No one really misses Angelfire.

October 6, 2007 4:01 AM

So, are you feeling nostalgic? There's also an, uh, adult section. Of course.

Yeah, I know this was wrong. I was just flabbergasted this sort of thing still exists in this form. And maintained, apparently.

posted by converge (39 comments total)

Broken links, animated gifs? Bright red text?

Ah, yes, this brings me back! :)
posted by Dillonlikescookies at 4:13 AM on October 6, 2007

See also the veritable time sink that is Ghost Sites of the Web for more fun.
posted by Iosephus at 4:17 AM on October 6, 2007 [2 favorites]

Maybe.
posted by Mblue at 4:22 AM on October 6, 2007

Huh, you can't flag as "noise" anymore.
posted by LarryC at 4:40 AM on October 6, 2007

Y'know, in some ways, we haven't really progressed much. Compare those old-school pages to what passes for a contemporary webpage.

All the winking, blinking, flashing bits have been replaced by winking, blinking, flashing advertisements. The embedded music has been replaced by the occasional ad congratulating you on winning a new iPod Nano. Plus, now there are the pop-ups, pop-unders, and ads that slide across the screen.

In fact, when it comes down to it, all the quaint, amateur self-created junk has been replaced by crass, professionally-created advertising junk. At least someone's making money with it, now.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:40 AM on October 6, 2007 [3 favorites]

Can you fix the link it is taking me top myspace.

Baazing! These do bring back memories though.
posted by imjosh at 4:48 AM on October 6, 2007

LOLMIDI!!!!!!
posted by darkripper at 6:01 AM on October 6, 2007

It so spectacularly killed Safari and my system that I had to do a hard reset. Seriously.
posted by tksh at 6:08 AM on October 6, 2007

My Firefox didn't quite know what to do with that MIDI file.

Ah, MIDI, was it really that long ago...?
posted by dgbellak at 6:58 AM on October 6, 2007

I just wanted to point out that Webtek is still around.
posted by brownpau at 7:01 AM on October 6, 2007

My imaginary pet hamster just died of an epileptic seizure after I went to Webtek's client list page. They deserve an award for worst use of Javascript ever, I suspect.
posted by Iosephus at 7:07 AM on October 6, 2007

Webtek is a joke site, right? Right??
posted by agropyron at 7:17 AM on October 6, 2007

Metafilter: We've been in the "biz" for quite a while, so let us help you with our experteze!
posted by darkripper at 7:19 AM on October 6, 2007

If nostalgic means Led Zep in midi.
posted by MtDewd at 7:26 AM on October 6, 2007 [1 favorite]

To be fair, these sorts of sites can be given credit for inspiring lots of people to learn HTML back in the mid-90s. Even clueless students like myself said, "Holy Cow, I bet I can do better than that."
posted by normy at 7:33 AM on October 6, 2007

See also the veritable time sink that is Ghost Sites of the Web for more fun.
posted by Iosephus at 7:17 AM on October 6 [1 favorite +] [!]

Why have you not posted this to the front page yet? Has it already been posted?
posted by NoMich at 7:35 AM on October 6, 2007

Nostalgic for that? No, not really. I saw a site every bit as bad as that yesterday, and it was designed earlier this very year. It had all the hallmarks of bad 1998 web design... bad music you can't stop quickly enough, gratuitous flashing .gifs... the works.

You might have heard of it, it's called "Nearly every page on MySpace."
posted by lekvar at 7:46 AM on October 6, 2007 [1 favorite]

I love sites like this. True vernacular design, or anti-design. I think it's fantastic how the early web was full of people doing all sorts of crazy (and often ugly) design.

I sure don't miss Midi, though.
posted by Nelson at 7:48 AM on October 6, 2007

Some claim Symbolics has the oldest site on the Internet because they registered for a domain before anyone else: March 15 1985.
posted by PHINC at 8:12 AM on October 6, 2007

NoMich: beats me, I'd swear I saw it here years ago and had it floating around my brain, only recalling it when I read this thread. I even had to google the address, being only sure it was "Ghost Sites something".

Besides, I have this psychological hang-up that keeps me from posting to the front page unless it involves a monkey in a fez, second-order logic, and a deconstruction of the Swedish taste for atrocious candy.
posted by Iosephus at 8:22 AM on October 6, 2007

Meh. Needs more Dancing Jesus
posted by LordSludge at 8:33 AM on October 6, 2007

[cries]
posted by five fresh fish at 8:47 AM on October 6, 2007 [1 favorite]

OK, anyone else still have their old geocities type pages up?

Dear god, check this out. That's my old site back from like 98/99 era. Don't forget the awesome Christianity and Marijuana page!

My Libertarian section, and empyre (with animated GIF banner *and* a blink tag.

There's a strange combination of "what's new on this site" and blog, here.

And finally my pathetic attempt at explaining binary numbers.

This is the last iteration of the site, the first had a starry background and even worse graphics (done with, I think, Neopaint shareware).

Come one, I wanna see what sites you guys had if they're still up! (I hate that geocities didn't allow archive.org to keep their stuff, it'd be nice to see all the old iterations).
posted by symbioid at 10:21 AM on October 6, 2007

Oops, that was meant to be "Come on" in the last paragraph, duh.
posted by symbioid at 10:23 AM on October 6, 2007

Puh-leeze, in 1999, it was Tripod, baby, and while I quickly moved my blog to my own domain, I never bothered with my list of "2000 Oxymorons for the Millenium*: THE OXY2K" (with never-finished source link-backs) which I had insanely designed in alternating stripes of black-on-white and white-on-black... just to hammer home the idea of dichotomy. Geez, that was stupid.
*yes, I misspelled it
posted by wendell at 10:50 AM on October 6, 2007

And now..

Let's Dance

This definitely takes me back.
posted by sir_rubixalot at 11:03 AM on October 6, 2007

Ahh <center> justified pages. The fastest visual cue as to whether or not I need to pay attention to the content of a site.

Fantastic.
posted by quin at 11:53 AM on October 6, 2007 [2 favorites]

Awww. Crashing browsers. That really does take me back.
posted by cmyk at 12:51 PM on October 6, 2007

I have a site online which has not changed since 1995. It still looks pretty good, though the content of some parts is laughably tiny, as it was designed for 640 x 480 and features images prominently.

About the only really dated thing is the frameset, which came from my "multimedia" background where fixed toolbars sat around scrolling content.

That site was mentioned in a couple of books, I was interviewed, got to collect all the bestest "award" icons, blah blah. These days, I'm at best "in the upper echelon" of web designers and devs (but thousands are as good or way better) whereas back then it seemed like there were only a dozen or so people who could build a "killer" web site, and we all knew of each other.

I've been paid to develop hundreds of sites since then, but I am a bit nostalgic for the "simplicity" of those early days. HTML was it, no need for a CMS, js, Flash, etc., which are expected on even the lightest-weight sites today. I do those but, as I say, I miss the "right, that's done, what's next?" aspect of work back then. Worst period, though, was when browsers were sufficiently advanced to use CSS but you still had to support NS4, the biggest steaming-pile browser ever--though supporting IE6 today is nearly as frustrating.*

Time was where guys like the one in the FPP would inevitably hang out a shingle saying they did "web design." Their "clients" would be their church, their chess club, a local deli and themselves. Front Page would figure prominently.

* My solution for "backwards" compatibility (for really terrible older browsers) has always been "give them a nice text-only page" but rarely has a client been that enlightened, preferring to degrade the experiences of 95% to please the 5% who refuse to upgrade and crippling their site's forward compatibility. Whatever...
posted by maxwelton at 1:33 PM on October 6, 2007

dgbellak, i personally find it shocking that Firefox can't handle Midi files. Internet Explorer v 2.0 as well as Netscape 2.0 could!

I mean not that anyone really embeds them into webpages anymore, but browsers should be backwards compatible with legacy sites.

(But then again, neither is it possible to run many old DOS games that I loved in Windows XP.)
posted by gregb1007 at 2:50 PM on October 6, 2007

So once, my sister was really rude about my taste in shoes, in public. I could not let this lie. She was studying new media (or something like that) at the time. So I made Hagisworld and sent it round all her new media friends. She hasn't been rude about my shoes since.
posted by Helga-woo at 4:02 PM on October 6, 2007

I was going to try and find all my old stuff, but Googling for old usernames of mine pulled up a wealth of Duran Duran fanaticism that I'd like to forget.

NICK RHODES 4EVER OMG!!!111
posted by katillathehun at 8:53 PM on October 6, 2007

Angelfire. Happy days.

Reminds me so much of Homer's webpage in the Simpsons.
posted by triv at 2:09 AM on October 7, 2007

Personally, I'm glad that I've gotten my pre-2000 page projects off the web by now. A couple of sites I made were actually pretty nice-looking, but the overconfident high school kid in me is better left buried in my offline archives.

However, to this day I dare not search for my old Usenet posts using Google Groups search, and I'm infinitely glad that the various BBS's I used to frequent are long dead and completely unarchived.

gregb1007: But then again, neither is it possible to run many old DOS games that I loved in Windows XP.

Off topic, but do check out DOSBox. I've just completed assembling just about all the DOS games I ever played into a completely awesome DOSBox setup. So the love need not die. If this is old news, sorry, but your comment reads like this might be something you didn't know about.
posted by lifeless at 5:23 AM on October 7, 2007

Ahh, MIDI! Takes me back to the times before MTV, to the era of ASCII ROCK!
(More here, with annoying javascript popups.)
posted by Anything at 9:34 AM on October 7, 2007

I can't believe that's never been linked before on MeFi.
posted by Anything at 9:48 AM on October 7, 2007

gregb1007 writes "i personally find it shocking that Firefox can't handle Midi files. Internet Explorer v 2.0 as well as Netscape 2.0 could!

"I mean not that anyone really embeds them into webpages anymore, but browsers should be backwards compatible with legacy sites."

<>Plugins are not standards.<>
posted by krinklyfig at 7:04 PM on October 7, 2007

Well, that didn't exactly work. It was supposed to have a tag with "pedant" in it, but the empty brackets make it look like weird quotes.
posted by krinklyfig at 7:05 PM on October 7, 2007

So I made Hagisworld and sent it round all her new media friends.

The original Rickroll, obviously. Nice work, Helga-woo.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 1:40 AM on October 8, 2007