
Under Construction (2015) - dmlhllnd
http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/under-construction/
======
robert_tweed
I was just thinking about these the other day. The other thing that died off
was "web rings". From back in the days when search engines were rubbish, so
you'd have to find one site that was approximately what you were after, then
click lots of links until eventually, at about 4 or 5 degrees of separation
from the original search, you might find what you were originally looking for.
I know, it seems barbaric now.

Reciprocal links between similar sites were much more important in those days.
In fact, the web was generally a friendlier, less commercialised and siloed
place, because cooperation between webmasters was the only way anyone would
ever find your content.

What I find sad is that now Google is becoming more commercial and heavily
gamed through SEO, the first page of results is increasingly likely to be full
of links to buy a thing than information about that thing. And because there
is much looser interlinking between sites now, it's a lot harder to find
information any other way.

~~~
martin-adams
I also think a shift is that the web is very content driven now, so rather
than linking sites together, you link content together.

~~~
robert_tweed
[https://xkcd.com/741/](https://xkcd.com/741/)

------
dangrossman
I started offering hosted guestbooks as a Perl CGI script, backed by a
homegrown pipe-delimited text file database, in the 1990s. I moved them over
to PHP and MySQL in 2002. 11,000 of those guestbooks are still linked from
live websites, and about 600 have had people add new entries in the past year.
I added reCAPTCHA a few years ago to keep the spam to a minimum, otherwise
they look essentially the same as they did in the 1990s, with a variety of
neon fonts on custom tiled background images. I plan to keep hosting them
forever.

~~~
bartread
C'mon - we need some links to examples. :)

------
stuartmalcolm
> "..this is one of those occasions where we should be thankful we've moved
> forward."

Have we _really_ moved forward?

In 20 years time, will today's parallax-scrolling, advert-laden, click-bait
sites look any less ridiculous?

Rotating skulls have not gone away..they have just changed appearance!

~~~
flushandforget
Oh yes, the 3MB click bait news article with practically zero content. To
think you used to be able to fit an encyclopaedia on a floppy disk!

------
Jedd
Just like enjoying the delight of using Cool Retro Terminal (for short bursts)
... you too can turn any web page into a mid-90's geocity-alike unpleasant
mess here: [http://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/](http://www.wonder-
tonic.com/geocitiesizer/)

Consider what it does to this HN discussion about Under Construction)
[http://www.wonder-
tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=...](http://www.wonder-
tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=1&music=3&url=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12334868)

~~~
i_are_smart
Cool Retro Term is my guilty pleasure. I spend an awful lot of processing
power just to make my terminal look older and less reliable.

But somehow, to me, it doesn't feel right to use IRC from anything other than
a fuzzy and flickery orange screen.

------
rootlocus
If you go to the guestbook [1], you'll find this gem: _You know, I would have
hooked this up and made it work, but I 'm scared of the horrors you monsters
would write here._

1\. [http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/under-
construction/guestboo...](http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/under-
construction/guestbook.htm)

------
vog
From the article:

 _> But the horrible truth is that this really was how these websites were.
They all looked like this, every little one of the fuckers._

Well, no. Many websites did not bother to include all that stuff. But these
didn't bother to do a lot of styling at all. Original browser style. Very
ugly, but at least informative and not nearly as distracting as the sites
described in the article.

~~~
robert_tweed
Also, some websites looked more like this:

[http://www.ozones.com/](http://www.ozones.com/)

------
Jaruzel
I'd totally forgotten about the Book of Mozilla easter egg ('about:mozilla' in
Firefox's url bar). Just re-checked, and yup it's still there, albeit a
different text.

~~~
BorgHunter
about:robots is still around, too. That one seems unchanged from when it was
first introduced, including using the older style of Firefox error page.

------
flushandforget
Article missed loads. Like the fact that a h1 would pretty much take up all
the screen real estate back then because 800x600px resolution was luxurious
back in the day. So no one used h1,h2 etc. They just bolded text instead for
headings.

And used pixel fonts to get the font size down to a readable 10px to squeeze
in text navigation where icons didn't cut the mustard.

Having said that the default grey background was there for a reason - it was a
sane readable default. I find many modern sites still difficult on the eyes
compared to their unstyled counterparts.

The lack of an underline and visited colour change on links disorientates me.
It's all mystery meat navigation.

Mystery meat navigation is a whole other section of history missing. Some
websites were made entirely in flash. Others just had a splash page. And many
of these flash sites required you to hover and click about like a lunatic
trying to find web content.

Oh the good old days...

~~~
anexprogrammer
Then there was webpagesthatsuck.com where you could see the latest mystery
navigation idea from someone who should know better. Or some multinational
site looking like a geocities homepage.

I never could decide if the design of pagesthatsuck was deliberate satire or
accidental, but it was always an ugly site itself.

It used to be fun back then browsing sites like clientsfromhell, the similar
programming one who's name I now forget, and pagesthatsuck over lunch.
Nowadays that's much less satisfying. Time was you could kill 20 minutes
looking at some awful sites and terrible VB code. The comments were usually
most fun. Now they've all reduced content so much that you get about 1/4 the
content in a long column that takes 1/5 browser width. Of course now a clean
modern site with 3 mile long ad interstitials between each piece. Progress?

Oddly haven't visited any of those for years now!

~~~
douche
> the similar programming one who's name I now forget

[http://thedailywtf.com/](http://thedailywtf.com/) maybe?

~~~
anexprogrammer
That's the one! Seems to be more browsing friendly than last I remember it.
Far better than the other two currently are.

~~~
douche
It used to be much, much uglier - I think they had taken inspiration from the
default ASP.NET error pages...

------
phatak-dev
Loved the office space reference. Marquee one of the feature I learnt which
made others go crazy. Back in days it's all about HTML not about JavaScript.

------
vog
From the article:

 _> Which side won? Like any good mutually-assured destruction, we all lost._

This is true on so many levels.

------
labster
This page should be the first site on the History of the WWW Webring.

Reminds me of the homepages I used to design with frames and image maps,
wierdly-tiled backgrounds, and tons of <FONT> tags of course. Good times were
had by all.

------
d--b
Frames! The article missed them.

Oh boy, did I love frames.

That, and fixed backgrounds

~~~
flushandforget
Frames were brilliant. It's just they had a few unpleasant side effects, that
could have been ironed out given the will. One html menu/navigation as a frame
that was editable in one place without resorting to programming
languages/constructs for file includes. Piecemeal content aggregation via
frames may, just may have been a better approach to web page building.

~~~
swiley
I really prefer just keeping a standard heading with an index link in it. Most
people open pages in new tabs now anyway so you get the same effect for less.

~~~
ihuman
At the time most popular web browsers didn't have tabs. If you wanted to have
two pages open at once, you had to open them in separate windows.

------
douche
The best part is:

> (while writing this article, I discovered that if you Google for the phrase
> "blink tag", you get... well...)

You should definitely do this.

~~~
ihuman
Google has some more search easter eggs, like 'askew' and 'zerg rush'

------
mpicker0
Status bar abuse. Back when web browsers (and most other applications) had a
status bar across the bottom of the window, there was a JavaScript API that
could manipulate the text displayed there. A common trick was to "scroll" a
message in the status bar by constantly updating it with all the letters
shifted to the left by one.

------
thebeardedone
I got dizzy when looking at the bottom of the page where the space (stars
etc..) background is used. I'm quite glad sites aren't made like that anymore.
I also love to be reminded of the following:

"Moving items attract the visitors' eye. This is a well-established UX
principle."

------
yojex
What a shame, the web counter seems to be broken. Having mostly forgotten
about them, it hit home for me to see those silly things mentioned.

------
CM30
Well, some things don't change. Back then we had a ton of misinformation on
poorly done personal home pages and fan sites, now have a ton of
misinformation in poorly done news articles and social media posts.

Always fun to look and see which of the 226 different ways to get Mew a
Pokemon site would post, or which of the equally large number of ways to get
the Triforce in Ocarina of Time you'd see on a Zelda site.

Topsites were another big thing there too. Bit like webrings, except clicking
on the button would vote the site you're on up the rankings and make it more
likely to appear on others. These fell apart about as quickly as webrings did,
especially when people gamed the hell out of them.

There was also:

Awkward Javascript animated objects moving around with the mouse cursor. Those
were pretty big at one point.

The inevitable blink tags, which got so annoying that browsers dropped all
support for them.

Jokey 'I agree to proceed to this site' splash pages, where the other link
would send you to Google. Or perhaps something like the Barbie website.

Sites hotlinking to images and resources on other sites. Which then made a
comeback for a while on Myspace, and still remains a large issue on internet
forums. Bonus points if the original webmaster got so annoyed with the
bandwidth costs, he replaced the image link with a porn picture instead.

Various awkward ways to try and 'block' right clicking, as if this could
'protect' the content from thieves.

Songs or sound effects playing in the background, which usually gave you quite
a shock if you speakers were up and you moved to another site:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1BJVN8zD0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1BJVN8zD0)

Various extremely basic HTML tutorials that basically said how to add bold
text, italic text, underlined text, images and links.

Javascript used for 'password protection' (in the slightly later days). You
can probably guess why this wasn't the best idea in the world.

Oh, and fanlistings. Where you had a big old list of people who liked
something (a series, a game, a celebrity, a band, etc), and you could send an
email with a name and contact address to be added to it.

It was certainly a different era then, though a surprising amount of stuff
common then is actually still around. For example, this site still seems to
offer webrings:

[http://www.webringworld.org/](http://www.webringworld.org/)

And sites like Bravenet still offer everything that was popular in 1996 or so.

~~~
kayamon
I really did try to find an active webring while writing the article, but
there aren't any. webringworld.org doesn't actually offer any real services.

