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Republishing my Simpsons fan site, twenty years later
- torgeros 2y agoHuge shout-out to your dad for being a stay-at-home dad in the 00s!
- zebomon 2y agoHe was definitely ahead of his time then, and even more so in the 90s!
- Waterluvian 2y ago>I had more fun being creative online when the stakes were so low that it seemed that just by playing I had already won something. I’ve been thinking about this on and off a lot these past years. I think part of it is that when your time has no value, nothing you choose to do is a waste. That’s not to suggest your time needs to be worth nothing. But that you stop perceiving your time as having intrinsic value. My kids succeed where I fail all the time. They’ll spend hours on projects that have been done far better by other people already. But they just don’t think about those facts. They’re not relevant. Their time is not being valued in anything other than the feeling of “I want to do this thing.”
- MPSimmons 2y agoWe see opportunity cost as such a danger, and you're right, it probably holds us back from enjoying life quite a lot.
- pryelluw 2y agoHave you seen the Python Atlanta website ? https://pyatl.dev https://pyatl.dev I built it and it’s pretty bad. Even with the power of the Wordpress template I managed to make a bad website. But I spent too much time thriving for perfection. And this one sort of works which is better than a non existent site that might work better. Perfect is the enemy of done.
- Waterluvian 2y agoExactly. Now I’ve seen it. And I’ve seen it because it exists. If you didn’t make it and never finished it, I wouldn’t have seen it.
- pryelluw 2y agoThis is the latest iteration after multiple Django based rewrites. Last night I was looking into just running a wiki but that would require more time, which I don’t want to spend. More important things to do like finding speakers for the group events.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- flpm 2y agoI think the problem is the pressure to "monetize" projects that today's internet puts on everything: either monetize the attention (ads) or by generating expertise (the "personal brand"). Back then it was just for fun, so it looked and felt more human and less corporative. We need to make the web human again, specially now with generative AI.
- unethical_ban 2y agoMy dad has saved snippets from the newspaper that he read over the years. One of those snippets he gave to me is stuck to my refrigerator. >What I strive for and to a degree achieve as a craftsman wood turner has its roots in the idea expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson: The reward of a thing well done is to have done it." This feeling cannot be abandoned. (Richard H. Montague, Groton, Vt.) I don't know what paper or magazine this came from, probably Fine Woodworking, probably 1980s. It has the same spirit many of us are talking about. The joy in doing something is doing it, not making money on it or being the best at it. In the Internet era, if you only take joy from being the best at a hobby or task online, you will never be happy.
- ToDougie 2y ago> My kids succeed where I fail all the time. They’ll spend hours on projects that have been done far better by other people already. But they just don’t think about those facts. They’re not relevant. Their time is not being valued in anything other than the feeling of “I want to do this thing.” Watching my boys grab some paper and a marker and sweat quietly over a desk for 30 minutes only to walk over and hand me some crude drawing of "a little buddy I can put on my desk" always has me rethinking my station in life. Maybe I shouldn't be so tough on them.....
- lathiat 2y agoSomehow, the (much less impressive) Star Trek fan site I created in 2000 when I was 13 is still online. I’ve long since lost access to it but the freeservers mob I hosted it with have somehow kept the sites from way back then all around and online still to this day. It’s a little painful and factually incorrect (I called the movie Generations a series!) but gives me a good laugh: http://stvoyager.iwarp.com/ http://stvoyager.iwarp.com/
- na4ma4 2y agoIt's kinda funny how your site has outlasted most of the sites on the Links page :)
- pryelluw 2y agoI tried to sign the guestbook but could not. Didn’t expect it to work but would have been nice. Wish guestbooks were still a thing. Visiting my site to find a new message was always a treat.
- lathiat 2y agoHa ha thanks :) yeah the guest book was an external service. Along with the image based hit counter :)
- hypercube33 2y agoThese are the best. Thank you. anyone have any xfiles sites?
- bitwize 2y agoI'm looking for a character shrine for Akane from Ranma 1/2 myself.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agohttps://wiby.me/?q=Akane+Ranma https://wiby.me/?q=Akane+Ranma came up with https://geocities.restorativland.org/Tokyo/Pagoda/3879/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/Tokyo/Pagoda/3879/, does that count?
- santoshalper 2y agoNice nostalgia piece overall, but I especially enjoyed this line: "The distinction between noise and signal becomes decreasingly apparent the further one gets from their source." Very succinct and insightful. I will use that in the future.
- zebomon 2y agoThank you for your kind words!
- ethagnawl 2y agoTangential but timely: I haven't watched the Simpsons regularly in about 20 years. However, my internal clock still sounds an alarm every Sunday night about 15 mins before showtime.
- macintux 2y agoYou've reminded me of how intensely frustrating it was to be a fan of a TV show pre-WWW and pre-streaming, when networks would shuffle shows between different days and times, trying to find the perfect lineup (or trying to accelerate the demise of an underperforming series).
- Scoundreller 2y agoIn Toronto, we had a slight advantage where the TV channel that played most of the Fox content (Global TV on NTSC channel 6) bled into the tunable FM range so you could at least listen to it on your car radio (or any FM radio for that matter). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/87.7_FM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/87.7_FM
- ethagnawl 2y agoThat is so cool. I'd not heard of this "phenomenon" before.
- macintux 2y agoI ran into this a couple of different ways growing up. As with Toronto, on some FM radios I could catch a local Indianapolis TV station. Don’t remember which station off-hand. More concerning, on my boombox, I discovered that could pick up some local cordless phone calls in my neighborhood.
- ethagnawl 2y agoI also remember hearing neighbors' phone calls and baby monitors on the first cordless phone my family had. In addition to the privacy issue, I think we've collectively forgotten just how bad those first few generations of cordless phones were. There was limited range (how about those telescoping antennas?), the sound quality was terrible, the batteries didn't last more than 30-60 mins, etc. In my experience, they weren't worth the trouble or cost until around 1998.
- stavros 2y agoI rehosted my Tolkien fanpage from 1999 or so: https://tolkien.stavros.io https://tolkien.stavros.io I also have my personal website from back then somewhere.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoResources like the Simpsons Archive aka SNPP, the episode capsules particularly, which are just a collection of lengthy text files written decades ago but filled with treasure trove of insights and searchable references/quotes, are one of the rare simple gems of the Internet that I hope last forever.
- zebomon 2y agoI hope so too! Jouni is still active and recruiting maintainers here: https://simpsonsarchive.com/about.html https://simpsonsarchive.com/about.html
- stuartd 2y agoI hadn’t realised this had resurfaced after snpp.com went down! Pleased to see I’m still listed as a contributor to the computer list - https://www.simpsonsarchive.com/guides/computers.file.html https://www.simpsonsarchive.com/guides/computers.file.html
- 101008 2y agoThis touches me so deeply... I had a similar experience in the sense that I too created a fansite for something I really enjoyed back then (first with Frontpage, then iframes, then PHP), and now that evolved a lot and I kind of become an expert on that (and a business on itself, I am generous!) But while I was doing that, being a 10 years old, my best friend had his own Simpson fansite, so this triggered a lot of nostalgia. I when I visited yoru website and I saw the Buttons sections, oh my god. I wanted to cry. Thank you so much, I don't know how to thank you. I'm in love with the fansites from 2000-2005, and this was a trip.
- zebomon 2y agoYou are very welcome! It makes me so happy to hear that I could add a little to your day. Frontpage was my first IDE as well!
- runsonrum 2y agoI love it! I will take a closer look at some stage. I have a full set of the Burger King promo figures still in the plastic which I just recently pulled out of storage box to show my young son.
- qup 2y agoThe first website I ever built, where I learned HTML, was a Goldeneye 007 N64 fan site. I had all the cheats, all the walkthroughs, all the funny jokes and animated gifs. I misspelled "license to kill" in the url I created at angelfire. Angelfire has a lot of sites from back then (~1999?), but not mine. The site wasn't even that bad by modern standards. Had a frames layout, vertical frame on the left for the nav. I didn't know about server side includes yet.
- amatecha 2y agoNice! If you remember the full URL, it's very possible it's on archive.org. My first couple websites are on there, fortunately (or unfortunately, considering how dorky they are hahah)
- qup 2y agoI've looked extensively, I don't think it exists. I can't remember exactly how I misspelled it, though, so there's this little glimmer of hope in my mind still.
- amatecha 2y agoahh dang! maybe you've got the URL in an old email somewhere? only thing I could think of... fingers crossed for you!
- NoboruWataya 2y agoMine was a Linkin Park fan website, also hosted on Angelfire from around then. IIRC frames were the subject of a holy war at the time. I thought they were magical and had the same frames layout as you, but read a lot of stuff about how they were awful design so I created both frames and noframes pages (the latter having the nav bar across the top). It was a lot of fun. When I discovered JS I started playing around with alerts, which surely would have driven my visitors mad if I had any.
- mettamage 2y ago
- waltbosz 2y agoWhen I created the website for the Ultimate Simpsons Doom II mod, I published it at tripod.com. It's still there 22 years later https://waltersgameboy.tripod.com/simpdoom/ https://waltersgameboy.tripod.com/simpdoom/ I miss the old Internet.
- ryanwhitney 2y ago> I vaguely knew C++ to be the more powerful language but regardless of that, it seemed cursed because it was more steps away than PHP from building things that I could put on the internet. Still true!
- amatecha 2y agoRandom "early web Simpsons memory": in 1995 when I was taking a course to learn HTML, I had a great time browsing the web with "super-fast" ISDN (this was amazing at the time), and downloaded the Itchy & Scratchy song, in .au format. The filename was itchscra.au -- pretty sure I remember this because I spent so long trying to embed the audio into my web page and make it automatically play, which I don't think I ever got working haha
- viccis 2y agoTables were big for web design back then but tbh a lot of modern CSS frameworks remind me a lot of that old school table design.
- yapyap 2y agoSo this is the homegrown Simpsons stuff people are talking about
- MrsPeaches 2y agoLove the “Match-Ups” page: https://gardnermcintyre.com/simpsonszip/view.php?page=matchups https://gardnermcintyre.com/simpsonszip/view.php?page=matchu...
- zebomon 2y agoThank you! I remember having a great time putting that one together!
- dustincoates 2y agoMy first website was a baseball fan site in the late 90s. I discovered Google that way, because I had somehow reached the #1 result for "perfect game baseball" and got a lot of traffic thanks to David Wells (or Cone, can't remember which). The web was so amateur back then, that I even got an email from a sports journalist asking if I accepted submissions from freelancers.
- elzbardico 2y agoEvery time I am presented with something like that that reminisce me of the 90's web, its innocence, and the unlimited potential it presented, I am brought back to Jaron's Lenier book, "You are not a gadget" and this often-cited quote out of it: "If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless"
- JustBreath 2y agoWas there a time or place in where money flowed to musicians, journalists, and artists instead of their managers?
- boutell 2y agoMain content of each page not loading for me - maybe it's Flash?
- zebomon 2y agoThere were a few Flash tidbits buried as downloads I took down, but the main content should all display, as it's just PHP rolling out HTML aside from the rollover up top that uses JS.
- tfinch 2y agoThanks to oocities.org the ska-punk band I was in at school still has it's glorious table based design https://www.oocities.org/peat_bog_man/ https://www.oocities.org/peat_bog_man/
- ta1243 2y agoSadly my first major site (with a four-letter dot-com and everything) went down before internet archive got to it. The first, and indeed only, site I did for cash, dating back to early 1997, was still hosted by claranet until 2009 - well after the shop had bust