Site created 1997-06-19.

May 11, 2014 10:54 AM

The Colonel's Home Page! It's a home page that spans the Colonel's many interests, including homebrewed card games, jingle compositions, ASCII maps of NES games, how to deal with abusive parents, and puzzles.

Bonus: You can learn how to clear a Wang 720!

There's also a people links section. They don't go to other home pages like his, though, but rather, mostly to Google+ and Facebook profiles.

posted by ignignokt (23 comments total)

This site is optimized for Lynx

Kickin' it old school, I see.
posted by codswallop at 11:20 AM on May 11, 2014 [8 favorites]

They don't go to other home pages like his, though, but rather, mostly to Google+ and Facebook profiles.

Yeah, I noticed that. That means he's still updating it. With vi, presumably.
posted by Philosopher Dirtbike at 11:24 AM on May 11, 2014 [4 favorites]

This must be the Sicherman of Sicherman dice?
posted by Segundus at 11:32 AM on May 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

Proto-Ulillillia?
posted by pravit at 11:32 AM on May 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

I like this site because it reminds me of the old days where everybody felt that they could/should put all kinds of information on a personal website. Like public transportation information. Because why would the bus company put that info online themselves?
posted by IAr at 11:54 AM on May 11, 2014 [9 favorites]

Same here IAr. To me, this is still how a homepage should look, not because of the style but because of the wealth of interesting links. And there's still lots of pages like this out there, filled with interesting stuff, each of them a treasure trove if you can only hit upon the right Google terms to bring them up.
posted by JHarris at 11:58 AM on May 11, 2014 [4 favorites]

More proof the site's still being updated: it hosts PDF print-out score sheets for the board game 7 Wonders, which was first published in 2010. (It's pretty good, a quick-playing game that lasts about half an hour but supports up to seven players!)
posted by JHarris at 12:01 PM on May 11, 2014

That How to deal with abusive parents thing should be carved into a mountain somewhere.
posted by localroger at 12:15 PM on May 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

Interesting! The 1931 Drew Pearson article on Hoover alone is worth the price of admission.
posted by Twang at 12:43 PM on May 11, 2014

This must be the Sicherman of Sicherman dice?

$ wget http://userpages.monmouth.com/~colonel/sdice.pl
$ perl sdice.pl 6
1 3 4 5 6 8
1 2 2 3 3 4

1 2 3 4 5 6
1 2 3 4 5 6
posted by effbot at 12:43 PM on May 11, 2014 [3 favorites]

I have a feeling this is self-consciously retro but I know some older sys admins who still have this mindset, and it brings back fond memories of my early days on the Web ;-)
posted by hyperizer at 2:14 PM on May 11, 2014

Deliberately old-school in both form and content, but I can identify with the mentality of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." (If Yahoo hadn't closed down GeoCities, I'd probably still be using the "news and links" page I built for myself over there at the turn of the century.)

It does make me a little nostalgic for the Web That Was - despite the complete lack of images, it's more interesting, and reveals more about its owner, than a lot of people's Facebook pages.
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 3:43 PM on May 11, 2014 [11 favorites]

glorious
posted by young_son at 11:05 PM on May 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ah, curated content instead of serial brain-farting, selfies and linkbaits.

I miss me some Clinton-era internet.
posted by lon_star at 11:42 PM on May 11, 2014 [2 favorites]

Deliberately old-school in both form and content, but I can identify with the mentality of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

A popular German tech blog (Fefes Blog) takes that attitude as well. The first question in the FAQ is, unsurprisingly, the statement, "The layout looks terrible!"
posted by frimble at 12:10 AM on May 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

Because why would the bus company put that info online themselves?

In most cases, because it took literally a decade between when the personal pages were published and when the bus company finally got around to creating a web site.
posted by bystander at 12:50 AM on May 12, 2014 [4 favorites]

When she's done carousing,
Disco down to fed'ral housing.
Pull the cord, it's dark out,
Don't forget to let your sixteen cats out,

Mrs. Gooby, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Mrs. Gooby, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Mrs. Gooby, yeah, yeah, yeah!

This comes perilously close to outsider art on the level of The Shaggs, though totally not as tonedeaf. If there were actual recordings of this, John Waters would use one in a film or put some in his compilations.
posted by Spatch at 1:23 AM on May 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

The piece about Soddy Nests led me on to reading about Frederick Soddy, Nobel prize winner and the man who introduced the word 'isotope' among other things.

That's the kind of unexpected bonus you get from sites like this.
posted by Segundus at 1:45 AM on May 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

There is much to be said for a website that functions well in Lynx, because it will function well pretty much anywhere else, including mobile devices & tablets. It's a good reminder that web pages were originally more about information than presentation. I like good clean web design too, but those few years after the advent of the image and font tags but before reliable CSS were kind of ugly. Web design best practice was to abuse HTML in whatever ways were necessary to make pretty web pages.

Don't get me wrong, I eventually got where I am thanks to being able to slice images, nest tables, code image maps, and find/replace FONT tags with the best of them, but if I ever get around to assembling an omnibus personal web page it will probably look a lot like The Colonel's.
posted by usonian at 5:45 AM on May 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

It's a good reminder that web pages were originally more about information than presentation.

The entire industry has completely forgotten that the M in HTML stands for Markup, and that tags were never meant as anything other than a suggestion to the browser as to how to lay out the content.

For a fun illustration as to how thoroughly that's been forgotten, try editing a page like the Colonel's with Microsoft Word and look at what happens to the HTML source even though it looks almost the same in a browser afterward.
posted by localroger at 6:26 AM on May 12, 2014 [3 favorites]

There is much to be said for a website that functions well in Lynx, because it will function well pretty much anywhere else, including mobile devices & tablets. It's a good reminder that web pages were originally more about information than presentation.

Yeah, having to make things work on mobile has lead to some interesting thinking. I listened to the The Nitch Podcast for a while, and they took the thought exercise beyond making it work on mobile to really simple devices, to a low-cost watch that has networking capabilities. There, moving parts are right out, and even simple layout aspects like large text won't work.

Maybe some of them won't even be able to read markup. Maybe plain text is what something like that will be able to present meaningfully. At that point, we're basically doing what gopher did, except maybe calling it an API or something. So, the hosts on that show often make the point that if you really want to be future proof, you better be ready to serve it up plain, even if you prefer some real stylee design zazz.

All that said, I've found the modern web to be a wondrous place for building "apps." Shit like this is fantastic. However, if whatever it is you're presenting makes people want to use Readability on it, you need to take a step back and just give the people what they want, like the Colonel has done.
posted by ignignokt at 5:48 PM on May 12, 2014 [1 favorite]

This part of the page is really confusing:
Not members of my family:

So he is just listing all people with the same last name, and linking to their Google Plus page (or even giving their email address)?
posted by getawaysticks at 7:19 AM on May 13, 2014

So he is just listing all people with the same last name
Yeah, back in the day we would get lots of inquiries about "are you tommy smith's dad?" or whatever, so it was a reasonable thing to do if you had a highish google (well, in fact altavista) rank. I am guessing he just never stopped updating it.
posted by bystander at 7:22 AM on May 13, 2014 [1 favorite]