My family got a computer with Windows 95 sometime in the late 1990s. Shortly before I started high school, I think. These were the days of free trial internet with CDs that AOL would send out indiscriminately. You couldn't make calls on your home's phone line while using the internet. Cell phones weren't mainstream at all. Dial-up internet made a series of beeps, squeals, and static noises while connecting, which everyone who had to deal with it remembers distinctly, as well as any commercial jingle. The days of 3.5 inch floppy discs that could hold 1 whole megabyte, and downloading a song through Napster took 30 minutes to an hour.

So. The scene is set. AOL had some offer where you could make a simple website on their platform somehow, but you had to know HTML. So I taught myself. I learned how to look at any website's code, and I copied/pasted where needed, found some tutorials here and there (but remember, this was very much before YouTube, and I imagine long before Stack Overflow, too).

I've been thinking about those days more because I've been doing this website by hand (although not through Notepad, which was the way back when), and a couple other websites.

I am a bit of a hoarder when it comes to computer projects and files on the computer in general,... and emails too. What if I need to read my correspondences from twenty years ago with people I haven't seen since?! I still have my Yahoo! account from those days. Which means that I can see that, for instance, I subscribed to the Discworld Monthly newsletter in November of 1998. They started in May '97, and were consistent up until September 2023, which is a pretty darn good run. They have since morphed into Better Than A Poke In The Eye, and I just received their first newsletter. Thankfully, they have an archive of ALL the almost 300 issues of Discworld Monthly! I don't seem to have any emails from Lockergnome, which some random guy ran for a long time, which had links to neat freeware and shareware software he'd found, stuff like that. Maybe that was sent to an email pre-Yahoo!…

I did a couple high school projects making websites. I almost designed my school's website, while I was attending. Also, I almost had my website design for a local Thai restaurant used, but they ended up finding someone else. I made fansites for Red Dwarf and Doctor Who. I made a lyrics fansite for Steeleye Span, which was relatively popular enough I once had some lady in England ask if I had any connection to the band in hopes of hiring them for some event. No, ma'am, I'm just some kid in the US.

I put a LOT of work into that Steeleye Span website. I experimented, as was the fashion back then. If you didn't live through it, it's hard to imagine just how goddam creative websites were. Fine, yes, they were super janky, too. There were NO standards, no accessibility (thankfully that one has changed!), there was no Wordpress or Squarespace. For a while there was a version of HTML called Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, that I could not wrap my head around. I think that got superseded by CSS and Javascript, but I remember some trippy websites using it.

Anyway, I guess I can't say I was able to save those files from those days, but I was able to access some of those long-defunct websites of mine via the incredible Wayback Machine of The Internet Archive.

It's crazy to see what I was doing with HTML and CSS in the bygone year of 2000. (Now of course the reverberating, echoing shout of the year 2000!!! just indicates the long past, rather than the distant superfuture). It's also interesting to see the development of HTML and CSS since then, as they have both evolved in that quarter century. No longer are there The Browser Wars of the late '90s, that I had to make separate version of the Steeleye Span site—one for Internet Explorer, one for Netscape.

There were websites exclusively for animated gifs, not unlike the ones we use today in messaging. Back then, these little animations were used to spice up your website and were more often than not egregiously overused. I pulled the following from my old site as preserved on the Wayback Machine. The black background is necessary here:

The POWER! It's absurd how much nostalgia I feel with this explosion gif, what the hell.

Nostalgia. Seriously, the one big thing I would bring back, if I could, would be the creativity and expressiveness of web design (the lack of social media sounds quite nice these days, too). Now everything's based on the same six templates and made through Wordpress, Squarespace, Shopify. Ninety-plus percent of internet traffic is to a handful of sites of huge corporations like Amazon and Facebook. Long gone are the days of Tripod and Geocities. The profession of UI and UX design has, I think, standardized the expectations of websites and in so doing made them boring as shit, frankly. I even kinda miss Adobe Flash, which I had very minor proficiency in, too.

This, my Pilcrow Monster website, does not really live up to any crazy creative expression design-wise. These days I'll keep it lean and mean. No flashy gifs or flashing text. The use of the pixelated font is a throwback even further back than when I ever touched a computer, really. More of the nostalgia is just relearning HTML and CSS, spending hours getting everything just right. Thank god for VSCode.

On a minor point, I noticed on one of those old websites the disclaimer that it was best viewed on such-and-such version of Internet Explorer, on a 800x600 monitor. Can you imagine?! Honestly, yes you kind of can: looking at websites on your phone. The resolution is better, true, but the retail space is not too different than ALL websites had to be.

I had thought about including an example of code from that old Steeleye Span site. I did use a stolen snippet of Javascript to make dropdown menus back then, and I wanted to try that out here, on the main page. Eventually, if I write enough posts, that main page will get long, so I thought maybe hiding the posts under the month's description could be a solution. Using that old code was successful, but the if/else statements strike me as super clumsy, for one. I did find a more modern solution but I'm not totally sold if that's the direction I even want to go.

My philosophy with such things is to search out the simple solution. That probably would mean learning new shit first, making a separate version, and doing all the backend work so that eventually I could be lazy and do things more simply. Make it more into a modern blog with keywords and sorting and stuff. REACT. I really need to learn React again...

On that note, toodle-freakin'-pip!