> 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...
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
[1] "When I was your age, Action Replay was a Gameshark..."
The file was huge, about several hundred gigabyte. I didn't download it, because I don't have enough space and downloading it would take ages with my slow connection.
On http://reocities.com/ you can browse through some of the old pages and sites, but many things are broken now, missing images.
Has everyone made a Pokemon site as part of some rite of passage or something? One of the first things I did to teach myself Perl and HTML back in the day was write a Pokedex page.
I made a school website instead. It got official and to thank me for the good deed they removed our class from the school history when they build the new website and converted the image archive, because we weren't up to their standard or whatever.
Catholics .. gotta love them.
I still remember sitting there hours and days banging my head on the table how to get this school logo exactly in the center at the top of the page where it had to stay visible even if the page was scrolled, because "it has to be up there. And it must be always visible."
Fun times.
That's awesome! I remember most pages looked like that back in the day actually. I even offered it as a 'service' to Dragonball Z websites. It existed of just a background image with all the borders/effects in it, and transparent tables on top of it with a content structure just like yours. Good times.
Geocities was awesome. I used it for an upcoming events website while I was in school. I remember thinking how cool it was when I bought a domain name for the site. When good ol' Geocities went away, it was really sad. Kind of felt like the end of an era.
Luckily the title of babies first scripts as well as annoying autoplay, flashing gifs and terrible layouts had been taken over by tumblr. If you ever feel the need to know why 99% of professional devs aren't 12, check out a couple of "custom" tumblr styles.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
God, I started out with Perl-based CGI, NetObjects Fusion, and ATG Dynamo's early JSP implementation, back when being able to afford a SQL backend meant you were hot stuff. Kids today have it so easy. We had to code ISAPI filters, during packet storms, for bidirectional communication! And don't get me started on what we had to do when the bit buckets ran out of ones....
I wrote an Atari 2600 cartridge auction/trading site in perl that was so popular, it caused my company's webserver - a large national ISP! - to slow to a crawl running all the CGI.
This was pre-ebay, about 1995. Wish I had stuck with it in retrospect: ebay started very similarly.
I think one reason for me, is that I am way much better doing pure graphics coding for customs components, than trying to make a component out of <div/> coupled with CSS/JavaScript magic.
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/
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.
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!
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:
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.
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).
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.
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.fortun...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Dummies-101-Html-Computer-Tech/dp/0764...