 This is such a great suggestion, actually. So, tell us, what *did* it feel like to make your first website? https://donotreply.cards/en/do-post-what-it-felt-like-to-make-your-first-website (via @danhon https://dan.mastohon.com/@danhon/113018272551284688) 56 comments
I loved it. I still love it. I still don't really know why it's so satisfying to build up a web page (not even a site, just a pretty page will do) from scratch like that, why turning plain text into fancy webby stuff was such fun. Is such fun. And it can be so *quick*. I think that's one reason why burnout is high lately - there's so much overhead now and... Not always for any good reasons. All the overhead (DevOps, frameworks, all the stuuffffff) gets in the way of change stuff! See results!  @sarajw This is why I love @eleventy. For my money, it's as close to what I wanted once I figured out what I was doing 25+ years ago — reusable templates, a bit of processing, and the option for total control, should I need it. For what it's worth, I started in 1996 with Frontpage in my school's brand-new Windows 95 lab during my senior year. I quickly found it wasn't cutting it, and I would need to actually learn HTML to achieve my vision (the best Boba Fett fan page on all of Geocities). @sarajw @eleventy Who needs the internet archive — I have it on my actual website! I wrote a post about it a few years ago, where I link to both a 1998 and 1999 version of it. https://illtron.net/2019/04/boba-fetts-lair/ The earliest working capture on the Internet Archive is the 1999 version, from 2001. I'm a digital pack rat, and so I'm really bummed that I don't have my very oldest stuff. @Chris oh gah, that's so cool. I lost all my earliest stuff years ago after I wiped and reinstalled a PC. I decided all the old data didn't need to come with and could just sit on an external hard drive, which itself got wiped at some point. There's a whole load of stuff I'm so sad I don't have any more 🥲 @sarajw Yeah, my very oldest stuff was only ever on PC-formatted floppy drives since I did all of it in the school computer lab at first. Everything on Geocities was overwritten every time I made a change, since it was all pasted into the File Manager. I actually have old school reports, poetry, and other assignments from the mid-'90s though. There may be chance the floppies still exist in some box, but I doubt they'd work even if I had a floppy drive to read them. @Chris feels so alien now to have such precarious data stores - what with all the easy ways to back up, cloud storage etc. @sarajw As a librarian, I have regularly taught an HTML & CSS class that is really meant as an optional precursor to the classes I do on Wordpress and Drupal, but I have them build a site from scratch using a text editor. First the HTML and then the CSS. @fskornia it's so great that you can still just do that. The web is the best for backward compatibility. A throwback memory appeared: The first summer after discovering all this, I suffered my first long period without internet on my dad's boat - addicted already - and what did I do? I planned a website design. I had a block of squared paper - and you know the "cool S"? I first drew up a whole font in the same style, and used it to make titles to use as headings and as buttons for my links within my new navigation-to-be. I coloured them in with neon highlighters. I scanned them when I got back 😄  @sarajw wow, that's SO cool haha. Talk about someone with a passion for web stuff. Rad  @sarajw Wow! I still have a font I created this way.😅with most of the non-alphanumeric characters missing.  Clara.net. goodness. My dad was super angry at me for getting Claramail because he thought that email had to be kept on a computer not accessed through a web page. 😑  @flamed I did quickly migrate to notepad once I realised that Word kept inserting useless HTML elements 😄 but it was the WYSIWYG effect it had which got me started :) Of course once I realised I could just open the .html file in the browser and refresh it after every change, the whole Word interface seemed very cumbersome. Everyone gotta start somewhere! I remember W3Schools being very helpful back then, as well as view-source of course 🤩 @sarajw I spent days downloading a shareware/trial version of Front Page 97, connection kept disconnecting… I wound up with a cracked version of Dreamweaver which I spent time in the code editor part. CuteHTML was another editor I used in the early days as I also used CuteFTP for getting my websites onto the servers. @flamed oh boom, throwback, I remember CuteFTP! I'm not sure I used or saw CuteHTML though 🤔 @sarajw @danhon My first website was when I was 11 in high school. We had a joint project between computing and home economics, where we has to.make a website about our favourite fruit or vegetable. I made a website in Dreamweaver about carrots, EVERYTHING was orange! It was good fun, I started using the GUI but learned a little HTML so I could do stuff like add audio, cooler gifs, and generally tweak it. @accudio I wish my school had a project like that! I imagine you're a little younger than me, but maybe my school was behind. My IT lessons were mostly about making forms in Excel. There probably was a computing A Level to choose at some point, but it wasn't at all on my radar for reasons unknown. @accudio you're deffo younger than me too 😆 I finished secondary school in 2002 🧓  @accudio @sarajw @danhon I learned HTML with a book from the library. It was ugly, but a website. One time I had a project called "Neuer Ordner", because I was too lazy to rename it. I don't know whether I still have that… It was in the days, where Brackets still was a common editor.  @darkuncle magic is right! I think at some point I logged into a chat via telnet and saw the other person's characters as they were typed, and typos fixed, and deleted and rephrased - that was a little bit of awe for me. Like here's a real human, thousands of miles away, typing stuff. @sarajw yeah it’s still amazing when I stop and consider it; I kind of resent how commonplace and trivial it’s all become in the last 25 years @fskornia beautiful 🥰 reminds me of websites I'd have had in my friend links too..   @sarajw @danhon it was so recently! I don't count my personal site cause I just borrowed an existing theme and did some reskinning, so #rescueTransRescue 's site is the first one I really built!!! and it was so exciting. at one point things started to click - I think I had just learned about flexbox and wheels were TURNING - and it felt so *cool* to finally grok this thing that had baffled me for years and years. @inherentlee true this shouldn't necessarily be written in past tense - people are still learning to write personal sites from scratch 🥰  It was great. I got a copy of FrontPage Express in one of those shareware CDs that came with tech/gaming magazines. I used it to create a lot of fan sites. When I learned about frames, it was awesome. I was never good at design, though. Shortly after, I learned to code in PHP and that was even better. @sarajw @danhon My dad helped me set up my own website some 22-23 years ago. Originally it featured stuff I liked, but after he taught me some basic HTML I was able to maintain and update it myself. @sarajw @danhon Yeah! I even went so far as to check with each update that everything looked as it should. Sometimes a typo in the code threw something off and then it took some time to locate the mistake to fix it.  @sarajw @danhon Started mine in 1991 and left off in 2009, when I retired. Still exists in mirrors: https://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/ Yes, enjoyed it. And it got me two trips to Canada to give talks. Never been out of the US before or since.  @sarajw @danhon I believe it was from playing with a demo copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver from a magazine cover CD. Hosted on the free hosting that came with Freeserve (our ISP back then). Everything seemed magical. The web was not yet commercialised; it was a sea of interlinked pockets of enthusiasm and nerdery and friendliness. You could bump into new ideas and concepts constantly, never sold anything. It truly felt like the future anyone would want. And *I* could be part of it?! Stunning. @sarajw @danhon Man, the "Bert is Evil" days and earlier. I still remember playing with Netscape Navigator on Windows 95 before we got our Modem. On a Pentium 166MMX with 16Mb RAM and a 1.2Gb HDD. Wondering what the internet would actually be like at home - I don't think we even had it at school yet. Browsing the Help page, watching the logo of the world spin. Plowing through all the menu items to see what was there. I miss those days. @mattwilcox @danhon having that bored and free teenage time to just plough through all the things, just exploring @mattwilcox @sarajw @danhon There was this fellow going by "Raybiez" who used to post patches/cracks for all the Macromedia trial versions back then. And the software didn't mind if you just copied the folder to another computer, would recreate all the necessary (Windows) registry entries the first time you ran it.  I had been on a Pipex 1 day course on html in Jan ‘95 and coded up my first page, then went on to build up a site and push it live. I remember being really scared that anyone in the world could see and read what I had designed but the excitement was extreme. This really was something new. Was 3 or 4 days before it got its first visit. Bit of a letdown, but set expectations for the future! 🤣   |
Gregory's Server
I was ~15. After much begging, I'd got access to the internet. My ISP offered the usual for the time - internet, email and usenet access, plus web hosting.
I was the kind of kid who had got used to exploring GUIs. I wasn't a coder but I was pretty computer literate when I could click around. I never chose the "recommended settings" for anything and of course I had found Weezer's Buddy Holly video.
I had no idea where to start to be honest. I went exploring and found Word could save to HTML...