Today’s topic, 90s Websites.
I can, definitely attest to this one, I spent a lot of the 90s online. Hell, I have spent a lot of my life online. But I also ran some 90s websites. Back before wordpress and social media and micro-posting. There was not even a place to share. We didn’t even really have RSS to keep up on things.
I feel like I have mentioned it before, but this site started out as a 90s site on Geocities called The Chaos Xone. Because in the 90s, X was Xool like that. It’s a versatile letter, it can be an x or an s or a ck or a c, and it was XTREEM! Eventually I got over the idea of X being cool (unlike some XTREEMly unlikable people), and instead moved onto just being Lame. But that was never a 90s website.
Also, some other iterations of The Chaos Xone.
- Version 4 (Why is my avatar so sickly brown looking?)
- Version 5 (Or something)
- The Geocities Pokemon Center
But enough me, what about others. A lot of it was just kind of, word of mouth, or random exploring. My sites were on Geocities. You got, I forget exactly, maybe 10mb of space free? And so lots of folks had little sites out there, devoted to all their favorite things. It wasn’t even about ads or traffic or SEO, just, “Hey, I think this thing is cool and I want to tell you why” in html form. Part of the gimmick of Geocities was neighborhoods. The Chaos Xone was at Tokyo/Pagoda/6098, because that was the “Asian culture neighborhood and back in High School I was a wannabe weeb.
Though I am not sure weeb was really a word then.
Side note, if you look up my old site on one of those Geocities archive pages, you will find an intentionally terrible Shrine to Orla from Chrono Cross that I threw up there when I left Geocities, as a little “This was what the shitty web was like”. Had I known it would be preserved for all eternity when the place closed, I probably would not have done that.
Anyway, back to Geocities, you could browse directories based on neighborhoods and have a reasonable chance of finding similar pages. Tokyo/Pagoda had many Sailor Moon fan pages, for example.
Soooo many Sailor Moon fan pages….
My god…. so many….
But what about leaving Geocities? Another useful part of Ye Olde Webe of Yore, was link pages. Sort of like a “Blog Roll.” Basically, I like your website, I link to it, in a big list on a single page. Like I might have a link to a Sailor Moon fanpage I found over on Geocities competitor Tripod. Or a link to a Sailor Moon fanpage on Lycos. Or maybe even a Tuxedo Mask fan page on an Angelfire site.
These link lists were all about sharing your favorite Sailor Moon fanpages!
Another aspect of these sites that the modern web should really go back to striving for is optimization. You got, whatever megabytes you got for free and that was it. So you had to make sure images were tight and your HTML was tight. Also, a lot of people were in dial up, so it was polite to try to get your homepage down to a few kb if possible.
It would take all night to load a modern webpage at those speeds.
But dial up is on the calendar as a writing prompt for later, so I will save that for another day.
