Yahoo nukes Geocities

[salm]

Ah, back in the days when every website a had a visitor counter.

[LMSx]

Just today I remembered and checked in on an old Angelfire site I last worked on about 9 years ago.

....I promptly deleted everything because that shit was embarrassing. Up until I discovered PhotoBucket though, it was a useful repository for images.

And then just for nostalgia I tried my ezBoard account. Oh, the early 2000s.

[Akkleptos]

Photobucket will do the same thing, except better since it's a dedicated image host.

Oh. It was only that I thought they were the ones with the... issues. But I read some reviews, then went and got me an account. Thanks.

And then just for nostalgia I tried my ezBoard account. Oh, the early 2000s.

*chuckle* I have one of those, too! It's still running and every now and then some idiot poor misguided soul posts there!

Which reminds me... I have to go and do some cleaning up there... someday.

[RogueIce]

Hmmm... I remember those. But I still use my starmedia orbita account from 1998 to host my SDN signature and post pictures... There's also a site there, but it hasn't been updated since... I think 1999 (I don't recommend the lame thing).

[EDIT: Nothing happened in Y2K, BTW]

Granted, it doesn't have anything that even remotely resembles "speed", but it's been there the whole time, and it doesn't nag about hotlinking or anything, AFAIK.

Is that chick still your girlfriend?

[Stark]

Creepy!

[RogueIce]

Creepy!

Ah damn, I forgot this wasn't Testing. My bad, yo. No offense, Akkleptos?

[RedImperator]

You forgot Myspace. Myspace is the Geocities of the 21st century.

I wanted to say the very same thing, everyone who had huge-ass ugly sites on Geocities in the 90s now does the exact same thing on Myspace. It's as if only the color-blind and the aesthetically challenged are allowed to open accounts there. But then again, Myspace profiles are even ugly in default settings.

Has there ever been an attractive Myspace page, or do they actually force you to tile an image for your backdrop, put a bunch of sparkly bullshit around italicized, cursive text, and cram the page with so much shit you have to horizontally scroll to see it all?

[Stark]

Creepy!

Ah damn, I forgot this wasn't Testing. My bad, yo. No offense, Akkleptos?

Testing, clearly, is taking over.

I'm somewhat surprised these old hosting systems are running at all. I know they probably just jacked up the ads etc, but seriously, how many people have never-visited GC sites that have important info on them?

[RogueIce]

Has there ever been an attractive Myspace page, or do they actually force you to tile an image for your backdrop, put a bunch of sparkly bullshit around italicized, cursive text, and cram the page with so much shit you have to horizontally scroll to see it all?

Well, the default isn't that bad, assuming you don't clutter it up with those songs and videos and shit. You don't need those stupid layouts and wall o' pics, though. No matter what 99% of those morons think.

For the record, I left mine as default and have but one embedded video and no autoplay music. I think. It's been ages since I actually looked at it.

[Akkleptos]

Is that chick still your girlfriend?

Creepy!

Ah damn, I forgot this wasn't Testing. My bad, yo. No offense, Akkleptos?

None taken. I did say I didn't recommend it (meaning I didn't even think anyone would click on the link, I link everything pretty much automatically now). It surprises me however that you bothered to actually read that far.

Nope. The current (make that permanent): pic, pic, pic, and pic
(they'll be moved eventually).

[RogueIce]

That said, there's no excuse for the sheer number of utterly illegible pages. Being ugly and cluttered (to some extent) is almost a necessity given the site's restraints, but being wholly illegible is... well, I can't even understand it. Don't these people even look at their own pages?

Did the makers of GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod, and *shudders* AOL homepages look at them either? I suppose some of that can be put down to "dumbass teenagers" (as can MySpace...most of them probably start it in teen years anyway). Still, I don't think most of them even do the work of designing their pages, they just use those shitty layouts, which are responsible for the crappy backgrounds, shitty fonts, and some of the sparkly crap (though some of that is the fault of users, too).

Of course you can't really pass the blame on to anyone else for those damn wall o' pics in the interest boxes and shit. You'd think since there's a dedicated photo album people could place that stuff in there. But they don't.

And then there are those wall comment posts...

[General Zod]

Did the makers of GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod, and *shudders* AOL homepages look at them either? I suppose some of that can be put down to "dumbass teenagers" (as can MySpace...most of them probably start it in teen years anyway). Still, I don't think most of them even do the work of designing their pages, they just use those shitty layouts, which are responsible for the crappy backgrounds, shitty fonts, and some of the sparkly crap (though some of that is the fault of users, too).

I had some Geocities sites back in the day, but I at least tried making it somewhat presentable given my hatred of asymmetrical design. Unfortunately the limited tools Geocities provided made that extremely difficult to accomplish.

[RogueIce]

I had some Geocities sites back in the day, but I at least tried making it somewhat presentable given my hatred of asymmetrical design. Unfortunately the limited tools Geocities provided made that extremely difficult to accomplish.

Indeed. My very old GeoCities site (I don't even remember the address; I used one of those zap.to things and that's long since dead) was probably rather bad by modern standards, though I don't think it was eye hurting. Of course back then I was much more of an HTML neophyte (I used the Netscape HTML editor...thingy) so I remember having my main text be larger sizes...because? But at least I kept it simple.

Of course not that I'm much more of an expert these days beyond vanilla HTML (RSS, CSS, and all of that are Greek to me) but at least I can make websites somewhat more presentable. Even if some of my coding is outmoded (fuck you standards, I'm going to use frames and the <FONT> tag...that span shit is just needlessly complex so far as I'm concerned).

Yeah yeah, the coders of the board will now kill me, or point out the errors of my outdated, simplistic ways. But it's not like I make web pages anymore anyway, outside of the Wiki for SDN World. Where I use wikitext and, yes, the <span> stuff to handle fonts and such.

[RogueIce]

You can actually still see the old color scheme:
http://arsdnet.net/
Click on the "ARSD Classic" link on the bottom of the left menu to see it.

Hard on the eyes now due to the poor contrast, but I used to think it looked really good.

That's actually not too bad for me.

They would be the one to pick the layout though. While going through a gallery, they must have, at some point, said "oh wow that is awesome and is so me", which is a WTF itself.

Yeah, there is that. I don't really know how those layout gallerys go though. Wouldn't surprise me if people just go "oh yay 50 cent layout!" (or whatever they're after) and grab it without thinking about it.

[Darth Wong]

Of course not that I'm much more of an expert these days beyond vanilla HTML (RSS, CSS, and all of that are Greek to me) but at least I can make websites somewhat more presentable. Even if some of my coding is outmoded (fuck you standards, I'm going to use frames and the <FONT> tag...that span shit is just needlessly complex so far as I'm concerned).

Yeah yeah, the coders of the board will now kill me, or point out the errors of my outdated, simplistic ways. But it's not like I make web pages anymore anyway, outside of the Wiki for SDN World. Where I use wikitext and, yes, the <span> stuff to handle fonts and such.

Nobody's going to lynch you, but there was a pretty good reason for dumping the FONT tag: they knew people would use it to bypass the whole idea of CSS, which was to format the page in the stylesheet rather than tags scattered throughout the content.

[RogueIce]

Nobody's going to lynch you, but there was a pretty good reason for dumping the FONT tag: they knew people would use it to bypass the whole idea of CSS, which was to format the page in the stylesheet rather than tags scattered throughout the content.

I always used the <BODY BGCOLOR=color FONT=color> method to set up the basic design of my pages. SInce I have no idea what CSS does, but just looking at your homepage that's a lot of code there. So for the utter novice like me, it seems like an awful lot to do what I used to be able to do relatively simpler.

I suppose if I got into it things might seem much easier, but from the outsider looking in...it's rather intimidating.

But then I rarely used FONT tags outside of the initial body anyway. I was more akin to use <CENTER> <B> <I> and so on, which according to what I've found is mostly still allowed, except center is now [style="text-align:center"] which seems more complicated. *shrug*

[charlemagne]

I always used the <BODY BGCOLOR=color FONT=color> method to set up the basic design of my pages. SInce I have no idea what CSS does, but just looking at your homepage that's a lot of code there. So for the utter novice like me, it seems like an awful lot to do what I used to be able to do relatively simpler.

CSS lets you set the basic appearance of your website by defining what fonts and sizes tags like <body>, <p>, <h1> etc. will use, and other things. That information is all stored in one .CSS file, and every HTML page of your website simply is referred to that file for getting that information.

So, that's a lot easier than having to format each new paragraph again and again, leading to much less tags and confusion in your source code, and it also allows you to change the basic appearance of the whole website by just editing the .CSS file.

[Darth Wong]

Nobody's going to lynch you, but there was a pretty good reason for dumping the FONT tag: they knew people would use it to bypass the whole idea of CSS, which was to format the page in the stylesheet rather than tags scattered throughout the content.

I always used the <BODY BGCOLOR=color FONT=color> method to set up the basic design of my pages. SInce I have no idea what CSS does, but just looking at your homepage that's a lot of code there. So for the utter novice like me, it seems like an awful lot to do what I used to be able to do relatively simpler.

For one simple page, you're correct. For hundreds of pages, or even a single long page, it's a lot different. If I want to change the general appearance of every page on my personal home page, I just tweak index.php or the CSS stylesheet, and it's done. If they were all coded with FONT tags and BODY modifiers, I'd have to go through every single page and modify it.

I suppose if I got into it things might seem much easier, but from the outsider looking in...it's rather intimidating.

But then I rarely used FONT tags outside of the initial body anyway. I was more akin to use <CENTER> <B> <I> and so on, which according to what I've found is mostly still allowed, except center is now [style="text-align:center"] which seems more complicated. *shrug*

Centering is one of those things that I still tend to format directly in the page even though it could be handled with a CSS class, simply because it's not the sort of thing I can see myself wanting to ever change on a site-wide basis.