Have you ever looked at your old websites?

[londrum]

I was having a clear out the other day and found a few backups of my old websites on CD. I found one site that was about 9 years old.

I was just wondering if anyone has ever looked at their old sites and felt a bit nostalgic...

I was lucky because i backed up the entire thing, so i was able to stick it on my laptop and load it up in all its glory. It was all table based (of course), with 4 frames. i was big on frames back then because it was easy to stick the navigation in them... one for the top and one down the side. and another one on the bottom, for luck, and the main one. anyone who had 3 frames for navigation these days would get fired.

it had a nice hover menu that loaded in at about 10 K of javascript (and all it did was change colour).

i had webring on every page. i remember being happy about that because it got me some traffic (probably about 10 people, max). and a links page with about 100 flashing banners on it that i had swapped.

it also had a guestbook on it. when was the last time you saw a site with a guestbook?

anyway... it got me all nostalgic. i'm thinking of travelling back in time to the good old days. if anyone wants to join me, i'm leaving tonight.

[lucy24]

You forgot the part where you fed your old page into the validator and got back
#1 "no dtd, so let's try HTML 4.01 Transitional"
followed by
#2 875 errors-- and they're not due to a single missing </close-something-or-other> at the very beginning.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I was just wondering if anyone has ever looked at their old sites and felt a bit nostalgic...

All I feel is shame I am afraid. ;)

[tangor]

Heck... I still maintain a site using 1990's techniques... and it continues to perform well for its niche. So that nostalgia is only a click away... HOWEVER, I can't really recall how many "old sites: (not all mine, of course) I've had to drag kicking and screaming out of that early mindset/graphics of the 'web.

[limoshawn]

It was all table based

what's wrong with tables?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

You mean you don't know?

[Samizdata]

I was just wondering if anyone has ever looked at their old sites and felt a bit nostalgic

I still have a site I built in 1998 online. It looks terrible (designed for 640x480 resolution).

It does validate, but only because I cleaned up the markup later. It is a non-commercial pet project that I used to test out various techniques as I learned them.

On this particular project I archived the site after each redesign and expansion (usually annually) and kept all the sites accessible for historical purposes and legacy browsers.

I don't work on it anymore, it is a museum piece which no longer attracts traffic.

It contains almost every web design abomination you can think of.

</BLINK>

...

[tonynoriega]

god... I want to say I was embarrassed, but it was what was "normal" at the time.... table structured left column, header, and right content area, and footer...

Solid color backgrounds. Pixelated icons. Shifting content. 20 frame flash animations of letters bouncing around and finally resting still.

Bloated image files. inline CSS. Root folder and hundreds of files...not hierarchy at all...

OH Wait.. you said old sites?

[wheel]

I still have a site I built in 1998 online.

Hey buddy, can you spare a link?

[Leosghost]

;-))

[limoshawn]

Hey buddy, can you spare a link?

Wheel, my new hero, never misses a beat!

[Samizdata]

Hey buddy, can you spare a link?

A few years ago a link would have been valuable, but not these days.

My 1998 site predates Google by a few months and fits on a floppy disk.

The updated site held the number one spot on Google for its primary keyword until 2006.

I am only nostalgic for the fun I had.

The site was never monetized.

...

[creeking]

I was making a parked-page-design for some of my domains a while back, and seriously considered using frames. :)


I didn't because I wasn't sure frame designs were still good-to-go in modern browsers.

[Hoople]

My second oldest site (1997) is still up. Although the video chat program it was about has since faded into obscurity with java web modules now in fashion. Nested tables no less!

Never monetized, but the free host does have some AdSense on it. Has only lost a bit of toolbar rank, at PR4 now surprisingly.

[lawman]

I have two sites. First up in 1999 second in 2002. Still update with MS Frontpage. They both are still making me money.

[koan]

OH Wait.. you said old sites?

Lol. Well, in the future... the present will be considered "the good ole days".

Man, I wish I still had this 10+ years old site. I spent so much long nights on it and although it was more of a geeky hobby, it would probably be making money now. It had so many good, authoritative inbound links too. It was hosted with my ISP account, you know: example.com/~johnsmith/. I changed ISP, my account was erased and then I got a hard drive failure and lost months of work. Big regrets. Back things up people. My sins of the time: midi background music.

[caribguy]

Ah, I'll raise... In 1995 we used to create sites as www.whatever.nw.dc.us and the like. Pretty grey backgrounds, NCSA Mosaic compatible...

Fond memories of Veronica and Gopher!

[piatkow]

anyone who had 3 frames for navigation these days would get fired.

We still use them for intranet sites but not on the web.

I have never bothered to rebuild any pages that use tables for layout. It has always seemed easier to leave them alone rather than mess around with all the hacks for cross browser css compatibility.

[rocknbil]

"copyright" stamp 1997 (always gives me a chuckle, who'd want to steal **anything**) and built late 1995. First viewed in . . . MOSAIC! :-)

It does, however, validate.

I can't let it go. It is the suckiest site to have hit the web and am surprised it never got to WPTS but I leave it up because it's a constant reminder that no matter how far I've come I always still have a long way to go.

[blend27]

1997, backed up a 3 page thingy with a flash(4?) movie including a few picks of the ONE that got away and a 200+ word Poem, my oh my... still have it on a floppy... It Was on Angelfire till not that long ago...

Later, in 03-04, linked several Juicy keyword phrases from within the content, to the site I still run know...

Tables, Iframes, ...well...

I am having a Dot moment...

[mark_roach]

I have a site built in 1999 it has 4 frames and all the layout is table based. It is performing better than ever. When I look at it I can't believe that is so successful.

Later this month I am replacing it with an all singing and dancing new version. I have never been so nervous in my life before.

[brotherhood of LAN]

I think my first webpage attempt was entitled 'The Spider's Web'... massively original.

Unfortunately my first dabblings were on free web space (a subdomain) provided by my ISP... who were gobbled up in 2000. The company still holds the domain though it does not resolve which is a shame, as I still have links pointing to it so they must be 10+ year old links ;o)

My first sites were code-soup graphically-sick attempts but a stepping stone nonetheless. I used Frontpage, basically for a WYSIWYG approach and slowly realised databases and 'active' server pages (aha, ASP) would make more sense for a growing informational site, so bought some webspace with Access & ASP

I miss my Bravenet hit counter, but extremely grateful for the invention of PHP and MySQL since then...

[lucy24]

Ooh, hit counters! I only recently deleted the one that's been on my Games page since, I dunno, probably since the AOL version in 1997-ish. Wonder how many robots it's dutifully counted over the years? :)

[Samizdata]

my first dabblings were on free web space (a subdomain) provided by my ISP

I still have one of those from the last century - 12 Mb of space, no server-side scripting - that I have managed to keep alive by using the dialup account occasionally (even though the original company has changed hands several times since).

I didn't expect it to last this long (my other dialup accounts didn't). The only question now is whether the company will unilaterally turn it off before my last remaining modem dies.

My one regret is not finding WebmasterWorld until 2001 (I used something called "books").

I am certainly not nostalgic about writing different markup for different browsers.

This thread is best viewed in Netscape (earlier than 4.7).

...

[tangor]

My first "web site" was an Interpreted Basic with Xmodem RBBS BBS (later changed to Maximus) starting in 1983 and maintained until 1991 with 1 modem to start, 6 in the heyday, and 2 at the end, generous at 59 minutes per access, though few lasted longer than 22 minutes. Consequently my first HTML website looked pretty much the same as that ASCII vision of loveliness.

[piatkow]

I miss my Bravenet hit counter

I still have one on my blog at Blogspot. At one time I had three Bravenet accounts which gave me nine free counters.

I still use a counter service for my main pages as it takes far fewer clicks to open that account than to get into cpanel.

[wheel]

My first online business, I built the site in perl iirc. Got bought out in about 2 years (that went well :) )

They eventually let the domain lapse. It got picked up by some domainers I think, it ran some crappy ads for a few years. I just looked, it got registered by a bonafide IT company in June and they've got a real site on it. Kind of odd, considering it was a contraction of two words put together and was industry specific. No idea how they came up with the same idea for a domain.

They've got one backlink. One I built :).

[vivalasvegas]

i'm thinking of travelling back in time to the good old days. if anyone wants to join me, i'm leaving tonight.

I won't join you, but here's someone who might:-)
[craigslist.org...]

[Essex_boy]

I have one from 2004 still does well in the serps, just considered adding to it....

[lucy24]

But Seriously Folks...

One site I visit regularly was created in 2001 and, to the best of my knowledge, has never been touched since then. Wait, I tell a lie. Someone stopped by in early 2009 and added a Google Analytics link. Can't begin to imagine why, since they haven't otherwise set foot in the place since 2004-ish. (That's the datestamp on most files, and they're so close together, I think they just changed servers. The typos and bad links have definitely been there since 2001.)

The layout is constructed entirely out of nested tables. A page I pulled up at random had them nested four deep. It's done by pulling in assorted .inc files (the overall form is .jsp, a language I don't know) that each make their own tables to fill in the required spot. There is no CSS, and the original designers don't seem to have known the "border" attribute. Any table cell with a visible border is expressed as-- so help me, I'm not making this up-- a nested table consisting of outer cells with, say, width 3px and background-color dark blue, while the content goes in the middle cell.

Hm, what else? It assumes that the only browsers in use are Netscape and Internet Explorer, so the code is written as "if...else..." with no third option. Sometimes Netscape is called "Mozilla", which is fun if you're in Firefox or similar.

Generated-page encoding varies between UTF-8, Latin-1 and-- really-- 1252 (Windows-Latin-1).

Punch line: the page displays as intended, and the interactive stuff still works-- except for a few trivial details. Such as, um, the sound samples don't play (the code is browser-specific), and one form of text input doesn't work unless you do a convoluted workaround involving lying to your browser about the file encoding.

Oh, and the entrance page asks a question that has been irrelevant since around 2004, but fortunately it defaults to the right answer.

Cheers for backward compatibility. Wonder how much they're paying the webmaster?