Windows XP vmdk on his system, but I recovered that for him recently.) He’s 75, and isn’t interested in converting or learning anything new at this stage. The funny thing is for years his home-made site was the top google hit if you searched for “hill's criteria” (See Hill's criteria of causation). His site is http://drabruzzi.com/ http://drabruzzi.com/
- Santosh83 7y agoHmm, how do you manage to acquire a legal of copy of Frontpage (even Express) these days for your dad?
- Macha 7y agoWas FrontPage ever sold digitally? I wouldn't be surprised if my parents still had their disc copies of Office 95-XP (some even legal thanks to PC bundle deals).
- nonamenoslogan 7y agoThe later versions "Sharepoint Designer" are free from Microsoft and still available on their downloads page. Frontpage may be old enough to consider it 'abandonware,' a quick Google for "free frontpage" has a lot of downloads including one from Kean.edu with an embedded key.
- abruzzi 7y agoHe still has the install disk! Though my repair was to pull the vmdk off his old, broken laptop to get him working again.
- ta999999171 7y agoMost don't (shouldn't?) care about the legality of 20+ year old software that's no longer being sold.
- geocrasher 7y agoThese 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 before. I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page. Looks like Web 1.0 got something right after all :)
- est31 7y agoFortunately there are plenty of static site generators. Frontpage is out of support and likely the currently popular generators will meet their end one day as well. But even then you can still run them in the future, and their output should not have any major issues (unlike a CMS which might get hacked if it's not kept up to date).
- danielbarla 7y ago> If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. and > I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page. While simplicity is a great way to future proof things, I'm not convinced that this argument in general would work nearly as well without the benefit of hindsight. One could be forgiven for confusing it with "guess the future correctly". Plenty of relatively safe bets from 10, 20, 30 years ago haven't panned out that well. It's an interesting line of thinking though: exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived?
- untog 7y agoI think you can generalise the advice: remove as many processing steps as you can. It's not so much that you needed to guess that HTML was going to be as long-lived as it is, it's that HTML is the final product that actually loads on the users computer, and those tend to stick around for a long time (or at least be emulated). The code that lives on a backend server somewhere, not so much. For what it's worth, I don't think this example is necessarily bulletproof: it requires a working copy of Frontpage. If Microsoft behaved more like Apple it might have been deprecated away long ago!
- mattkevan 7y agoOnce worked on an enormous, very popular site built by hand in Frontpage. It had millions of pageviews, made over 6 figures a month in AdSense and been updated so often and for so long that the owner didn’t actually know how many pages there were. Had to hire someone just to index it. Not bad for plain old html and css.
- rchaud 7y agoAh, the old days of the web, when it was possible to make money via AdSense. Users would actually bookmark sites those days, so there was no need to throw an email signup popup in their face when the page loaded. The comments would have real people conversing, and not filled with spambots pushing fake Guccis and Air Jordans.
- 32gbsd 7y agoComments went a downward spiral right about when facebook got popular. It canabolised the regular comments + the comments from other creatives/bloggers
- SonnyWortzik 7y agoFrontpage wow, that was my go to back in the days. Then I saw the markup it was making, yikes!!
- bobowzki 7y agoI had forgotten all about Frontpage!
- dpcan 7y agoIn my ~17 year career as a professional web developer and consultant, I'm not sure that any technology has made me more frustrated and miserable than the days when I had to help people who insisted on using Frontpage to build their websites.
- mk89 7y agoWe are talking about a God given website. Of course it's old and still ongoing :P Jokes aside, the first thing I read was the sentence "here there is a java applet, sorry your browser doesn't support it" :D Which is funny, after all.
- dhosek 7y agoMy personal site, http://don.dream-in-color.net http://don.dream-in-color.net has been at that URL (and with this design) for over 20 years. The reading list (http://don.dream-in-color.net/books/ http://don.dream-in-color.net/books/ ) dates back to a page that was originally served over FTP and will turn 25 years old in May.
- tdstein 7y agoIt loads so fast!
- Phait 7y agoAs an Italian, reading this is site is absolute bliss. There's just so much to discover. I really suggest non-Italian speakers to automatically translate it with Google and dive into it.
- melq 7y agoI can't believe how well google translates this. Is there something about Italian that lends itself to english translation or is translate getting this good with other languages too I wonder?
- utahsaint365 7y agohttp://explorermag.com/ http://explorermag.com/ My 21 year old site focuses on Windows NT and the upcoming Windows 2000 release. Back when MSFt focused on operating systems. Billg still in charge!
- chaoticmass 7y agoThis really takes me back, in a good/nostalgic way. That 3 column layout with a header on top was the go-to layout for content heavy sites.
- raghavtoshniwal 7y agoThis is pretty cool. I had to look Frontpage up! Logic dictates that there must have been a point in time where the prevailing opinion shifted from “Uses ancient UI” to “Has a cool retro feel”. Probably all technologies go through this? Like vinyl becoming cool a few years back. Has happened with Flash games recently. Is there a name for this?
- faramarz 7y agoI made my first web site with Frontpage and the big leap for me was learning about nested tabled within tables. game changer.
- 3dprintscanner 7y agoAnother mention of this fantastic cycling website: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/harris/ https://www.sheldonbrown.com/harris/
- Damogran6 7y agoDude's gonna wonder why he had a sudden 6500% jump in traffic.
- mygo 7y agodoes anyone know what year the <marquee> tag became depreciated? I’m surprised my iPhone renders it
- oftenwrong 7y agoThere is a search engine dedicated to finding "classic" websites: https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ Click the "surprise me..." link to see a random one.
- JasonFruit 7y agoThat could eat up some hours. I landed on a model airplane site and started getting sucked in before realizing I have work to do.
- batirch 7y agoWith the surprise me button I found Berkshire Hathaway website. https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ This is really cool search engine :D
- calrueb 7y agoThis is a fantastic site. I'm a little worried about using the "surprise me" feature at work, but I will return to this in my free time. I wonder what website attributes it looks for when it indexes.
- gitgud 7y agoThis is brilliant! The first "surprise me" mad me smile :) http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html
- callesgg 7y agoPersonal websites... is something that screems mental ilness also writing youtube comments...
- theklub 7y agoI love it
- kome 7y agoahahah from Lonate Pozzolo!! I am from Bellinzago and this is just mind-blowing. great website!
- Nowyouknow 7y agoCheck out my Dad's from 2002. He's still using it as an e-commerce site, regularly getting orders and directing customers to it. Deleted URL thanks to friendly advice
- tsukurimashou 7y agohmm you might not want people to know about your dad's e-commerce site built in 2002... EDIT: checked the website, "add to cart" sends you directly to paypal and there doesn't seem to be any account system. Still you should be careful with which communities you share this kind of information, hint: think of the H of HN
- Nowyouknow 7y agoGood point. Appreciate it
- tsukurimashou 7y agoNo problem, I know how it is to just want to talk about a personal story without thinking about the information you're letting out for the "public" to see :D
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- timonoko 7y agoMy personal web-page is from 1992 and updated occasionally. This page is preserved as it was in 1994: http://timonoko.github.io/alaska http://timonoko.github.io/alaska . It started as Gopher-page in 1992 and I just moved those associated pictures into it, without truly understanding formatting and all that shit. Some dudes in Usenet told me about <p> and <img> tags.
- masswerk 7y agoMy website is still as of 1999, but it received some design updates (and a blog section) two years ago. However, there's still some original content, some even older than the particular website. E.g., see this 1998 demo for what we may now call a single page app, entirely rendered in JS from central data files (but using frames – well, it was the 1990s): https://www.masswerk.at/demospace/relayWeb_en/welcome.htm https://www.masswerk.at/demospace/relayWeb_en/welcome.htm Slogan: "Microsoft keeps talking about Active Server Pages – We're offering Active Client Pages" Mind the charts section, rendering graphs by outputting tables with tiny images using `document.write()`, since the canvas element wasn't even dreamt of. (Displaying charts was a tricky business, then. Usually these were rendered server side as GIFs, where they caused heavy load. The alternative were Java applets, which had an enormous effect on the client load and delayed page display quite considerably, while the JRE was starting up. Enter JS to the rescue…) Also, note the period design, including marquee tickers, custom fonts from GIFs, etc…
- dwheeler 7y agoMy personal site was posted on September 12, 1999, is still updated, and has no problems. It;s a static site that mostly uses straight HTML/CSS. There are a few scripts that generate pages, but generating HTML/CSS pretty easy. https://dwheeler.com https://dwheeler.com. Geocrasher said: > I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page. Yes. I don't get paid to maintain my personal site, so simplicity and longevity are most important. If I have to rewrite things because of incompatible changes in the infrastructure components (e.g., Python2 to Python3), or because proprietary company C has decided to stop supporting product P that I depend on, then I have to spend time that doesn't actually provide any new value. Keeping things simple, and minimizing dependencies, can be useful. Like everything else, there's a trade-off.
- jvanderbot 7y agoYou might say your website was designed to last[1] 1. https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/ https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chipperyman573 7y agoPbatengf, lbh'ir qrpbqrq zl frperg zrffntr. Fbeel, ab cevmrf. ?
- sidarape 7y agoYou could use a static website generator such as Jekyll or Hugo. Then, if the tools stop working for any reason, you always have the generated HTML than you can update.
- gerardes 7y agoIf you like this? Check this one: https://www.gratiz.nl/ https://www.gratiz.nl/ Updated every day :-)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- generationP 7y agoI sympathize with the author. I have built my maths site just 2 years after this one, when I was in high school. Ever since I've only been adding material, and occasionally moving old stuff into subdirectories; other than that, it's the same old geocities website made with FPE, except it's now hosted on a university server and has my academic title and office and no more colored background. Oh, and I now edit it with notepad++ and track it with git. I've had plans to rebuild it for the last 8 years or so, to make it better and slicker and easier to navigate (as it stands, my new papers are mixed together with my scribe notes from undergrad). But I never figured out how to achieve this without also requiring javascript or relying on tools that may not survive the next decade and that I cannot tweak to my needs without learning a new programming language (hello Jekyll, hi Hugo). Nor did I ever find the Right Way how it should be structured; move one thing to the front and something else gets harder to find. I guess it will survive me. Makes me a lot less judgmental when I see another academic website that can trace its lineage back to geocities and angelfire.
- jeena 7y agoA company in Germany called Arcor had the front page website of my band from 2001 which used frontpage serverside extensions still online about 4 years ago. I couldn't find the FTP password to download the source code so it died when they finally pulled the plug.
- shaneprrlt 7y agoYou're telling me their site still works in 2020 without needing to serve the client as a server-side rendered react app with the data being provided by several node.js microservices containerized and deployed to a kubernetes cluster and accessed through a GraphQL interface? IMPOSSIBLE!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 72deluxe 7y agoThis guy has a Frontpage-generated site too, and it's full of useful Win32 programming tips; he replies if you email him too! http://flounder.com http://flounder.com Nothing wrong with readable content, regardless of the generator. In fact, I like reading his site precisely because it is speedy to load and render, and because it has content (unlike, for example, Apple's developer documentation).
- mhandley 7y agoBut is it still running on Cern/3.0, installed circa 1993. Ours is: $ nc www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk 80 HEAD /staff/m.handley/ HTTP/1.0 HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: CERN/3.0 Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2020 17:02:59 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 9185 Last-Modified: Sun, 16 Jun 2019 15:27:37 GMT It's running on Sun Sparc hardware from the same era, and has been in active use for all of those 27 years.
- nonamenoslogan 7y agoI used to have a bunch of Sparc's circa-early 2000's. Sold some, recycled some, wish I'd have kept at least one. The price of a SparcstationLX that works is silly now-a-days.
- fjfaase 7y agoMine, in plain HTML, is almost 25 years old. I have to admit that I did change the layout a little, through the years, but it has been rather constant, because updating 974 HTML files, is not something that is easily done.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoIt's pretty easily done? Strip out everything but body, make a wrapper to include the pages? Any static bits you can search-replace, that's what I used to do before discovering server-side includes.
- fjfaase 7y agoI am talking about 974 HTML files of which probably more than 95% is static content. Doing this manually, will take me about a year (considering the time I have available). So, maybe I should develop a script/parser to process the contents and generate them as server-side includes? But what is the benefit? That I can change the layout more easily, while first having to learn how to efficiently work with server-side includes? (Now I am just uploading my HTML files through FTP to my very cheap hosting provider.) But why would I? I am not interested in the layout, just the contents. I am not writing the website for a broad public, it is mainly because I like to record events (big and small) in my life. I guess, I myself am the most important user. Sometimes, I can surprise people by telling them the exact date that I did/experienced something.
- ssijak 7y agoI have a 'personal' website which is also about 18years old. It was the first website I built while in elementary school, also in Frontpage. I uploaded it to I think Geocities or something like that, I think it was Yahoo related hosting, can't remember exactly, but it was free hosting. Some 'fancy' JS effects do not work on the page now, but it is still up. I forgot about and remembered it few years ago and checked it to find it still up. But I can't remember where could I login to see the files and what are the credentials so it makes me giggle that it will stay up for who knows how much longer as a small part of my past :) http://dzigi.itgo.com http://dzigi.itgo.com http://dzigi.itgo.com/o_autoru.htm http://dzigi.itgo.com/o_autoru.htm "about author page" with a bio and pic haha
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoGeocities got taken over by Yahoo, I think there was an intermediate step, and they added a JS widget to free pages, there was a hack to hide it. IIRC they started allowing PHP and not just SSI at/around that stage.
- ngcc_hk 7y agoAnything not text based is problematic. But beyond that it is hard.
- neosat 7y agoI 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.
- reaperducer 7y agoIt 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.
- davnicwil 7y agoI visited this on mobile expecting it to be a laugh, but was surprised to find that it's actually amazing! You can see the whole page in a single column, and just pinch zoom to the bit you're interested in to read/interact. Scrolling downwards and sideways to pan around works fine, super intuitive. The UX of this is so great, feels just like that original iPhone demo [1]. ...why don't we do this again? [1] https://youtu.be/vN4U5FqrOdQ?t=2530 https://youtu.be/vN4U5FqrOdQ?t=2530
- djsumdog 7y agoI recently did a history of my old websites: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/a-history-of-personal-and-professional-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.
- WorldMaker 7y agoI took a similar journey over the years from static pages to custom static generators to PHP to Drupal to a custom Django-based blog engine to Jekyll/static pages. It's interesting because I'm sometimes sad I lost the code for some of those old versions. Those old early PHP and custom static generator codebases would be interesting to revisit with today's ideas, even if just to laugh about. (But also because I know there's probably not-great blog content lost to them.) One of the "custom static generators" I recall was actually a really early not-quite-SPA JS app. I remember it ran really slowly in browsers at the time and worse got slower with each new content added, but these days I wonder if it would seem fine on modern JS engines. (I've got a feeling about the only thing I'd need to change would be to swap `document.write(stuff)` for `element.innerHtml = stuff` and it'd perform quite well today.)
- elwell 7y agoHere's a real gem: https://bible.ca/ https://bible.ca/
- jamesjyu 7y agoFrontpage: the original no code software.
- Lucadg 7y agoI learned Frontpage in 2000 in a King's Cross (Sydney) internet cafe where you paid 2 AUD for unlimited time...but you couldn't leave, not even to go to the toilet. That html went straight to Geocities. The feeling of power part of a minority of people who could actually publish something on the net was amazing.
- aloukissas 7y agoI just love the footer "optimized for 1024x768 @ 16M colors" :)
- dep_b 7y agoI really have a soft spot for these kind of sites. Often people have pretty interesting and unique content on this kind of websites. I always try to help by keeping things very simple to maintain but just a bit better, like making a PHP include of the menu and then replacing the top part on every page once.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- randogogogo 7y agoWow that loaded quickly! I wonder what she's doing to optimize it.
- netule 7y agoShe? http://www.fmboschetto.it/autore/autore.htm http://www.fmboschetto.it/autore/autore.htm
- gjs278 7y agomy site has been online since 2005 and this view has worked out pretty well https://www.garyshood.com/ https://www.garyshood.com/
- EugeneOZ 7y ago"UFO's don't exist" - untrustworthy site.
- cptskippy 7y agoOne of my favorite pieces of software, that I still use to this day, is 20 years old version of SpaceMonger. https://i.imgur.com/XMwNRR3.png https://i.imgur.com/XMwNRR3.png
- dmalvarado 7y agoAlso of note, this website is still running despite the HN hug of death.
- dmuhs 7y agoThis is dedication in content creation and maintenance. We can all learn something here!
- benibela 7y agoMy personal website is also around 18-year-old. I actually do not remember how old it is. I did not have a domain at first and hosted it on AOL or something. Here it was: https://web.archive.org/web/20030908174016/http://www.benibela.de/ https://web.archive.org/web/20030908174016/http://www.benibe... But in 2005, I made a complete redesign: http://www.benibela.de/index_en.html http://www.benibela.de/index_en.html The backend went through a few reimplementations. Individually made html files (with front page express or something), a template tool written in Delphi, another template tool written in Java, a complete XQuery interpreter written in FreePascal
- Kunix 7y agoOne made with Word and still updated: http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/ http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/
- jhoechtl 7y agoIts.So.Quick. I love the speed of the page! And seemingly nobody is eavesdropping me.
- nimajneb 7y agoI love the old style of (personal) website like this. It's seems both nostalgic and maybe a bit more authentic.
- sabas_ge 7y ago2251 Mb size! "Qui c'è una applet Java. Mi spiace che il tuo browser non le supporti" = Here's a Java applet, I'm sorry your browser doesn't support it Marquee still gets animated :O "Questa pagina è ottimizzata per un formato 1024 x 768 pixel a 16,8 milioni di colori, carattere medio" = This page is optimized for a 1024x768 pixel format, 16.8 million colors, medium sized font Still apart from the ancient tooling, it's an example of a personal wiki as periodically come on HN, there's a lot of content!
- sabas_ge 7y agoI just wrote to the gentleman pointing him to this discussion :)
- jmnicolas 7y agoOnly someone with unwavering faith would maintain a Frontpage website in 2020 :)
- DannyB2 7y agoRemember the Front Page license. Originally, Front Page had a four page license. It specified that if you use Front Page to create a web site, you cannot disparage Microsoft, Expedia and a list of several other Microsoft owned properties. So with a license like that, I can't assume that any site created with Front Page is unbiased when it comes to a list of various Microsoft owned properties. After the slashdot effect (long ago) Microsoft removed this from the license.
- hypertexthero 7y agoSimple and useful. https://s3.amazonaws.com/simpleuseful/index.html https://s3.amazonaws.com/simpleuseful/index.html
- dmje 7y agoAs I spent half a day trying to wrangle my way through some sass grunt compiler frontend bullshit just trying to update the colour of some links on a client website, I find myself nodding sagely again. In the early days you could view source, see what was going on, copy and recreate someone else’s site, learn a whole bunch of new stuff and actually get shit done. Now, it’s all JavaScript bullshit and 100k lines of css. It’ll last about a month before it’s out of date and replaced by the Next Big Thing. HTML, css, a sprinkle of JavaScript. That’s what’s proven to last.
- zladuric 7y agoI'm not sure a FrontPage site would be much better. It's also a big mess of generated markup you'd have to go through manually, if you didn't have the proper FP version.
- lucasjans 7y agoI'm surprised no one mentioned it here: before Front Page was a Microsoft product it was created by an independent company, Vermeer. But as many pointed out it produced horrible code. My favorite editor of the day was a "hand coder" called Home Site https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite
- elamje 7y agoMy page(https://www.towardssoftware.com https://www.towardssoftware.com) isn't quite that old, but it gets the job done with an incredibly simple content manager - plain html/css editing. There is almost no javascript, and I have to say, it's done wonderful so far. I have tried Hugo to manage stuff, and a couple of others, but for a lot of blog type of stuff, html just works!
- tren 7y agoMy 83 year old dad has updated his website since the mid 90s, it's actually pretty interesting to look back it in the Wayback machine, the design is exactly the same in 97. He'd really get a kick out of it if someone commented on one of his articles. http://aoi.com.au/ http://aoi.com.au/
- threepio 7y agoSLAPP LIKE NOW!
- kylek 7y agoOne of my favorite websites is clocking in at 25 years now- Marathon's Story [0], a website dedicated to the lore of Bungie's Marathon series. [0] http://marathon.bungie.org/story/ http://marathon.bungie.org/story/
- exabrial 7y agoAnd loads faster than any of the crap SPOs that are en vouge today
- felixg3 7y agoI generated my website at server.giessmann.net just last year using Lotus FastSite and the geocities gif archive. I included my fax number, icq id and a PO box. Of course there are 9/11 conspiracy theories and a banner to download the latest Netscape browser.