Because it used to be the internet was fun and centered on making stuff yourself and sharing with others. Just like geocities allowed. But now a lot of it all seems like the people making things want to sell things and this has been done at the expense of having spaces for non profit seeking creativity. This is also why I made https://rainy-city.com. Sorry for the self promotion but I really want people to create more stuff like this. Just fun things to find on the internet.
All of those have the same extremely prominent top pick. Some don't even bother linking the other entries. This entire thing is an elaborate marketing campaign for Hanker. Either for SEO or LLMs
As someone who actually wrote primitive websites by hand in those days, the pages these produce are FAR more elaborate than your average webpage in those days. And divs/css? Should be using tables or gasp, iframes. This feels more like a vaporwave style re-imagining of what things were like than the real deal.
I think the thing these "old internet revivals" miss is they looked the way they did was because they were outsider-art. I don't think they have to reuse precisely the same layout tools, but non-developers butting heads with those tools was a big factor in why personal sites looked that way. The whole look of "old internet" is a modern concept that's a bit flanderized [0] now.
Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but I agree with you that the wrong things are being equated here. A tool that just quickly generates a visually-similar site to that somewhat-imagined "old internet look" isn't really the same. If you emulated a similar amount of friction to those old site with modern tooling, you'd end up with an actual spiritual successor to those geocities sites. (NeoCities [1] is a great example, a lot of personal sites on there are not targeting 90s-2000s nostalgia even if that's an obvious aesthetic direction to go for something called "NeoCities")
Absolutely. I also hand-edited HTML (and XHTML and CGI scripts and Java applets) back in those days and the majority of web pages were no more than a few hundred lines of code long. Regular notepad.exe was absolutely fine at home, and I did a lot of editing server-side in vi. It was a simpler time....
I set up a server that limits bandwidth through it to max dialup speeds, with rate limit buckets per-IP:
https://dialup.moveything.com/. It has some gifs, progressive jpegs that a fun to watch load, and a mirror of xkcd.
* support limiting to 33.6 kbps, 14.4, etc for real nostalgia
* Add an initial "dial-up" sound and "connect" button that matches those for different speeds (I'll be able to tell the speed by just the sounds, so no cheating!)
I made my home page like MySpace:
https://johnspace.xyz
Because it used to be the internet was fun and centered on making stuff yourself and sharing with others. Just like geocities allowed. But now a lot of it all seems like the people making things want to sell things and this has been done at the expense of having spaces for non profit seeking creativity. This is also why I made https://rainy-city.com. Sorry for the self promotion but I really want people to create more stuff like this. Just fun things to find on the internet.
That's, er, definitely not where I expected this to be leading.
Although I guess the PyPI username was a hint.
An elaborate instance of https://xkcd.com/810/
Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but I agree with you that the wrong things are being equated here. A tool that just quickly generates a visually-similar site to that somewhat-imagined "old internet look" isn't really the same. If you emulated a similar amount of friction to those old site with modern tooling, you'd end up with an actual spiritual successor to those geocities sites. (NeoCities [1] is a great example, a lot of personal sites on there are not targeting 90s-2000s nostalgia even if that's an obvious aesthetic direction to go for something called "NeoCities")
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanderization
[1] https://neocities.org/
* support limiting to 33.6 kbps, 14.4, etc for real nostalgia
* Add an initial "dial-up" sound and "connect" button that matches those for different speeds (I'll be able to tell the speed by just the sounds, so no cheating!)