Neopets HTML Guide | Hacker News Reader

Neopets HTML Guide

neopets.com

120 pointsexolymph41 comments

Every once in a while I run into another programmer who started on Neopets, and it makes me happy. :) When I interviewed for my job, they asked me my “programming story.” I remember struggling to make my petpages compatible with Firefox, Safari, and IE5. I remember learning Dreamweaver so I could apply to adopt cool Neopets. I wrote tens of thousands of lines of HTML in TextEdit to make an interactive Lite Brite, and more recently I built Neopets-compatible Minesweeper. (http://www.neopets.com/~wire) These are the projects that made me give CS a shot even though I had no idea what it would be like and even though I was nervous to enter a field with a bad reputation for its attitude towards women. I’m so glad I did.

So many people learned the joy of coding from that site. Sadly, it can’t be that for the next generation because its code filters are almost as obsolete as this guide. HTML5, CSS3, multiple classes on an element, and the word “position” in a stylesheet aren’t supported. TNT, if you’re reading this, please take some time to invest in the part of your site where people learn and create.

To this day I will still cite how Neopets' pet pages were my introduction to the creator's web; later MySpace would help me accumulate some spare lunch money. The good ol' days. =)

Neopets is the reason I’m a software engineer. Along the way looking for “cheat codes” for Neopets, I discovered some people hacking the games. I eventually ran a forum on hacking Neopets, made money from ads, got into PC World Magazine, and had a great time along the way.

Sorry to Adam and Donna for any headaches I caused during my teenage years. <3

Similarly, Runescape private servers and bots got me interested in programming and computer science from an early age. Young me viewed Runescape as an immutable truth that couldn't be manipulated, but teenage me got involved in botting, hacking, and even the development of a Runescape private server that had it's own rules and code. It was magical to see that technology could be tinkered with. It introduced me to java and configuring tools, collaboration, and most of all how to spot a scam and the intricacies of a (granted, fake) economy. It's amazing what that addictive game gave to me.

Amazingly this summarizes my teenage years with Runescape.

Not only did I pick up botting and development of a private server, but I learn a lot about how virtual economies worked and how to maximize value buying small quantities and sell in bulk in Varrock.

It taught me so many things as well. One that comes to mind is after they introduced the Grand Exchange, “merch clans” became popular running pump and dump schemes on random items. Unsurprisingly the only people to actually get rich were the people who bought before the next item was announced, i.e. the insiders who actually decided the items. This has many parallels in the real world!

Neopets was where I first discovered hacking.

There was a user named "blueyoshi82" or something, I wanted to see if I could get into their account (I don't remember why). So I tried guessing their password, and lo and behold, it was just "yoshi"!

Being the white-hat that I was, I tried to PM them a message saying "hey you really need to change your password, it's too easy to guess", but the word "password" was blacklisted so I couldn't tell them.

I remember during school showing my Math teacher (who was a big Ultima gamer but also played Neopets) how I set up a fake neopets shop that prompted you for login. <form action="mailto:xxxxxx"> When you submitted the login form it sent the form inputs in an email to a hotmail address :D. One of my first experiences with HTML. I had no idea there were so many shared Neopets experiences in this community.

One of the first "real" programs I wrote was a thing in Visual Basic 6 that would navigate to the giving tree page and quickly snatch up stuff. It was extremely primitive, requiring me to manually sign in to Neopets through an IE webview, and most of my code was ripped from other projects on planetsourcecode.com(that site was epic to my 12 year old self), but somehow I made it work for a short while. Trust me, I didn't really understand what was going on or even what a GET request was.

Also, pushing the limits of the HTML and styling you could have on a store page helped me learn those things, and I'm sure some of the knowledge I use for my career in web development today came from those days on Neopets.

I wonder if I came across your site back then.

Ha, thanks for reminding me of Planet Source Code. I remember winning a Superior Code Award for a submission I made on there when I was a teenager and feeling incredibly proud. I even included it on my resume when applying for internships during college.

Yeah, I put a good pile of reverse engineering work into this thing at one point - used Flare and Flasm along with a lighttpd proxy to replace their swfs with my own.

ha I remember your site

Low key, this guide is how I got into programming and probably plays a big role in why I’m now a Software Engineer. Throwback.

I never saw the Neopets guide. For me, it was Joe Burns' site: HTMLGoodies[0]. It was indispensable for me. That and a lot of help from FrontPage Express[1] & viewing the source code of whatever I'd just made.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19990429010831/http://www.htmlgo...

[1] http://www.jegsworks.com/lessons/web/html/fpx/fpx.htm

This is one of the first sites I recall using, around 2002: http://www.lissaexplains.com/ (I'm surprised it's still online TBH.

Before that was a book from my local library (and a library PC), which I vividly remember because it took me _way_ too long to realise that "href" is not "herf".

I remember HTMLGoodies. Before coming across it I learned the basics from a site called Lissa Explains [0].

[0] http://www.lissaexplains.com/

For me it was this Neopets guide and FrontPage too, actually (:

HTMLGoodies helped me make terrible Geocities sites.

You and me both

Same here, amazing that the site is virtually the same now. Being acquired by viacom was terrible for the site. (Not to mention that it became product placement at every turn).

Kind of sad that micropayments are the defacto monetization model for games now, it really kills all sense of accomplishment for finding cool items

Neopets is probably the first place I encountered random item drops - I remember half the cybercafé freaking out when someone randomly found a Paintbrush.

Same here. This and writing bots for RuneScape.

First time I saw a program written was when I asked my dad to help me get #1 on one of their mini games. He helped me by making a java swing app (at least I think that is what it was).. which I could put letters into to make words with. Made it to top 10 for in about a day & then got banned for 'acting suspiciously' :D. Definitely a throwback for me too.

And for when you wanted to dive a bit deeper and make your shop really pop, there was the Funky Chickens HTML Help Page (http://www.funkychickens.com/main.asp)

Also, http://www.lissaexplains.com/ was really big at the time. Taught me everything I needed to know to code up petpages and the like.

11-year-old me used the hell out of Funky Chickens HTML Help.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who used this.

This is a major throwback, and definitely one of the main reasons why I'm where I'm at today.

This got me into programming as well! The biggest problem I had was when I wanted to expand and build a forum, and tried to understand why Geocities didn't run my .php file (which was from a tutorial). Answer: PHP support was paid option AFAIK

Yep, back then it was very hard to get any free hosting that supported any sort of scripting language. Of course, as a 12 year old on the internet, paying for anything was unheard of.

I remember wanting to set up some forum that required CGI. I had some sort of hosting account that required using their own dialup service to connect to their FTP. Probably cost more on the phone bill than some cheap hosting service, but it was easier to get that by the parents than asking to use their credit card when the internet was still a mystery to them.

Tripod offered Perl CGI scripting on their free service at one point.

I wrote a terrible "messageboard" that only one other person ever used.

The bandwidth at which they produced new flash games was amazing. They were pretty detailed too. I can't think of any html5 gaming community website that even comes remotely close to them.

One of my favorite events with Neopets was participating in a global takedown of enemies during war. I spent so many hours with that website.. from tending my shop, training my pets and tricking out their pages w/ HTML, to collecting map pieces (I remember the economics w/ Secret Laboratory Map Pieces exploding when people realized how valuable they were)..

I too used this, and more generally credit Neopets as a source of a lot motivations to learn by solving interesting problems. I reproduced a couple of the site's games in my first couple high school programming classes, and then eventually had a minimal logic but very reliable "Battledome" fighting script using autohotkey partway through undergrad. That autohotkey experience was helpful senior year in very quickly automating data collection from a non-automatable program for estimating atmospheric radiation dispersal.

This is so nostalgic... I remember spending several days of my youth playing and, er, "boosting" my scores to earn more neopoints. Usually modifying the POST request with something like TamperData did the trick :)

I actually went beyond that. There was a fun game that involved overlaying tetris-like shapes on a board to cycle images through a set. It started out easy, but soon got rather hard. I wrote a program to help solve them easier, and did quite well at first. Eventually, I think other people did the same, but better. That, or they were really, really savants at that kind of problem.

That is some next level late 90's / early aught's action

I know a handful of developers started to code thanks to Neopets. Personally it was bbcode that got me interested in what was going on behind the scenes.

> If the user viewing your page is using Internet Explorer, your music can play in the background when the page loads.

This brings back memories ...

I got introduced to HTML through Neopets as well. I remember joining a Legend of Zelda guild. Another member and I decided to start our own guild. He showed me how to use an image tag so we hotlinked a bunch of sweet images and created a bunch of new accounts to boost our member count and that helped us organically get members. Good times!

Chiming in as another person who got into web development thanks to Neopets.

Ah neopets.... your character limits forced me to ditch frontpage and actually learn how to make html with notepad.

Now you too can make web pages straight out of the 90's!

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