18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

http://www.fmboschetto.it/

by fbn79 • 6 years ago

520 472 6 years ago

fmboschetto.it

Lagogarda• 6 years ago

This site is best viewed with Netscape Navigator

criddell• 6 years ago

I was looking for the web ring links.

hieudang9• 6 years ago

I missed the tools like FrontPage/DreamWaver and gorgeous Flash websites.

juskrey• 6 years ago

Never missed FrontPage/DreamWaver..

pixelrevision• 6 years ago

DreamWaver is an appropriate name...

rickyc091• 6 years ago

Agreed. The modern-day version of those would be Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) which kids use to start exploring coding, but it's not the same.

rchaud7• 6 years ago

You're right, it's not the same. Scratch is too Computer Science-y for something that can be as simple as a website. Text, images and video, plus hyperlinks that link one page to another. That's enough for the majority of people to share information.

I really hope something comes along that reinvigorates the public's interest in creating content that resides on their own website, rather than a walled-garden social media account.

jannyfer• 6 years ago

Here’s an archive link in case this gets hugged to death:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200214134509/http://www.fmbosc...

pmlnr5• 6 years ago

It's actually quite hard to hug static HTML pages to death, unless on purpose, with things like slowloris.

anacoluthe• 6 years ago

Reminds me of http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/

marai2• 6 years ago

What is the oldest website still standing?

retube2• 6 years ago

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

marc_io• 6 years ago

Now that's a responsive layout.

ainiriand• 6 years ago

CERN lab site.

modernerd• 6 years ago

http://info.cern.ch/

thekaleb• 6 years ago

This one is mobile friendly as well.

retube2• 6 years ago

and it loads at light speed

jagger27• 6 years ago

Hosted in Italy too!

galacticdessert• 6 years ago

Which makes the speed even more surprising!!

goshx2• 6 years ago

I love that you kept the style too. This brings back good memories. I’ve learned HTML using Frontpage and gifs were a must in my geocities hosted websites.

nalesnik3000• 6 years ago

The spinning e-mail symbol GIF evokes pure nostalgia, bro. Came here to laugh, not to feel.

goshx2• 6 years ago

I’m looking for the little dude with a shovel “in construction”.

xxs• 6 years ago

..."under construction"

drops• 6 years ago

One of the most prolific and well-known music reviewers - Pierro Scaruffi - has a website built in 1995 with a design not updated much, or at all, since: https://www.scaruffi.com

jacquesm2• 6 years ago

That's a great website, thank you.

attil-io• 6 years ago

This website does NOT use cookies. Period.

Love it!

ctruelson• 6 years ago

Similar to Robert Christgau! https://robertchristgau.com/

alexmorenodev• 6 years ago

He even reviewed one of my favorites albums launched recently: https://www.scaruffi.com/vol8/bentknee.html

rchaud7• 6 years ago

I've come across this site many times when looking up different bands...the breadth and diversity of bands and genres covered here is truly amazing!

Santosh833• 6 years ago

The biggest drawback of sites from this era is they don't reflow on mobile screens. On a desktop they still work as well as they ever did. I'm still searching for a good WYSIWYG HTML composer that can generate clean, responsive pages. Seems like this is a problem where there isn't sufficient incentive for the big tech companies to tackle, and the only s/w that seems to come close is BlueGriffon.

jacquesm2• 6 years ago

That's a client side problem, not a server side problem. The rendering and presentation of a webpage are entirely up to the client, absolutely nothing dictates that a page should look a certain way on a certain client.

lultimouomo• 6 years ago

Then again, the whole page is laid out in a table element, so I could see why mobile browsers won't reflow it perfectly.

onion2k5• 6 years ago

There are a ton of attributes in the HTML that dictates how the website should render - it has a bgcolor and a margin on the body tag, a width and height on the main table, center tags all over the place, etc. Suggesting that a browser should ignore the HTML spec and do something else would completely destroy the web.

thanatropism• 6 years ago

I'm still searching for a good WYSIWYG HTML composer that

You need a dev team implementing Agile for react-native-ux with CI/CD capabilities and devops.

verytrivial• 6 years ago

Well, I'm not so sure -- have you tried viewing that site via a WAP proxy? That's the 2002 way to solve the problem.

jgrahamc3• 6 years ago

My 23 year old web site: https://jgc.org/ It's still updated from a Perl script that generates static HTML.

azimuth11• 6 years ago

I guess you have some sort of "classic car" feelings towards it? How often does the perl script get updated?

jgrahamc3• 6 years ago

Whenever I need to update the site.

dna_polymerase• 6 years ago

Imagine stumbling upon an old-fashioned website, reading it is maintained by the CTO of Cloudflare, of all people.

jgrahamc3• 6 years ago

I think from time to time that I should completely change it and update it. But I can't really be bothered, Cloudflare takes a lot of my time.

jenshk• 6 years ago

Haha that's pretty awesome. I have dedicated this year to simplicity and building my company's new website in Hugo with plain vanilla javascript.

staz• 6 years ago

https://imgur.com/a/DCum3Ur here is how it render on my 14" screen :/

StavrosK5• 6 years ago

So I wanted to link my 23 year old website, but precisely because it's still updated, it looks like this: https://www.stavros.io/

It's gone through many renames and redesigns, but, in true Japanese style, it's still the same website. I do have an old snapshot, though: https://anonymoussoftware.stavros.io/

readhn• 6 years ago

> Greek. Amateur F1 driver. Technology enthusiast. Single parent. Liar.

thats quite a conversation starter...

WorldMaker5• 6 years ago

Similarly, I feel a continuity in how old my website is, but in Ship of Theseus fashion lots of little parts changed over the years (and pieces were lost to storms, etc). I was really excited at one point to find an old time capsule of a snapshot from a particular redesign I recall being fond of around 1999: http://worldmaker.net/wmo99/

Amusing to myself and contributing to overall Ship of Theseus analogy, the current design is a responsive, flexbox-based recreation of sorts of the original goals for that 1999 site. I'd like to think the 1999 version of myself would very much appreciate it (especially after all the work in making corner GIFs versus the magic of CSS border-radius, and fighting TABLEs for layous).

mobilio• 6 years ago

I'm going to SSG after playing enough with WordPress and other CMSes...

pbhjpbhj3• 6 years ago

My oldest content is from 96 or 97, but the page only exists offline. Hand written, of course, in pico - back then I didn't really know the web existed we just had www/ directories on our Uni's Unix accounts. Around '97 I updated to have frames, then '98 I think was SSI.

nonamenoslogan5• 6 years ago

Ahh pico! Good times, Good times.

dbalatero• 6 years ago

My favorite like this site is http://www.burger.com - this dude has a hilarious array of hobbies and awesome beveled button links.

dabeeeenster• 6 years ago

Have to wonder how much that domain name is worth...?

cameronbrown2• 6 years ago

Probably expensive, but I doubt it's actually worth anything. I reckon it's much harder to build a brand when you start with a generic word.

tdons• 6 years ago

USD 25.000 according to GoDaddy

https://godaddy.com/domain-value-appraisal/appraisal/?checkA...

cameronbrown2• 6 years ago

"Webmaster" - I miss that term..

znpy2• 6 years ago

Ah, the time when you could actually "master" all the web technologies to keep a website up and running...

retbull• 6 years ago

Ah papyrus oh how I missed you from high school.

LukeBMM• 6 years ago

24 years of weekly quotes is actually really impressive.

cgh• 6 years ago

He is a member of the Cherokee Nation with interests ranging from model railroading to fireflies. And he puts it all out there on his personal webpage, updated regularly since 1996. There was a time when it was normal to stumble upon pages like this one.

swyx• 6 years ago

that is the best last name in the history of the internet

mtm7• 6 years ago

I went from a page that said:

My charge for typical business or civil work is $450.00 per hour.

To one that said:

I am a relative newcomer to the world of turtles.

...in two clicks. I love this site.

Also learned a recipe for a quick and easy blackberry cobbler[0].

[0] http://www.burger.com/bcobbler.htm

zeitg3ist• 6 years ago

To this day I still visit www.scaruffi.com to read his opinions about music - the layout hasn’t changed since the 90s or even the 80s for some pages.

awiesenhofer• 6 years ago

or even the 80s

Probably not ;)

Initial release 1993; 27 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML

stjohnswarts2• 6 years ago

And everything loads just about instantly haha

0xferruccio• 6 years ago

There’s so many italian old italian sites with this design

My favorite in High Scool was http://ripmat.it

That site is the only reason I managed to learn Math school

acomjean• 6 years ago

Those backgrounds are fantastic. Just right arrowing through them... is a trip. http://ripmat.it/mate/a/ac/ac5.html

barbarbar• 6 years ago

This site is very fast.

skc• 6 years ago

The source is refreshingly sparse and tidy which was kind of jolting for a second.

webscalist• 6 years ago

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... 100 Points. Mobile First. Better than React Native.

stabbles• 6 years ago

This is hilarious! Turns out 18 year old websites were mobile friendly after all

jsaldes• 6 years ago

Have you actually tried the site on a mobile device? It's impossible to read the text and navigation is hell. Wouldn't classify that as "mobile friendly".

pmlnr5• 6 years ago

Pre frames and table-layout designs are pretty good, because they are dead simple HTML - and thus, they allow reflow, being responsive as a result.

This is not one of those.

pjc502• 6 years ago

Almost all of the performance-unfriendliness has been designed in. Especially for monetisation.

sakarisson• 6 years ago

More like 18 year old websites are so rare that page rating services don't even work for them.

mister_hn• 6 years ago

Just because mobile phones got same (or better) screen resolution than in 1990s/2000s desktop PCs

gorbachev• 6 years ago

Back when Netscape 0.9 was new I had daily arguments with some of the "web designers" who insisted on using HTML targeting browser bugs and other invalid HTML tricks to optimize the aesthetics of their sites.

All you needed to do then, and today, is make sure your HTML is valid and that you don't break things on purpose ("this site optimized for MSIE1.0" type of stuff) and your site will forever be mobile and any-other-html-rendering device friendly.

ozim• 6 years ago

In 2002, 1024×768 and 800x600 were mostly used resolutions for computer screens so yes, those were mobile friendly...

nyuszika7h• 6 years ago

Unable to process request. Please wait a while and try again.

pmlnr5• 6 years ago

100 points on pagespeed is not that hard with static sites.

- drop 99% of the JS (PWA, lazy-loading, infinite scroll, jquery, you don't need any of them for a webpage), convert the remaining for 1% to vanilla js and use it as progressive enhancement.

- use EM or % as layout width/height

- inline css, js, and svg

EDIT

- no webfonts!

The only thing that'll remain as an issue are tables wider, than viewport, on mobile.

My site: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

freeone3000• 6 years ago

Gee, maybe that's sort of an indication on how far backwards the user experience on web has fallen.

ravenstine• 6 years ago

Don't know about PWA. Service workers are pretty lightweight and help with caching.

But yeah, lazy-loading, infinite scroll, etc., are all designed to cover up design flaws that impact performance. I think lazy-loading can be potentially done right, but almost none of us do anything right.

use EM or % as layout width/height

Why? EM/REM is good for handling font sizes, but for anything else it may not make sense and a custom font setting in the browser can break layouts if the size of boxes are based on font sizes. PX is perfectly adequate for layout, and is actually a relative unit(PX !== hardware pixel). Same for borders, padding, margin, etc. Even REM is better than EM for most cases. People who adjust the font size in their browser don't necessarily want their layout to change and potentially degrade as a result.

inline css, js, and svg

Can be a good idea, especially if you can somehow identify the CSS used on page load and discard anything nonessential. Though maybe HTTP/2 makes inlining obsolete. IDK

no webfonts!

Thank you! Web fonts are perfectly sufficient in 99% of cases.

throwaway_fbnet• 6 years ago

Here is a life-saver maintained by a 77 year young lawyer for a lot of public good: http://www.drtsolutions.com/. Case laws against SARFAESI, an Indian law that expedites bank recovery for non-performing assets. He updates it manually in FrontPage even today!

jannes2• 6 years ago

Wow, that page is amazing!

I hadn't seen the old Google logo in years: http://www.drtsolutions.com/drtqueries.htm The search widget doesn't even use an <iframe>. Just a plain <form>.

ta9999991717• 6 years ago

Page colors are ugly as shit, but so readable - modern web devs/people who make them do "modern" stuff, you suck compared to these sites in this thread.

Sorry, not sorry.

geocrasher3• 6 years ago

My favorite "Retro awful": Site:

https://www.lingscars.com/

cosmodisk• 6 years ago

I remember how she was ridiculed on Dragon's Den,yet she's the one employing a bunch of people and having a successful business. I remember reading that she's even hired someone to do some maintenance in the town,because the local council couldn't afford it anymore.

ahmetkun• 6 years ago

this one looks very retro but the code is actually quite modern. it has custom fonts, css animations, gradients, etc. and no tables.

notahacker• 6 years ago

Also, beneath the intentional craziness, it's very clever marketing.

reaperducer6• 6 years ago

It's like the visual equivalent of chiptunes.

ceejayoz• 6 years ago

I made a lot of sites in Frontpage in high school.

My favorite bit was the rollover buttons that used a Java applet to do so.

matteuan• 6 years ago

It's impressive the amount of content inside! There are countless pages about literature, religion and physics. It's a good reminder of the original goal of WWW: share information.

rlv-dan3• 6 years ago

It's a good reminder of the original goal of WWW: share information.

That is what I miss the most about the old web. We wanted to build something better by sharing knowledge. And for a while we did. Then mainstream came and corporates took over.

reaperducer6• 6 years ago

Well, to be honest the corporations were always there. It's just when the marketers discovered "cyberspace" that everything went to hell.

codegeek• 6 years ago

But thats so not web 2.0/3.0. You gotta add more padding so we can create smooth scrolling. /s. I am a culprit of this too now btw.

blakesterz• 6 years ago

Anyone else still sad over the demise of FrontPage Express? It did everything I needed at the time, it was free, and really easy to use. The HTML wasn't as bad as FrontPage either.

gtk40• 6 years ago

I got my start with web dev using Netscape Composer, which was a similar enough tool. Seamonkey, the successor of Netscape and Mozilla Suite, still includes it to this day and it works well!

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

cat199• 6 years ago

Not to forget the geocitiesizer:

https://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/

"Make Any Webpage Look Like It Was Made By A 13 Year-Old In 1996"

1_player• 6 years ago

I'm surprised to see <marquee> still exists and works in modern browsers. And saddened to see it updates at ~20fps, at least on Safari.

Time for a smooth, GPU accelerated 60+fps marquee implementation?

seisvelas• 6 years ago

While <marquee> support is near universal, I was sad to find out that <blink> has not fared so well.

I'm sure a lot of you already know this easter egg, but if you search "blink tag" in Google, Google makes all the blink tags actually work (using JS of course but still)

https://www.google.com/search?q=blink+tag

reaperducer6• 6 years ago

I simulate the <blink> tag on a 404 page I maintain.

But I use CSS, not JS.

SketchySeaBeast2• 6 years ago

Wait, how do the rest of you test if a field accepts or rejects html?

why-oh-why• 6 years ago

What field accepts or rejects html? What are you talking about?

pjc502• 6 years ago

Another classic from an electronic music pioneer, author of the original TRON score: http://www.wendycarlos.com/

afwaller• 6 years ago

The content is super wholesome as well.

rlv-dan3• 6 years ago

My personal/hobby business web site (https://www.rlvision.com) is based on code 22 years ago. It's built with tables, because that's how you did things back then. The age shows. But I haven't found reason to rebuild it yet. Simply put, it works. It may not be mobile friendly, but the goal is to make available my Windows software, so my aim is desktop users.

tbdr• 6 years ago

happy user of RLVision Artgem - thank you !

alvarezo3• 6 years ago

Holy, that was it - ArtGem! Perfect middle ground between Photoshop and Paint. Great features, pleasant feel to use.

alvarezo3• 6 years ago

This website looks extremely familiar. I think I visited it about 15 years ago and I am not completely sure but didn't you have a nice drawing and photo editing software there? I can't remember the name of it but it was the best ever, until it was disappointingly discontinued because of lack of buying customers :(

rlv-dan3• 6 years ago

Yes, ArtGem (https://rlvision.com/artgem_about.php). We were a couple of guys that tried at making shareware, but sadly failed. I continued running the site to host my own utilities, some of which eventually turned into shareware. I don't earn much money from it, but I enjoy making software and it makes me happy when other people find them useful as well!

dr_kiszonka• 6 years ago

Replace Genius looks great - I will be trying it out soon!

bcrosby95• 6 years ago

It's funny to me that one reason why people said to stop using tables was because of file size. Now we have everyone download almost a megabyte (or more) of javascript to render a few kb of html.

WorldMaker5• 6 years ago

I don't recall page size being a reason. I recall TABLE layouts being a lot smaller than most of their alternatives at the time (FRAMESETs in particular come to mind, because we knew HTTP connection overhead was a thing even back then and needing separate files for each individual website "part" felt like a huge bandwidth waste back then).

The big problem was always Accessibility-related semantics. Websites laid out in TABLEs were often quite confusing to screen readers, as TABLE has a lot of supposedly important semantics in how it should be read/engaged with and using a TABLE for layout follows none of them. (What does a table header mean in a layout? Most layouts wouldn't have good headers. How do you describe what a table column is supposed to be for without a column header?) It's a shame that narrative was never clear enough that Accessibility was always the big reason TABLEs were considered a Bad Idea for layout.

(Speaking of downloading a megabyte of data, I recall how long I felt that a 1.44 MB floppy was the best restriction for the size of an entire website. If it was bigger than a floppy you were probably doing something wrong. I stopped counting floppies a long time ago; that person might be ashamed at how many floppies a typical website downloads these days.)

devalnor• 6 years ago

<bgsound src="ue.mid" loop="-1"> is princeless

jeremyswank• 6 years ago

My first site is still live. It went live in 1997, hand coded (using tables). Went through a few redesigns but the 2000 version has been left online as a fixed digital artifact from the time: http://pwp.detritus.net/

mmmBacon• 6 years ago

Seriously very nice design for 2000.

rhblake• 6 years ago

My personal favorite, which is in a similar vein - an Italian, although the site is in English; Frontpage; still updated - is https://www.luigicases.com/. He makes leather straps and cases for cameras. Famous in the classic camera community. Only active site that I can think of that still uses frames.

toyg• 6 years ago

Those pics tell a glamorous story worth of a movie.

pmlnr5• 6 years ago

I started with FrontPage 98 in '99. Moved to a self-written PHP CMS, then WordPress, then back to static HTML.

Had I stayed with FrontPage, my life might have been simpler - porting 20 years of content is not simple - but I would have missed out on learning a lot of HTML, CSS, PHP, Python, MySQL, character set conversion, MySQL vs UTF-8, etc.

arm64future• 6 years ago

Where can I find more sites like this

rchaud7• 6 years ago

NeoCities has a collection of sites with that old-school Geocities styling.

owlninja• 6 years ago

Try here https://wiby.me/ Hit the 'surprise me' link

jk7f• 6 years ago

Another gem: http://www.tyrrell.de/startseite.htm

abruzzi2• 6 years ago

My father still updates his website with Frontpage (he had a recent 6 month outage because he inadvertently deleted the Windows XP vmdk on his system, but I recovered that for him recently.) He’s 75, and isn’t interested in converting or learning anything new at this stage.

The funny thing is for years his home-made site was the top google hit if you searched for “hill's criteria” (See Hill's criteria of causation). His site is http://drabruzzi.com/

Santosh833• 6 years ago

Hmm, how do you manage to acquire a legal of copy of Frontpage (even Express) these days for your dad?

Macha• 6 years ago

Was FrontPage ever sold digitally? I wouldn't be surprised if my parents still had their disc copies of Office 95-XP (some even legal thanks to PC bundle deals).

abruzzi2• 6 years ago

He still has the install disk! Though my repair was to pull the vmdk off his old, broken laptop to get him working again.

ta9999991717• 6 years ago

Most don't (shouldn't?) care about the legality of 20+ year old software that's no longer being sold.

nonamenoslogan5• 6 years ago

The later versions "Sharepoint Designer" are free from Microsoft and still available on their downloads page.

Frontpage may be old enough to consider it 'abandonware,' a quick Google for "free frontpage" has a lot of downloads including one from Kean.edu with an embedded key.

geocrasher3• 6 years ago

These simple sites show us something profound: If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last. There are a some technologies that will never allow somebody to build a site and leave it unchanged for 20 or 25 years. Cold Fusion comes to mind. Almost nobody hosts it anymore for one. Can you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years? The version of PHP it runs on will be EOL long before.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page.

Looks like Web 1.0 got something right after all :)

est31• 6 years ago

Fortunately there are plenty of static site generators. Frontpage is out of support and likely the currently popular generators will meet their end one day as well. But even then you can still run them in the future, and their output should not have any major issues (unlike a CMS which might get hacked if it's not kept up to date).

danielbarla• 6 years ago

If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last.

and

I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page.

While simplicity is a great way to future proof things, I'm not convinced that this argument in general would work nearly as well without the benefit of hindsight. One could be forgiven for confusing it with "guess the future correctly". Plenty of relatively safe bets from 10, 20, 30 years ago haven't panned out that well. It's an interesting line of thinking though: exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived?

untog2• 6 years ago

I think you can generalise the advice: remove as many processing steps as you can.

It's not so much that you needed to guess that HTML was going to be as long-lived as it is, it's that HTML is the final product that actually loads on the users computer, and those tend to stick around for a long time (or at least be emulated). The code that lives on a backend server somewhere, not so much.

For what it's worth, I don't think this example is necessarily bulletproof: it requires a working copy of Frontpage. If Microsoft behaved more like Apple it might have been deprecated away long ago!

8lall0• 6 years ago

I think that the right way to rephrase that is "use the right tool for the right job".

How many blogs are powered by wordpress? How many of them can be replaced with a static gen?

HTML has a lot of garbage, but at least it's very hard to break it.

theandrewbailey• 6 years ago

It's an interesting line of thinking though: exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived?

I've thought about this on and off for a few years. Here's what I've come up with:

1. Popularity. You can't really display anything in a web browser without it, blank pages with one AJAX script notwithstanding.

2. Ease of use. Open a text editor, type some markup, save the file with .html, and open in a browser. When you're done, transfer to a server to show the world. That's a pretty straightforward process.

3. Well-defined, open standard. Every important piece of the web is defined, from the markup to the protocol to transfer it. I think that reasonably bug-free implementations of those standards help.

bitexploder• 6 years ago

My text files still work. I have MUD design documents from when I was in high school (mid to late 90s). Org mode and Markdown are kind of eternal formats. Even if all the tooling dies, they still look decent. Basic HTML still works well enough as well. You can write a parser for XML pretty easily. HTML can also be processed and rendered trivially. I think we could collectively find some other technologies that are likely to be around in another 20 years. The simpler the file format the more likely it is to be around :)

edit: A few more popped into my head. CSV. SQL schema + Data dumps (text format). The common theme to everything here is plain text. SQLite, although binary, is probably close to eternal. Git is eternal enough (recent HN post showed even POSIX shell is good enough to write a basic git client). JSON is easy to write a parser for as well. YAML.

_jal• 6 years ago

It is exactly the "guess the future" problem that static sites avoid.

The vast bulk of software goes unsupported in less than 25 years. If you want to depend on something that long, you can guess which package will survive that long, or you can store your data in formats that the widest array of tooling supports.

If you drop into a coma after uploading your static HTML and wake up in 25 years, you might have to use whatever fills the text-manipulation-scripting niche then to beat it into the right shape to import into whatever kids these days are using.

If you used Wordpress, well, maybe it takes over the world, maybe it ends up a Wikipedia entry. (Putting aside, of course, that your site began hosting cryptominers a week after you slipped into that coma because you missed an update.)

bentcorner• 6 years ago

exactly what properties of HTML make it so long lived?

I think we're thinking about this backwards. It's not anything inherent to HTML that make it long lived, it's that the code to parse static HTML is simple, it's more or less standardized and has stuck around for a long time.

Aperocky• 6 years ago

Use static HTML and javascript, I don't think they'll break js compatibility in a long long time, ES3 is still well supported and it's out in 1999.

geocrasher3• 6 years ago

I think I should have said "don't base it on something that CAN'T last". This requires no future knowledge. We know that a WordPress version and its supported PHP will be obsolete.

tasuki2• 6 years ago

I've been running a WordPress blog since early 2006 with very little maintenance. I'm sure it's all outdated again, but still appears to work.

paganel2• 6 years ago

It also helps if you self-host, I have personally self-hosted a subversion repository with my own projects using Trac [1] for 10 years now.

[1] https://trac.edgewall.org/

user59944613• 6 years ago

Trac has been end of life for some time. It doesn't run on python 3. There are open bug tickets about it that have been stale for years.

Maybe it will be upgraded now that python 2 is officially dead, but given it wasn't so far and there was no effort in that direction, I wouldn't bet on it.

LeftCorner• 6 years ago

I been using ColdFusion for over 20 years. The HTML it creates can be as simple or complex as the developer intends. The output can last decades without updating, I don't understand your comparison.

mi100hael• 6 years ago

The issue isn't the HTML it renders, it's finding a hosting provider that supports running it server-side.

Of course you could run it yourself, but maintaining a server for a basic blog or personal site arguably exits the realm of "simple."

nonamenoslogan5• 6 years ago

I recently changed jobs to a shop with 15-20 year old ColdFusion+SQL instances that were originally HP3000 Image Databases and COBOL screens. At first I laughed, now after a couple years, I agree ColdFusion is pretty robust and its HTML isn't bad at all. Its easy to do fairly complex forms, file operations, email generation, document generation, database in-out things, and it just keeps running and running. Its easy to read and understand and even though we're using MX-era code, the server still installs and runs on recent (Ubuntu 16.04LTS) Linux with no issues.

bdcravens• 6 years ago

They weren't talking about the output. They were talking about availability of hosting.

angrygoat• 6 years ago

Back in 2001 I redid the UWA computer club website (https://ucc.asn.au/) using XSLT with a custom doctype ('grahame').

In the early 2000s XML was the cool shiny thing. They're still using it, in fact I found out recently that someone wrote a Markdown to 'doctype grahame' converter to 'modernise' the site.

I guess what I actually built back then was an early static site generator, but it's still kind of cool they're using it 19 years later, hacky as it was / is :)

bjoli• 6 years ago

I still use my old XML doctype with xslt to produce some websites I maintain. Whenever, if ever, xslt is removed from browsers, converting it to a static site generator will be easy.

I regret nothing. Editing simple xml using Emacs is a breeze.

tcgv• 6 years ago

Last time I worked with XSLT was in 2014, redesigning a major Brazilian airline reservation and ticketing system. At the time their passenger service system (Navitaire New Skies [1]) had already switched their white label front-end app from a home grown XSLT web framework to ASP .NET MVC 5, but the company I was working for wasn't particularly interested in paying the (higher) fee for using the "new" front-end framework.

[1] https://www.navitaire.com/new-skies-reservation-system

ath92• 6 years ago

While this website still works fine, the actual HTML that Frontpage generated isn't exactly easy to maintain if Frontpage stops working for whatever reason.

The author of this website is basically stuck using whatever version of Frontpage supports the markup of his website. And I bet there have been plenty of people who used <some other WYSIWYG webpage editor> who are no longer able to maintain their website because their editor no longer runs on their system.

bjornjajajaja• 6 years ago

Microsoft has been fairly good at allowing older binaries to run on newer systems.

Apple is pretty annoying in this regard. There’s a lot of software that doesn’t work on versions maybe only 5 years old.

A lot of software doesn’t need to change to be honest. Microsoft word for example. Word processing: you sit down and type stuff, maybe change the font once or twice. I guess the collaborative features are nice being able to edit the same document with others.

It would be fun to use an older machine and see how productive you can be with the old software too !

randomdude4022• 6 years ago

I know a person who is maintaining a few sites she built in like 2005 with a version of Dreamweaver a little older than that, so never dares to upgrade the Dreamweaver version.

The whole thing is terrifying and horrific to me, but they keep paying her to do the work so she's fine with it.

generationP3• 6 years ago

Can't you just keep editing the html in a text editor? Frontpage's generated html isn't that unreadable.

YourMatt• 6 years ago

Also note that a Java Applet is included in there, which has likely not worked since 2015.

Scarbutt• 6 years ago

VMs solve this problem.

randogogogo2• 6 years ago

Looking at the page source it looks dead simple to modify. I know it isn't WYSIWYG but it's just HTML.

znpy2• 6 years ago

OTOH, I guess that maintaining a windows VM for use with frontpage would be a lot simpler and safer than maintaining an old software stack server side.

HenryBemis• 6 years ago

I properly own several versions of Office all the way back to 95 so I can say this as I am covered :)

Years ago I found a "Portable Frontpage" which of course I downloaded and still have somewhere zipped. I know that MS wouldn't like this much, but life is life and Portable Frontpage exists. So as long as there are Windows, Frontpage will work!

alxlaz• 6 years ago

The author of this website is basically stuck using whatever version of Frontpage supports the markup of his website.

But at least getting it done largely depends only on them, and it's not too hard. I have friends who swear by ProTracker and still use it, even though it's thirty years old and the platform it's running on has been dead for more than twenty. They don't have an Amiga but it's trivial to get it running in an emulator today.

You can run Windows 98 in a browser, and your web editor in it. It's certainly less complicated than hosting a WebObjects application today.

tinus_hn3• 6 years ago

Actually the browser makers are shouldering the burden of supporting the dredge output by FrontPage. Remember that the intention was to make it work in Internet Explorer and crash in Netscape.

GuyPostington2• 6 years ago

This is the internet as I remember it.

m3andros• 6 years ago

Alas, we're not spring chickens anymore... But isn't nostalgia a great feeling? (Frontpage was my very first introduction to a WYSIWYG editor.)

OpticalTransmit• 6 years ago

There is an obscure search engine called wiby.me that only indexes pages like what is posted here. I used to design websites in the late 90's, and very much miss the simple HTML pages of yore.

reaperducer6• 6 years ago

Thanks for that suggestion. I'm glad it's a three-day weekend!

achairapart2• 6 years ago

    Good Practice: Use the least powerful language suitable for expressing information, constraints or programs on the World Wide Web.[0]

[0]: https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html

ekianjo• 6 years ago

Can you imagine running the same WordPress version for 25 years?

If you keep active on your Wordpress install, the regular updates will be no issue for you and will (almost) never break your website. Not sure why you would expect a regular Wordpress user to run the initial install without recommended/mandatory upgrades over a long period of time.

typescriptfan1• 6 years ago

My olde PHP sites are still running just fine.

mad182• 6 years ago

I have couple of sites I built in 2005 with plain procedural php and they are still running absolutely fine today on php 7.4 with no major rewrites.

every• 6 years ago

Followed to its logical if not very practical conclusion, we all wind up on gopher...

Someone• 6 years ago

Or use free/open software, preferably popular free/open software that runs on a popular OS.

Even if the OS and software effectively die, you still would be able to run the latest version in a VM or in emulation.

wolco2• 6 years ago

I have been running an older wordpress that I hacked up nicely. If you keep php below 5.5 no problems. Even the old mysql vs sqli still works great.

rwbt• 6 years ago

If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last.

Sounds similar to the Lindy Effect.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

scarface7422• 6 years ago

You realize that you’re talking about a FrontPage site. The very definition of building something on a technology that won’t last.

kome3• 6 years ago

but look at the code... are modern website really better? i think that FrontPage did an awesome job there.

asdfman123• 6 years ago

Looks like Web 1.0 got something right after all :)

The secret is creating a standard early on that thousands of different pieces of software depend on, so that changing it would expensive and require a phenomenal amount of decentralized coordination.

Don't worry about making it good -- just make it good enough that people won't want to tear their hair out and unanimously agree to never touch it again. Make the short term cost of applying hacks on top of it low, and the cost of throwing everything out high.

Florin_Andrei• 6 years ago

If you want something to last, don't base it on something that won't last.

The ancient Egyptians knew something about this.

kelnos• 6 years ago

I don't think this is really unique to Web 1.0; certainly something that still works from the Web 1.0 days seems "impressive" just because of the passage of time, but there's probably some element of survivorship bias there. You mention ColdFusion as an example, but this guy's site is made using FrontPage. He didn't know in 2001 that he'd still be able to run FrontPage in 2020. He made a bet, and it paid off. Other people made similar bets, on other technologies, and unfortunately got it wrong.

My personal website uses Jekyll, and while there's always the possibility it would become abandoned and stop working (I've definitely found someupgrades to be a pain, and ruby tooling in general doesn't help either), I'll always have the simple, readable markdown files the site is based on. While this wouldn't be an option for a non-technical website author, if I really had to, I'm sure I could write a simple markdown->html renderer over a weekend (or a converter to transform it into the future format-du-jour).

grecy• 6 years ago

I've been using my Wordpress site for 12 years now. Sure I upgrade versions from time to time, but the original post is still there and works perfectly.

It's had around 8 million page views in that time.

boublepop• 6 years ago

build a static HTML page.

No way in hell today’s HTML will survive 25 years now that google owns it, browsers will literally crash due to lack of user tracking. Best just host a static txt file.

type0• 6 years ago

Nah, the next iteration would be called GHTML, it will include fact checking by Google AI and Google Analytics by default, all for free. Everyone will use it otherwise Chrome will give you strange security errors and after all you wouldn't want to use the web that is full of fake news and other content that can be offensive to someone. /s

throwaway286• 6 years ago

Hmm, I wonder if certain javascript based site generators will still be around in 20 years..

solinent• 6 years ago

Static HTML is also very secure. My personal sites are always static, it keeps server costs low and everything gets cached.

forgotmypw77• 6 years ago

this is why perl, txt, and static html are the top-level languages and formats for my project.

with some tweaking, it can be viewed in just about any browser, down to ie3, lynx, mosaic, netscape, and opera3.

tylerjwilk00• 6 years ago

To be fair keeping around an old runtime of FrontPage isn't much different than keep around an old runtime of PHP.

edwinyzh• 6 years ago

What you said made me glad that I've just developed DocxManager (https://docxmanager.com) - its concept is like WordPress (document-focused editor, themes and templates) but it generates standard html/css/js, and use Word as the document editor.

mattkevan• 6 years ago

Once worked on an enormous, very popular site built by hand in Frontpage.

It had millions of pageviews, made over 6 figures a month in AdSense and been updated so often and for so long that the owner didn’t actually know how many pages there were. Had to hire someone just to index it.

Not bad for plain old html and css.

rchaud7• 6 years ago

Ah, the old days of the web, when it was possible to make money via AdSense. Users would actually bookmark sites those days, so there was no need to throw an email signup popup in their face when the page loaded. The comments would have real people conversing, and not filled with spambots pushing fake Guccis and Air Jordans.

32gbsd• 6 years ago

Comments went a downward spiral right about when facebook got popular. It canabolised the regular comments + the comments from other creatives/bloggers

SonnyWortzik• 6 years ago

Frontpage wow, that was my go to back in the days. Then I saw the markup it was making, yikes!!

bobowzki• 6 years ago

I had forgotten all about Frontpage!

dpcan• 6 years ago

In my ~17 year career as a professional web developer and consultant, I'm not sure that any technology has made me more frustrated and miserable than the days when I had to help people who insisted on using Frontpage to build their websites.

mk89• 6 years ago

We are talking about a God given website. Of course it's old and still ongoing :P

Jokes aside, the first thing I read was the sentence "here there is a java applet, sorry your browser doesn't support it" :D Which is funny, after all.

dhosek• 6 years ago

My personal site, http://don.dream-in-color.net has been at that URL (and with this design) for over 20 years. The reading list (http://don.dream-in-color.net/books/ ) dates back to a page that was originally served over FTP and will turn 25 years old in May.

tdstein• 6 years ago

It loads so fast!

_fh5n• 6 years ago

As an Italian, reading this is site is absolute bliss. There's just so much to discover. I really suggest non-Italian speakers to automatically translate it with Google and dive into it.

melq• 6 years ago

I can't believe how well google translates this. Is there something about Italian that lends itself to english translation or is translate getting this good with other languages too I wonder?

utahsaint365• 6 years ago

http://explorermag.com/

My 21 year old site focuses on Windows NT and the upcoming Windows 2000 release. Back when MSFt focused on operating systems. Billg still in charge!

chaoticmass• 6 years ago

This really takes me back, in a good/nostalgic way. That 3 column layout with a header on top was the go-to layout for content heavy sites.

raghavtoshniwal• 6 years ago

This is pretty cool. I had to look Frontpage up! Logic dictates that there must have been a point in time where the prevailing opinion shifted from “Uses ancient UI” to “Has a cool retro feel”. Probably all technologies go through this? Like vinyl becoming cool a few years back. Has happened with Flash games recently. Is there a name for this?

thechao• 6 years ago

"Nostalgia".

jannes2• 6 years ago

I think they meant a name for the process of something becoming the matter of nostalgia.

faramarz• 6 years ago

I made my first web site with Frontpage and the big leap for me was learning about nested tabled within tables. game changer.

3dprintscanner• 6 years ago

Another mention of this fantastic cycling website: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/harris/

Damogran6• 6 years ago

Dude's gonna wonder why he had a sudden 6500% jump in traffic.

mygo• 6 years ago

does anyone know what year the <marquee> tag became depreciated? I’m surprised my iPhone renders it

oftenwrong• 6 years ago

There is a search engine dedicated to finding "classic" websites:

https://wiby.me/

Click the "surprise me..." link to see a random one.

JasonFruit• 6 years ago

That could eat up some hours. I landed on a model airplane site and started getting sucked in before realizing I have work to do.

batirch• 6 years ago

With the surprise me button I found Berkshire Hathaway website.

https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

This is really cool search engine :D

calrueb• 6 years ago

This is a fantastic site. I'm a little worried about using the "surprise me" feature at work, but I will return to this in my free time. I wonder what website attributes it looks for when it indexes.

gitgud• 6 years ago

This is brilliant! The first "surprise me" mad me smile :)

http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html

callesgg• 6 years ago

Personal websites... is something that screems mental ilness also writing youtube comments...

theklub• 6 years ago

I love it

kome3• 6 years ago

ahahah from Lonate Pozzolo!! I am from Bellinzago and this is just mind-blowing.

great website!

Nowyouknow2• 6 years ago

Check out my Dad's from 2002. He's still using it as an e-commerce site, regularly getting orders and directing customers to it.

Deleted URL thanks to friendly advice

tsukurimashou2• 6 years ago

hmm you might not want people to know about your dad's e-commerce site built in 2002...

EDIT: checked the website, "add to cart" sends you directly to paypal and there doesn't seem to be any account system.

Still you should be careful with which communities you share this kind of information, hint: think of the H of HN

Nowyouknow2• 6 years ago

Good point. Appreciate it

timonoko• 6 years ago

My personal web-page is from 1992 and updated occasionally. This page is preserved as it was in 1994: http://timonoko.github.io/alaska . It started as Gopher-page in 1992 and I just moved those associated pictures into it, without truly understanding formatting and all that shit. Some dudes in Usenet told me about <p> and <img> tags.

masswerk• 6 years ago

My website is still as of 1999, but it received some design updates (and a blog section) two years ago. However, there's still some original content, some even older than the particular website. E.g., see this 1998 demo for what we may now call a single page app, entirely rendered in JS from central data files (but using frames – well, it was the 1990s):

https://www.masswerk.at/demospace/relayWeb_en/welcome.htm

Slogan: "Microsoft keeps talking about Active Server Pages – We're offering Active Client Pages"

Mind the charts section, rendering graphs by outputting tables with tiny images using `document.write()`, since the canvas element wasn't even dreamt of. (Displaying charts was a tricky business, then. Usually these were rendered server side as GIFs, where they caused heavy load. The alternative were Java applets, which had an enormous effect on the client load and delayed page display quite considerably, while the JRE was starting up. Enter JS to the rescue…) Also, note the period design, including marquee tickers, custom fonts from GIFs, etc…

dwheeler2• 6 years ago

My personal site was posted on September 12, 1999, is still updated, and has no problems. It;s a static site that mostly uses straight HTML/CSS. There are a few scripts that generate pages, but generating HTML/CSS pretty easy. https://dwheeler.com.

Geocrasher said:

I guess what I'm saying is that if you want to build a site to last 25 years without numerous redesigns, build a static HTML page.

Yes. I don't get paid to maintain my personal site, so simplicity and longevity are most important. If I have to rewrite things because of incompatible changes in the infrastructure components (e.g., Python2 to Python3), or because proprietary company C has decided to stop supporting product P that I depend on, then I have to spend time that doesn't actually provide any new value. Keeping things simple, and minimizing dependencies, can be useful. Like everything else, there's a trade-off.

jvanderbot• 6 years ago

You might say your website was designed to last[1]

1. https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

chipperyman573• 6 years ago

Pbatengf, lbh'ir qrpbqrq zl frperg zrffntr. Fbeel, ab cevmrf. ?

Arnavion• 6 years ago

Answering your question will unfortunately defeat the purpose of that text being what it is.

nostromo• 6 years ago

spoiler alert

rot13

sidarape• 6 years ago

You could use a static website generator such as Jekyll or Hugo. Then, if the tools stop working for any reason, you always have the generated HTML than you can update.

iamaelephant• 6 years ago

Or you could not do that. Did he not just show that his way works just fine?

syntheticnature• 6 years ago

They already are, hand-rolled: "There are a few scripts that generate pages"

kaushalmodi• 6 years ago

Hugo has a single static binary. So the site will always generate the same way with the same binary.

dmalvarado2• 6 years ago

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Spreadfirefox

smush• 6 years ago

No kidding. Already, I've found some interesting articles to read.

I'm taking a look at https://dwheeler.com/essays/easy-cross-platform-gui.html, which has references to XULRunner etc. which since 2009 have fallen out of favor.

Would you continue to recommend those wanting to invest in (for the 80% of use cases) wxWidgets for FLOSS cross-platform GUI apps? BoaConstructor et. al look interesting.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this comment. If it helps give you some context, I'll throw in that I currently am most familiar with WinForms .NET apps or very small Win32 native applications, and have avoided JS successfully so far.

dwheeler2• 6 years ago

A lot of that stuff is overtaken by events, but I clearly say that the essay was written in 2009. Nevertheless, if you wanted to see what I wrote in 2009, there it is. It hasn't disappeared from The Ether, there's a disturbingly large amount of information that was written only a few years ago and has totally disappeared. One of the reasons that much information has disappeared is because the website can no longer stay running. If your website is designed to last, then the information is more likely to stay available. Yes, I know it's more complicated than that. But it's a start.

TingPing• 6 years ago

wxWidgets is a poor platform abstraction that just results in the lowest common denominator of UI.

use-net• 6 years ago

Boa Constructor best RAD IDE ever! why does no one understand this?

typicalphil• 6 years ago

This. Notice how simplicity is also the most important thing for users. Typography and graphics aside, it's remarkable to see how modern your layout looks.

gerardes• 6 years ago

If you like this? Check this one: https://www.gratiz.nl/ Updated every day :-)

cwoolfe• 6 years ago

Only 520 lines of HTML. And readable! view-source:http://www.fmboschetto.it/

generationP3• 6 years ago

I sympathize with the author. I have built my maths site just 2 years after this one, when I was in high school. Ever since I've only been adding material, and occasionally moving old stuff into subdirectories; other than that, it's the same old geocities website made with FPE, except it's now hosted on a university server and has my academic title and office and no more colored background. Oh, and I now edit it with notepad++ and track it with git.

I've had plans to rebuild it for the last 8 years or so, to make it better and slicker and easier to navigate (as it stands, my new papers are mixed together with my scribe notes from undergrad). But I never figured out how to achieve this without also requiring javascript or relying on tools that may not survive the next decade and that I cannot tweak to my needs without learning a new programming language (hello Jekyll, hi Hugo). Nor did I ever find the Right Way how it should be structured; move one thing to the front and something else gets harder to find. I guess it will survive me.

Makes me a lot less judgmental when I see another academic website that can trace its lineage back to geocities and angelfire.

jeena• 6 years ago

A company in Germany called Arcor had the front page website of my band from 2001 which used frontpage serverside extensions still online about 4 years ago. I couldn't find the FTP password to download the source code so it died when they finally pulled the plug.

shaneprrlt• 6 years ago

You're telling me their site still works in 2020 without needing to serve the client as a server-side rendered react app with the data being provided by several node.js microservices containerized and deployed to a kubernetes cluster and accessed through a GraphQL interface? IMPOSSIBLE!

72deluxe• 6 years ago

This guy has a Frontpage-generated site too, and it's full of useful Win32 programming tips; he replies if you email him too!

http://flounder.com

Nothing wrong with readable content, regardless of the generator. In fact, I like reading his site precisely because it is speedy to load and render, and because it has content (unlike, for example, Apple's developer documentation).

mhandley• 6 years ago

But is it still running on Cern/3.0, installed circa 1993. Ours is:

  $ nc www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk 80
  HEAD /staff/m.handley/ HTTP/1.0                    

  HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows
  MIME-Version: 1.0
  Server: CERN/3.0
  Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2020 17:02:59 GMT
  Content-Type: text/html
  Content-Length: 9185
  Last-Modified: Sun, 16 Jun 2019 15:27:37 GMT

It's running on Sun Sparc hardware from the same era, and has been in active use for all of those 27 years.

nonamenoslogan5• 6 years ago

I used to have a bunch of Sparc's circa-early 2000's. Sold some, recycled some, wish I'd have kept at least one. The price of a SparcstationLX that works is silly now-a-days.

fjfaase2• 6 years ago

Mine, in plain HTML, is almost 25 years old. I have to admit that I did change the layout a little, through the years, but it has been rather constant, because updating 974 HTML files, is not something that is easily done.

pbhjpbhj3• 6 years ago

It's pretty easily done? Strip out everything but body, make a wrapper to include the pages? Any static bits you can search-replace, that's what I used to do before discovering server-side includes.

fjfaase2• 6 years ago

I am talking about 974 HTML files of which probably more than 95% is static content. Doing this manually, will take me about a year (considering the time I have available). So, maybe I should develop a script/parser to process the contents and generate them as server-side includes? But what is the benefit? That I can change the layout more easily, while first having to learn how to efficiently work with server-side includes? (Now I am just uploading my HTML files through FTP to my very cheap hosting provider.) But why would I? I am not interested in the layout, just the contents. I am not writing the website for a broad public, it is mainly because I like to record events (big and small) in my life. I guess, I myself am the most important user. Sometimes, I can surprise people by telling them the exact date that I did/experienced something.

ssijak• 6 years ago

I have a 'personal' website which is also about 18years old. It was the first website I built while in elementary school, also in Frontpage. I uploaded it to I think Geocities or something like that, I think it was Yahoo related hosting, can't remember exactly, but it was free hosting.

Some 'fancy' JS effects do not work on the page now, but it is still up. I forgot about and remembered it few years ago and checked it to find it still up. But I can't remember where could I login to see the files and what are the credentials so it makes me giggle that it will stay up for who knows how much longer as a small part of my past :)

http://dzigi.itgo.com

http://dzigi.itgo.com/o_autoru.htm "about author page" with a bio and pic haha

pbhjpbhj3• 6 years ago

Geocities got taken over by Yahoo, I think there was an intermediate step, and they added a JS widget to free pages, there was a hack to hide it. IIRC they started allowing PHP and not just SSI at/around that stage.

ngcc_hk• 6 years ago

Anything not text based is problematic. But beyond that it is hard.

neosat• 6 years ago

I had this perception that those spinning gifs and moving text made pages crazy hard to parse but I was pleasantly surprised that this site seemed simpler and easier to parse than half the sites today with pop ups, notifications, and blocking modals. Is it just me, or are these notifications and modals that are getting so prevalent really degrading a lot of the web browsing experience today.

reaperducer6• 6 years ago

It used to be fun to load the Hamster Dance page on different machines and see how much it would slow each one. And that was just from a bunch of animated .GIFs.

Taboola, Facebook thumbs, Twitter counters, and the like are the Hamster Dances of the 21st century.

davnicwil• 6 years ago

I visited this on mobile expecting it to be a laugh, but was surprised to find that it's actually amazing!

You can see the whole page in a single column, and just pinch zoom to the bit you're interested in to read/interact. Scrolling downwards and sideways to pan around works fine, super intuitive. The UX of this is so great, feels just like that original iPhone demo [1].

...why don't we do this again?

[1] https://youtu.be/vN4U5FqrOdQ?t=2530

djsumdog2• 6 years ago

I recently did a history of my old websites:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/a-history-of-personal-and-pro...

Most of the content is still there, but it's been shifted between static pages, Rails, Wordpress and now Jekyll.

It's neat to see one of these gems still out there; a picture of the 90s web that's still functional and being used. Too many of these sites are lost; only available in the Internet Archives.

WorldMaker5• 6 years ago

I took a similar journey over the years from static pages to custom static generators to PHP to Drupal to a custom Django-based blog engine to Jekyll/static pages.

It's interesting because I'm sometimes sad I lost the code for some of those old versions. Those old early PHP and custom static generator codebases would be interesting to revisit with today's ideas, even if just to laugh about. (But also because I know there's probably not-great blog content lost to them.) One of the "custom static generators" I recall was actually a really early not-quite-SPA JS app. I remember it ran really slowly in browsers at the time and worse got slower with each new content added, but these days I wonder if it would seem fine on modern JS engines. (I've got a feeling about the only thing I'd need to change would be to swap `document.write(stuff)` for `element.innerHtml = stuff` and it'd perform quite well today.)

elwell• 6 years ago

Here's a real gem: https://bible.ca/

jamesjyu• 6 years ago

Frontpage: the original no code software.

Lucadg• 6 years ago

I learned Frontpage in 2000 in a King's Cross (Sydney) internet cafe where you paid 2 AUD for unlimited time...but you couldn't leave, not even to go to the toilet.

That html went straight to Geocities.

The feeling of power part of a minority of people who could actually publish something on the net was amazing.

aloukissas• 6 years ago

I just love the footer "optimized for 1024x768 @ 16M colors" :)

dep_b• 6 years ago

I really have a soft spot for these kind of sites. Often people have pretty interesting and unique content on this kind of websites. I always try to help by keeping things very simple to maintain but just a bit better, like making a PHP include of the menu and then replacing the top part on every page once.

randogogogo2• 6 years ago

Wow that loaded quickly! I wonder what she's doing to optimize it.

netule• 6 years ago

She? http://www.fmboschetto.it/autore/autore.htm

EugeneOZ• 6 years ago

"UFO's don't exist" - untrustworthy site.

cptskippy10• 6 years ago

One of my favorite pieces of software, that I still use to this day, is 20 years old version of SpaceMonger.

https://i.imgur.com/XMwNRR3.png

dmalvarado2• 6 years ago

Also of note, this website is still running despite the HN hug of death.

dmuhs• 6 years ago

This is dedication in content creation and maintenance. We can all learn something here!

benibela2• 6 years ago

My personal website is also around 18-year-old. I actually do not remember how old it is. I did not have a domain at first and hosted it on AOL or something.

Here it was: https://web.archive.org/web/20030908174016/http://www.benibe...

But in 2005, I made a complete redesign: http://www.benibela.de/index_en.html

The backend went through a few reimplementations. Individually made html files (with front page express or something), a template tool written in Delphi, another template tool written in Java, a complete XQuery interpreter written in FreePascal

jhoechtl• 6 years ago

Its.So.Quick.

I love the speed of the page! And seemingly nobody is eavesdropping me.

Kunix• 6 years ago

One made with Word and still updated: http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/

nimajneb• 6 years ago

I love the old style of (personal) website like this. It's seems both nostalgic and maybe a bit more authentic.

sabas_ge2• 6 years ago

2251 Mb size! "Qui c'è una applet Java. Mi spiace che il tuo browser non le supporti" = Here's a Java applet, I'm sorry your browser doesn't support it Marquee still gets animated :O "Questa pagina è ottimizzata per un formato 1024 x 768 pixel a 16,8 milioni di colori, carattere medio" = This page is optimized for a 1024x768 pixel format, 16.8 million colors, medium sized font Still apart from the ancient tooling, it's an example of a personal wiki as periodically come on HN, there's a lot of content!

sabas_ge2• 6 years ago

I just wrote to the gentleman pointing him to this discussion :)

jmnicolas• 6 years ago

Only someone with unwavering faith would maintain a Frontpage website in 2020 :)

DannyB2• 6 years ago

Remember the Front Page license.

Originally, Front Page had a four page license. It specified that if you use Front Page to create a web site, you cannot disparage Microsoft, Expedia and a list of several other Microsoft owned properties.

So with a license like that, I can't assume that any site created with Front Page is unbiased when it comes to a list of various Microsoft owned properties.

After the slashdot effect (long ago) Microsoft removed this from the license.

hypertexthero• 6 years ago

Simple and useful.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/simpleuseful/index.html

dmje• 6 years ago

As I spent half a day trying to wrangle my way through some sass grunt compiler frontend bullshit just trying to update the colour of some links on a client website, I find myself nodding sagely again. In the early days you could view source, see what was going on, copy and recreate someone else’s site, learn a whole bunch of new stuff and actually get shit done. Now, it’s all JavaScript bullshit and 100k lines of css. It’ll last about a month before it’s out of date and replaced by the Next Big Thing. HTML, css, a sprinkle of JavaScript. That’s what’s proven to last.

zladuric• 6 years ago

I'm not sure a FrontPage site would be much better. It's also a big mess of generated markup you'd have to go through manually, if you didn't have the proper FP version.

lucasjans• 6 years ago

I'm surprised no one mentioned it here: before Front Page was a Microsoft product it was created by an independent company, Vermeer. But as many pointed out it produced horrible code.

My favorite editor of the day was a "hand coder" called Home Site

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia_HomeSite

elamje• 6 years ago

My page(https://www.towardssoftware.com) isn't quite that old, but it gets the job done with an incredibly simple content manager - plain html/css editing.

There is almost no javascript, and I have to say, it's done wonderful so far. I have tried Hugo to manage stuff, and a couple of others, but for a lot of blog type of stuff, html just works!

tren• 6 years ago

My 83 year old dad has updated his website since the mid 90s, it's actually pretty interesting to look back it in the Wayback machine, the design is exactly the same in 97. He'd really get a kick out of it if someone commented on one of his articles. http://aoi.com.au/

threepio• 6 years ago

SLAPP LIKE NOW!

kylek• 6 years ago

One of my favorite websites is clocking in at 25 years now- Marathon's Story [0], a website dedicated to the lore of Bungie's Marathon series.

[0] http://marathon.bungie.org/story/

exabrial• 6 years ago

And loads faster than any of the crap SPOs that are en vouge today

felixg3• 6 years ago

I generated my website at server.giessmann.net just last year using Lotus FastSite and the geocities gif archive. I included my fax number, icq id and a PO box. Of course there are 9/11 conspiracy theories and a banner to download the latest Netscape browser.

RdRocket162• 6 years ago

Check out Butkus.org - my dad has had it since before 2000 and updates it regularly, with an ancient copy of frontpage.

RdRocket162• 6 years ago

https://www.butkus.org/chinon/index.html

18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated

Related Stories