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Top-level
 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... 19 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 🤔 |
Gregory's Server
Not only would Word save to HTML, but it would let you edit it too, flipping back and forth editing the code or editing the visual stuff in the usual Word way, and seeing how code changed:
https://front-end.social/@sarajw/112218176408848931
(skip to the thread payoff: https://front-end.social/@sarajw/112220736071571763)
This is how I learned how to build websites!
It was love at first upload. My URL was saraw.clara.net. Nothing to be seen in the Wayback Machine I'm afraid, first save in 1999, and it saved only the frameset. I was using framesets!
Not only would Word save to HTML, but it would let you edit it too, flipping back and forth editing the code or editing the visual stuff in the usual Word way, and seeing how code changed:
https://front-end.social/@sarajw/112218176408848931
(skip to the thread payoff: https://front-end.social/@sarajw/112220736071571763)