6 ms·

> HTML For Dummies doesn't cover the <IMG> tag until chapter four? Ah yes, HTML For Dummies. For me, the book that started it all. Reading that book during my

by pvnick 13y ago

> HTML For Dummies doesn't cover the <IMG> tag until chapter four? Ah yes, HTML For Dummies. For me, the book that started it all. Reading that book during my elementary school Pokemon craze led me to create my first serious website from scratch, Mew's Hidden Lair [1]. Except back then it was Dummies 101: HTML [2]. And I do remember how magical it was to type in that command and see an image of Pikachu show up on my screen. Reading the article and writing this post has been a serious trip down memory lane. Great, now I'm nostalgic. Back to work I guess... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010518071345/http://www.fortunecity.com/underworld/loading/884/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010518071345/http://www.fortun... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Dummies-101-Html-Computer-Tech/dp/0764500325 http://www.amazon.com/Dummies-101-Html-Computer-Tech/dp/0764...

d23 13y ago
Uh, are you me? My HTML book was a different one, but I definitely had the pokemon[1] thing. All in elementary school. Who knew it would end up being my career? [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070515090557/http://www.maxpages.com/1Pokeland https://web.archive.org/web/20070515090557/http://www.maxpag...
- pvnick 13y ago
  I very well could be, considering one of my first experiments was on maxpages also, but I can't remember the name unfortunately (pikachu something?). I remember how ultra-competitive it was to get people to upvote your website so it would get to the maxpages front page and that at one point all the front page links were pokemon websites.
  - kanzure 13y ago
    I wonder if there's a safe way an insider from maxpages, coolfreewhatever, trident, geocities, etc. could provide this data maybe by email address without violating the privacy of everyone ever? I have the exact same story, including the hilarious pokemon websites from 2000-2003. Can't remember any of the urls. I don't need backups, just the urls.
- aspensmonster 13y ago
  http://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Own-Page---Kids/dp/0843174595/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1393364708&sr=8-2&keywords=how+to+make+your+own+webpage+for+kids http://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Own-Page---Kids/dp/084317459... 1998. Hell, I think I still have this book laying around somewhere. I got it at a book fair in elementary school and from then on out I was always making one stupid webpage or another. Until I discovered Java of course.
  - tracker1 13y ago
    I feel old now.. in 1998, I was 24 and had been working as a web developer for a couple of years. I'd moved on from any thoughts of Netscape server-side dev, and was doing VBScript and JScript in classic ASP. JS was my favorite language back then, though dealing with MS COM collections was a pain. I remember using the 1x1 graphic a lot, combined with complex tables, and even other stuff. Of course, even before CSS, you could do a lot and at first I really didn't get the point of CSS... I think that IE6, not IE4 was the first good browser. Yeah, it was despised a half a decade later, but at the time it was the best available. IMHO the Netscape 4.0.x-4.2.x was probably the most horrible ever in terms of bugginess and imho solely responsible for IE's dominance. What we have today, even without the likes of jQuery is SO much better than the mid-late 90's.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      Same here, I was 22 and finishing my CS degree with lots of experience on side projects and ready to jump into the golden .COM days. Still after all these years, the scars earned in web development projects, make me jump of joy when I get to do native desktop stuff instead.
      - tracker1 13y ago
        That's funny, I actually really like web development... when it comes down to it, it's all hacking, only now you get better levels of abstraction. It's not nearly as bad as the bad old days so to speak, and a lot of things can be very clean and elegant.
- tfigueroa 13y ago
  My thing was Dragon Ball Z sites. CGI/Perl running NewsPro, links to questionable RealMedia content. What a sucker I was! Good thing PHP came along and taught us all what true webmastery is.
  - georgiecasey 13y ago
    with all the hate php gets now, people forget how it changed the game back at the turn if the century. it was so easy.
- alttab 13y ago
  Worms 2, tripod.com, paint shop pro. Can't stop me. SSI changed my life, and I coded a 50 page website in a textarea. on 28.8. In the snow. Without shoes. Not much has changed. I use vim now.
jotato 13y ago
I can't happen but notice the "village" button on the bottom on your site. I used to write "news" for that site. I still talk to the original owner of that site today. ahh... memories :)
chimeracoder 13y ago
I am so, so, so sad that Yahoo! shut down Geocities, because they took with them the Pokemon fan website that I made when I was just learning this whole 'HTML' thing for the first time. I even remember the exact full URL of the website[0]. But between the demise of Geocities and the demise of my 386's hard drive, that piece of nostalgia is gone forever. I remember dedicating a page to all of the different "strategies" to catch Mew in Gen I games, before we all collectively decided that this was impossible to do without a Gameshark[1]. Little did we know that there was a technique - it just wouldn't be discovered until ~2003[2]]! [0] For those just tuning in this century, Geocities would provide webspace (that's a word I haven't used in a while!) and your homepage would be a URL of the format http://www.geocities.com/Foo/Bar/1234 http://www.geocities.com/Foo/Bar/1234 [1] "When I was your age, Action Replay was a Gameshark..." [2] http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_glitch http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_glitch
- TheZenPsycho 13y ago
  have you tried looking for it here? https://archive.org/web/geocities.php https://archive.org/web/geocities.php
  - chimeracoder 13y ago
    Unfortunately, it's neither there nor on Reocities. :(
- corobo 13y ago
  Have you tried changing geocities.com to reocities.com? There was a huge push on archiveteam to scrape as much as they could before it was shut down. If it was saved it'll have the same url on reocities
- givehimagun 13y ago
  This reminded me of my pokemon fan site (Poketown) from 2000. https://web.archive.org/web/20000510132913/http://poketown.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000510132913/http://poketown.o... Looks like I was a pattern of grid design (ala tables) back then.
jvuonger 13y ago
I'm surprised Tripod.com is still hosting my Pokemon site, Pikachu's Place [1]! I used take screenshots of episodes by taking pictures of the TV using a digital camera and uploaded them to the site. Hilarious. Can't forget about the Paint Shop Pro animated graphics! [1] http://pika299.tripod.com/ http://pika299.tripod.com/
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  Wow, tripod... no pokemon for me (I was a bit too old for that craze), but they are still hosting my site with screenshots for a Quake3 bsp renderer I wrote back then: http://gmcbay.tripod.com/ http://gmcbay.tripod.com/ And my OpenGL driver for the Genesis engine.. the download zip of source code even still works: http://gmcbay.tripod.com/oldindex.html http://gmcbay.tripod.com/oldindex.html Pretty funny trip down nostalgia lane, including a reference to my very old gfm@my-deja.com email address... I still miss you, Deja News. Google Groups is not the same.
  - rocky1138 13y ago
    You had me at Genesis3D. Spent so many hours building levels and things with friends using that.
- dbalatero 13y ago
  Jeez, I had a site on Tripod called Pikachu's House of Pokémon. The number of Pokemon fan sites in this HN thread is blowing me away right now.
drv 13y ago
The one that started it for me was HTML 4 for the World Wide Web; the book's website is a quaint look back at an era of frames and tables for layout: http://www.elizabethcastro.com/html4_4e/ http://www.elizabethcastro.com/html4_4e/ My pages from back then (it must have been 1996 or 1997) were hosted at the local ISP, and they've since disappeared into the mists of time, but I definitely had a <marquee> with other tags nested inside. More importantly, I was making my first forays into programming... in VBScript and JScript. I soon moved on to "real" languages, but now we've come full circle, and JavaScript in the browser is the place to be again.
jwdunne 13y ago
I got my start from something a bit more modest - the HTML chapter of some Pocket Guide to the World Wide Web. I ate it up. I wrote tonnes of pages. I remember my dad saying that if I got a domain name and it got popular, I could rake in tonnes from sponsorship. I was amazed. I asked him if he could buy me a domain. He said no :( In fairness, I was only 10... What's quite funny is that I actually work for a company that has essentially done the above and actually provides a big portion of revenue. The pages are not much better quality either (they need more <blink> tag imo).
bendmorris 13y ago
Serious deja vu - I must have come across your website at some point. I was also very into the "pokemon sim" craze back in the day. Here's mine: http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/charmander/ http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/charmander/
steveax 13y ago
What, no mention of _The Whole Internet Catalog_? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User's_Guide_and_Catalog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User's_Guide_and...

by pvnick 13y ago

d23 13y ago

Uh, are you me? My HTML book was a different one, but I definitely had the pokemon[1] thing. All in elementary school. Who knew it would end up being my career? [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070515090557/http://www.maxpages.com/1Pokeland https://web.archive.org/web/20070515090557/http://www.maxpag...

pvnick 13y ago
I very well could be, considering one of my first experiments was on maxpages also, but I can't remember the name unfortunately (pikachu something?). I remember how ultra-competitive it was to get people to upvote your website so it would get to the maxpages front page and that at one point all the front page links were pokemon websites.
- kanzure 13y ago
  I wonder if there's a safe way an insider from maxpages, coolfreewhatever, trident, geocities, etc. could provide this data maybe by email address without violating the privacy of everyone ever? I have the exact same story, including the hilarious pokemon websites from 2000-2003. Can't remember any of the urls. I don't need backups, just the urls.
aspensmonster 13y ago
http://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Own-Page---Kids/dp/0843174595/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1393364708&sr=8-2&keywords=how+to+make+your+own+webpage+for+kids http://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Own-Page---Kids/dp/084317459... 1998. Hell, I think I still have this book laying around somewhere. I got it at a book fair in elementary school and from then on out I was always making one stupid webpage or another. Until I discovered Java of course.
- tracker1 13y ago
  I feel old now.. in 1998, I was 24 and had been working as a web developer for a couple of years. I'd moved on from any thoughts of Netscape server-side dev, and was doing VBScript and JScript in classic ASP. JS was my favorite language back then, though dealing with MS COM collections was a pain. I remember using the 1x1 graphic a lot, combined with complex tables, and even other stuff. Of course, even before CSS, you could do a lot and at first I really didn't get the point of CSS... I think that IE6, not IE4 was the first good browser. Yeah, it was despised a half a decade later, but at the time it was the best available. IMHO the Netscape 4.0.x-4.2.x was probably the most horrible ever in terms of bugginess and imho solely responsible for IE's dominance. What we have today, even without the likes of jQuery is SO much better than the mid-late 90's.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Same here, I was 22 and finishing my CS degree with lots of experience on side projects and ready to jump into the golden .COM days. Still after all these years, the scars earned in web development projects, make me jump of joy when I get to do native desktop stuff instead.
    - tracker1 13y ago
      That's funny, I actually really like web development... when it comes down to it, it's all hacking, only now you get better levels of abstraction. It's not nearly as bad as the bad old days so to speak, and a lot of things can be very clean and elegant.
tfigueroa 13y ago
My thing was Dragon Ball Z sites. CGI/Perl running NewsPro, links to questionable RealMedia content. What a sucker I was! Good thing PHP came along and taught us all what true webmastery is.
- georgiecasey 13y ago
  with all the hate php gets now, people forget how it changed the game back at the turn if the century. it was so easy.
alttab 13y ago
Worms 2, tripod.com, paint shop pro. Can't stop me. SSI changed my life, and I coded a 50 page website in a textarea. on 28.8. In the snow. Without shoes. Not much has changed. I use vim now.

jotato 13y ago

I can't happen but notice the "village" button on the bottom on your site. I used to write "news" for that site. I still talk to the original owner of that site today. ahh... memories :)

chimeracoder 13y ago

I am so, so, so sad that Yahoo! shut down Geocities, because they took with them the Pokemon fan website that I made when I was just learning this whole 'HTML' thing for the first time. I even remember the exact full URL of the website[0]. But between the demise of Geocities and the demise of my 386's hard drive, that piece of nostalgia is gone forever. I remember dedicating a page to all of the different "strategies" to catch Mew in Gen I games, before we all collectively decided that this was impossible to do without a Gameshark[1]. Little did we know that there was a technique - it just wouldn't be discovered until ~2003[2]]! [0] For those just tuning in this century, Geocities would provide webspace (that's a word I haven't used in a while!) and your homepage would be a URL of the format http://www.geocities.com/Foo/Bar/1234 http://www.geocities.com/Foo/Bar/1234 [1] "When I was your age, Action Replay was a Gameshark..." [2] http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_glitch http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_glitch

TheZenPsycho 13y ago
have you tried looking for it here? https://archive.org/web/geocities.php https://archive.org/web/geocities.php
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  Unfortunately, it's neither there nor on Reocities. :(
corobo 13y ago
Have you tried changing geocities.com to reocities.com? There was a huge push on archiveteam to scrape as much as they could before it was shut down. If it was saved it'll have the same url on reocities
givehimagun 13y ago
This reminded me of my pokemon fan site (Poketown) from 2000. https://web.archive.org/web/20000510132913/http://poketown.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000510132913/http://poketown.o... Looks like I was a pattern of grid design (ala tables) back then.

jvuonger 13y ago

I'm surprised Tripod.com is still hosting my Pokemon site, Pikachu's Place [1]! I used take screenshots of episodes by taking pictures of the TV using a digital camera and uploaded them to the site. Hilarious. Can't forget about the Paint Shop Pro animated graphics! [1] http://pika299.tripod.com/ http://pika299.tripod.com/

georgemcbay 13y ago
Wow, tripod... no pokemon for me (I was a bit too old for that craze), but they are still hosting my site with screenshots for a Quake3 bsp renderer I wrote back then: http://gmcbay.tripod.com/ http://gmcbay.tripod.com/ And my OpenGL driver for the Genesis engine.. the download zip of source code even still works: http://gmcbay.tripod.com/oldindex.html http://gmcbay.tripod.com/oldindex.html Pretty funny trip down nostalgia lane, including a reference to my very old gfm@my-deja.com email address... I still miss you, Deja News. Google Groups is not the same.
- rocky1138 13y ago
  You had me at Genesis3D. Spent so many hours building levels and things with friends using that.
dbalatero 13y ago
Jeez, I had a site on Tripod called Pikachu's House of Pokémon. The number of Pokemon fan sites in this HN thread is blowing me away right now.

drv 13y ago

The one that started it for me was HTML 4 for the World Wide Web; the book's website is a quaint look back at an era of frames and tables for layout: http://www.elizabethcastro.com/html4_4e/ http://www.elizabethcastro.com/html4_4e/ My pages from back then (it must have been 1996 or 1997) were hosted at the local ISP, and they've since disappeared into the mists of time, but I definitely had a <marquee> with other tags nested inside. More importantly, I was making my first forays into programming... in VBScript and JScript. I soon moved on to "real" languages, but now we've come full circle, and JavaScript in the browser is the place to be again.

jwdunne 13y ago

I got my start from something a bit more modest - the HTML chapter of some Pocket Guide to the World Wide Web. I ate it up. I wrote tonnes of pages. I remember my dad saying that if I got a domain name and it got popular, I could rake in tonnes from sponsorship. I was amazed. I asked him if he could buy me a domain. He said no :( In fairness, I was only 10... What's quite funny is that I actually work for a company that has essentially done the above and actually provides a big portion of revenue. The pages are not much better quality either (they need more <blink> tag imo).

bendmorris 13y ago

Serious deja vu - I must have come across your website at some point. I was also very into the "pokemon sim" craze back in the day. Here's mine: http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/charmander/ http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/charmander/

steveax 13y ago

What, no mention of _The Whole Internet Catalog_? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User's_Guide_and_Catalog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User's_Guide_and...