Republishing my Simpsons fan site, twenty years later
bingeclock.com
bingeclock.com
I’ve long since lost access to it but the freeservers mob I hosted it with have somehow kept the sites from way back then all around and online still to this day. It’s a little painful and factually incorrect (I called the movie Generations a series!) but gives me a good laugh: http://stvoyager.iwarp.com/
Wish guestbooks were still a thing. Visiting my site to find a new message was always a treat.
Eric S. Raymond recently posted some xeets about how retrocomputing nostalgia is due, in part, to wistfulness for the Cambrian explosion in personal computers, where every little two-bit company comes up with their own wildly different design. The design space hadn't been fully explored yet, and the future seemed pregnant with endless possibility. Then as people figured out what worked and what didn't in the computer design space, the PC sorta won, and it made much more sense to build a PC clone and take advantage of the huge PC hardware and software ecosystem. Raymond predicts that a similar coalescing on proven designs will happen with 3D printers.
Of course, ESR believes in the need for government slightly less than he believes in the need for redemption through the blood of Christ the Saviour, so he overlooks a critical forcing factor in this cycle of exploring the solution space followed by settling on proven designs: regulation. Cars were much cooler before the 1970s because the Clean Air Act was passed in the 1970s. There was an initial struggle period during which American autos shipped with anemic engines and features designed to compensate for lack of performance, until technologies like fuel injection became the norm, but again the automakers coalesced into a set of a few designs that both worked and fulfilled the obligations imposed by regulatory bodies... to the point where it's awful hard to tell a Toyota RAV-4 from a Honda CR-V just by looking.
I think the internet has gone through a similar exploratory vs. coalescing phase. Back in the 90s and 2000s, HTML and PHP let you create anything, so people created everything. And threw it up on a server, and it was wonderful. So many individual corners of the web with their authors' own perspectives. Now... well, regulation is definitely coming but in the meantime there are things with the force of regulatory bodies you have to worry about. You HAVE to do https which means you need a certificate. You HAVE to have a CDN and CloudFlare protection or else you'll be slashdot-effected or DDoS'd to oblivion. You can't even run an email server anymore without jumping through the hoops it takes to convince major providers you're not a spam farm. These are things you have to either think about yourself or pay someone to think about them for you. So the web has coalesced on a few best-practice designs and service providers. And most people just set up Wix or Shopify pages or Facebook groups anyway.
And that's why the 90s/2000s web has such nostalgic power. We could do anything from our armchairs with a bit of HTML and maybe some programming and sysadmin skills. But those days are gone. Maybe we're better off for it.
This is kind of true, but, getting a cert isn't a big deal anymore. If you're not a big company, a free cert works fine.
> You HAVE to have a CDN and CloudFlare protection or else you'll be slashdot-effected or DDoS'd to oblivion.
DDoS is hard to manage, but otherwise it shouldn't be too hard to handle a /. kind of event if your page is reasonable and you make use of the abundance of modern computing... 1G cheap hosting is out there.
> You can't even run an email server anymore without jumping through the hoops it takes to convince major providers you're not a spam farm.
Yeah, this one sucks a lot. But, email is dead, so...
What an extraordinary claim!
My job, today, is dealing with a vast influx of various types of email that all need categorising and a range of different actions. Not very dead at all from where I'm standing.
I rarely send emails for leisure, but I send and receive dozens a day for work, both internal and external.
Most of them have clearly died in private life, but in the professional life you will be literally worthless if you aren't reachable by email, telephone, snail mail, perhaps even the fax machine.
Really? These days, can't even login to some services (like Steam) without them sending you an email to confirm the login (some services even do this even if you already have other 2FA...)
I love your website. You’ve inspired my to put my blog back online in 2025 and document some of the things I plan to build.
Here you go: https://wiby.me.
jms is such a treasure. Listening to his autobiography, narrated by Peter Jurasik, is wholeheartedly recommended.
But I remember my exact address, and it's not there. Archive.org has it, but you'll need your exact address.
It appears the domain you used for your guestbook has been pass off to some sort of pharmaceutical information page in Scandinavia, I found that funny.
I’ve been thinking about this on and off a lot these past years.
I think part of it is that when your time has no value, nothing you choose to do is a waste.
That’s not to suggest your time needs to be worth nothing. But that you stop perceiving your time as having intrinsic value. My kids succeed where I fail all the time. They’ll spend hours on projects that have been done far better by other people already. But they just don’t think about those facts. They’re not relevant. Their time is not being valued in anything other than the feeling of “I want to do this thing.”
I built it and it’s pretty bad. Even with the power of the Wordpress template I managed to make a bad website. But I spent too much time thriving for perfection. And this one sort of works which is better than a non existent site that might work better.
Perfect is the enemy of done.
Now I’ve seen it. And I’ve seen it because it exists. If you didn’t make it and never finished it, I wouldn’t have seen it.
>What I strive for and to a degree achieve as a craftsman wood turner has its roots in the idea expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson: The reward of a thing well done is to have done it." This feeling cannot be abandoned. (Richard H. Montague, Groton, Vt.)
I don't know what paper or magazine this came from, probably Fine Woodworking, probably 1980s. It has the same spirit many of us are talking about. The joy in doing something is doing it, not making money on it or being the best at it. In the Internet era, if you only take joy from being the best at a hobby or task online, you will never be happy.
Watching my boys grab some paper and a marker and sweat quietly over a desk for 30 minutes only to walk over and hand me some crude drawing of "a little buddy I can put on my desk" always has me rethinking my station in life. Maybe I shouldn't be so tough on them.....
Angelfire has a lot of sites from back then (~1999?), but not mine.
The site wasn't even that bad by modern standards. Had a frames layout, vertical frame on the left for the nav. I didn't know about server side includes yet.
It was a lot of fun. When I discovered JS I started playing around with alerts, which surely would have driven my visitors mad if I had any.
I also have my personal website from back then somewhere.
But while I was doing that, being a 10 years old, my best friend had his own Simpson fansite, so this triggered a lot of nostalgia. I when I visited yoru website and I saw the Buttons sections, oh my god. I wanted to cry. Thank you so much, I don't know how to thank you. I'm in love with the fansites from 2000-2005, and this was a trip.
As with Toronto, on some FM radios I could catch a local Indianapolis TV station. Don’t remember which station off-hand.
More concerning, on my boombox, I discovered that could pick up some local cordless phone calls in my neighborhood.
In addition to the privacy issue, I think we've collectively forgotten just how bad those first few generations of cordless phones were. There was limited range (how about those telescoping antennas?), the sound quality was terrible, the batteries didn't last more than 30-60 mins, etc. In my experience, they weren't worth the trouble or cost until around 1998.
I miss the old Internet.
Very succinct and insightful. I will use that in the future.
The web was so amateur back then, that I even got an email from a sports journalist asking if I accepted submissions from freelancers.
"If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless"
The first, and indeed only, site I did for cash, dating back to early 1997, was still hosted by claranet until 2009 - well after the shop had bust
https://gardnermcintyre.com/simpsonszip/view.php?page=matchu...
Still true!
I have a full set of the Burger King promo figures still in the plastic which I just recently pulled out of storage box to show my young son.