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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

Had to check. Lycos/tripod is still hosting a stupid website me and some friends made a bit after 2000 (2004?). The cost is probably none (some static files), but I'm impressed they haven't just removed it or lost it during all these years. Stagnant and probably no visitors other than us the weekend we made it.

Edit: the glory: http://moj24.tripod.com/ animated background, marquee and right-click blocking script in case someone tried stealing our content

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This is my zine from 1997. It uses frames. http://scenezine.tripod.com/

Well now I have to watch Gleaming The Cube.

Am excellent movie!

Those with an ad blocker are missing out on the full Tripod experience, make sure to turn it off for maximum fun.

Nice. Was hoping for an IE4 toolbar ad.

Oh my you are so right, i browse with adblock and no js normally, the normal experience is quite rough ^^

Don’t forget that <blink> (And maybe <marquee>?) is no longer supported by modern browsers, so you’re definitely missing some major elements of the experience.

<marquee> still seems to work. <blink> doesn't... Any good reason this has been deprecated?

It's a thing of strange beauty, tremendous nostalgia.

I enjoyed the Lagwagon interview.

Looking forward to that mustard plug interview!

"We have frames"

Fantastic.

Nice. Got a little hit counter at the bottom too. Ah the good old days of the web. I remember when it was all about "hits", "impressions", and "banner ads".

Oh my gosh, there's even a Guestbook. What a blast from the past.

Man, I would be so pumped if I could find my old tripod site. I've looked before but I forgot the username and could never find it. One night as a young teen I decided to read a book "html for dummies", not knowing that 20+ years later the decision would pay off big!

Also, <marquee> tag and site counter's for life!

Don't forget the venerable <blink> tag and the obligatory "Under Construction" GIF.

And the .shtml guestbook.

I always read that in my mind as “shit mill” am I alone?

I read it as "sheet metal" because there was an HTML editor of the era called "Hot Metal."

It was "dot shitmeal" for me.

or load-bearing CGI and perl...

(perl's OK, CGI had a lot more server side injection risk from what I remember)

CGI as in "Common Gateway Interface" or CGI.pm?

If the former, the injection vulnerability would be in the script talking to the server/database via CGI, rather than in CGI itself.

If the latter I don't remember any major unpatched vulnerabilities in CGI.pm, but it was epically inefficient.

ah, the early days...

https://i.imgur.com/7mr0vjQ.gif

in seventh grade we had a "web" class that, as an assignment, wanted us to find "pen pals" on the internet (lmao great idea), and to make a personal site about whatever. I made an Escape Velocity site. Lots of under construction gifs even when I submitted it.

I made a "smoke games" store page. It didn't have a functional shopping cart or anything, just basic HTML with some frames.

> Lots of under construction gifs

Which ones were your favourites?

http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/

Wow. My eyes. The variety is tremendous.

LOL wow, I totally forgot about that! I had more than a few pages with "under construction" including black and yellow striped image.

google has a searchable cache of the internet from like 2004 as they crawled it, and they put it up once or twice for nostalgic giggles.

they really should put it up for science, so you can look up the shit that's been keyword-buried since then.

Same here.

I could say the same about my old Geocities site...

I wish I could find my old geocities site - it had some early (win3.1) apps I wrote.

IIRC they were not good.

Wow. The page source is gold.

No kidding. Firefox's inspector tool just crashed (went white and unresponsive) while I was making a list of the worst offenses:

- h2, h4, h5 used interchangeably

- embedded wav file loading an image

- loading all JavaScript just below body tag

What's so bad about loading scripts after body?

They're referring to loading the scripts right after the opening body tag (rather than at the end of the body), which historically would block content loading until the scripts all load.

Back then scripts literally were 1kb at most and not 15mb like today, so it really wasn’t much of a problem.

Back then it took ten minutes to load 1kb

It wasn’t that bad. I remember downloading fairly high res JPEGs (so 30-50kb) on a 36k modem back then, and that might have taken a minute.

Hyperbole is lost on 100% of people on the internet.

When I saw "embedded wav file loading an image", I was mystified and curious what that even meant, so I looked, and I didn't see. The only wav file I noticed in the source was on the Biler page, and I didn't see anything that suggested it was loading an image, but I didn't look very closely and I guess I'm not sure what to look for. I didn't read the JavaScript at all really, but I searched for "bgsound" with no results but the bgsound element itself, and it has no id and I don't know how else it could be referenced.

My first website from around 1997 is still on tripod. I check it every so often and I'm impressed it's still there. Tripod is like an internet time capsule.

My site is so bad I'm not going to link to it.

Every site on tripod could probably be stored on a single micro sd card

I used to sell web hosting... the amount of space started at 250k or if you went with the more expensive package was 500k.

I used to run an ISP. Our server park was two machines each with 128MB RAM and 120MHz classic Pentiums and 4GB of harddrive space. One of them hosted e-mail and shell access for all our users. The other had web hosting for our business users, our tape drive (we backed up the other machine over the network), and our USENET server...

4gb of HD space?! That's a lot! :)

Yeah,those machines were expensive at the time...

You can get 1TB MicroSD cards now. So entirely possible.

Aww man, I had a Simpsons fan site up in the 1997/1998 time frame that Tripod eventually took offline due to some sort of abuse or something... which I never figured out. There were a lot of Simpsons fan sites up back then, as I recall.

At that time, FOX was egregious about copyright claim to anything. They worked to take anything offline that was not official, hence licensed. I remember going to fan sites back then. One day they'd be up; the next, they'd 404.

Not sure if much has changed.

Well, same here. An old fan page, last updated 2003. Amazing that it is still up: http://augbunny.tripod.com even the gallery still works http://augbunny.tripod.com/Gallery.htm

Daaaang, should have gone with tripod instead of geocities. :(

Those are some high quality motion graphics on the car page, my friend.

Ahh, bringing me back! I moved my site between GeoCities, Tripod, and AngelFire all the time back in the day...

Recently, I have been able to find an republish (on my personal site) some of the pages of the mini site I created in 1997: https://bussolon.it/archivio/1997/

This stuff always makes me nostalgic. I wonder how feasible it would be to build a search engine specifically for 90s era websites. Ignore all modern stuff.

There is: https://wiby.me/

Not all of us are so lucky, one of my first websites was hosted by the little known bamboohost.com. Pretty sure it was http://linkinpark.bamboohost.com, but not even web archive can help me recover it.

Some of us are lucky - my first websites are not available anywhere, including the web archive. All that is left are some lingering sigs in a few usenet posts from 1998ish still archived on google.

This is glorious. I wish I could even remember my Tripod URL, let alone be lucky enough that it's still hosted.

Which JS framework did you use for this? I want to use it for my site!

VanillaJS of course! With all the options enabled: http://vanilla-js.com

That site is cute, but I don't think anyone would seriously claim YouTube is built with "Vanilla JS" in the sense of not requiring a heavy framework to make changes even if the millions of lines od non-vanilla code (guess) they build off of isn't public. And Reddit certainly isn't anymore.

So that's why the experience on these sites is so shit and I dread clicking any link because it'll make my browser stutter for 5 seconds?

I have to give you some credit for the load time!

I always liked tripod way more than geocities.

Is geocities still around?

Bet you just got a traffic spike

Looks great on mobile.

the internet needs more of this :)

Compare with HN posts of 5 years ago suggesting one moves her blog to LinkedIn streams or Medium

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