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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

This takes me back to the days of forum signatures, planetrenders.com, pixel fonts with 1px strokes, making emoticons (not emojis) on deviantArt, BBCode and making long-winded posts on VBulletin/PhpBB boards with the top three posts "reserved for later use".

Man I wish I could go back.

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You'd probably enjoy this collage of GeoCities vibes:

https://www.cameronsworld.net/

Unlike Geocities, that site is a masterful work of design! (And the wayback machine links are broken today due to a planned power outage.)

Wow, that's really cool!

What I want to know is, how did people make all those amazing 3D rotating animated gifs back then?

Did they use 3d modeling software?

Popular shareware proggies like "Xara3D". Don't think they'd qualify as modeling software. They had basic rotate/translate/scale transform routines in them plus glitzy effects.

(Note "shareware" usually meant cracked as far as youthful hobbyist website building from basements and bedrooms was concerned.)

There were some people who made 3D animated gifs of diverse subjects for a living (e.g. The Animation Factory). I am sure they used real 3D modelling, animation and rendering software for that.

Wow this is gorgeous.

I used to "hand-craft" HTML. Literally, writing it and no templates so each page is unique. Gallery page was manually updated.

If I kinda deeply think about it - I post may be one post every 2 months. Why the hell do I need a blogging CMS or static site generator, etc? Just craft a HTML page. You can just write it by hand. #header_h1 ...is it that much more work to write <h1>header_h1</h1>? Especially, every once in 2 months!? Each blog post would be custom. And AWESOME and set in stone. "What if I need to update the header on every single page?" Just don't. No need to update the theme ever. It's like writing a hand written letter, once you put the ink down, it's done. Mail it.

I've been doing this for a while and it's great. If you know a few tricks (optional closing tags, for example), writing HTML by hand can actually be rather pleasant. Go for it!

I used to copy html from the previous page and then modify as necessary.

Overtime it evolved and got cooler! But, there was no need to go back and update old posts.

I think charm about this is severely underrated as seen by the downvotes.

Some people still do this. http://john.ankarstrom.se/html/

Some surprisingly large tech companies still to this.

I don't even disagree, but even people who couldn't get "What if I need to update the header on every single page" out of their heads just embraced framesets and "server-side includes aka shtml" (and the early highly-limited css) and called it a day. Without CMS etc

Yeah, I am not condoning writing HTML for most things, but for a personal blog where creativity is probably the top thing that matters, it's funny how tightly bound our thinking gets. Sometimes, I just sit back, step out and completely dismantle the status quo.

"Under Construction" images, rotating skull and fire GIFs...

http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/

Flaming logo... spinning logo...

Original context: https://youtu.be/3LkQrtCIFA4

Yes! This is how I got my start in design. So many Photoshop tutorials that started with Render Clouds. Haha!

And then you had like ps 3 and the effect in the next step required version 4 or something

clouds -> difference clouds a few times -> invert -> ctrl+L and compress = lightning is still a recipe in my muscle memory.

Ha, exactly!

You know what's interesting? You are not alone. Something Awful forums still have most of these things and people are even paying for that in the year 2021 :D

That's still around? I don't even remember my username.

Deviantart? Seems you're in the wrong millennium? Deviantart started in 2000 and at that time I fondly remember us making fun of 90s web design by creating mock sites with 88x31 graphics. In -97 I remember it being all the rage though. :) Three, four or five years may not sound like a lot of time, but the web was changing at a pretty rapid pace back then.

88x31s were still alive and well on early deviantART: https://www.deviantart.com/fractalmbrown/art/Baby-deviantART...

> pixel fonts with 1px strokes

Nostalgia kicked in hard.

Can't forget albino black sheep and homestar runner!

BALEETED

I too miss those days.

What's stopping us?

We're all older and we need reading glasses now? ;-)

Userbars!

I completely forgot about them! Just looked at a bunch of them, they (and forum signatures in general) were kind of awesome.

Oh mannnnnnnnn yes. I forgot about those.

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