Republishing my Simpsons fan site, twenty years later

It's kinda funny how your site has outlasted most of the sites on the Links page :)

I‘m so happy the Lurker‘s Guide (http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/) is also still online.

This rocks, love finding stuff like this.

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.

Excellent work, ^-KewLGuY-^. I'd say that's the most "13-year-old in the 2000s" nick ever, but that honor probably goes to xXSephiroth666Xx. Yours is up there though.

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.

These are the best. Thank you. anyone have any xfiles sites?

The DS9 theme MP3 is still functional!

I tried to sign the guestbook but could not. Didn’t expect it to work but would have been nice.

Wish guestbooks were still a thing. Visiting my site to find a new message was always a treat.

I wish this was still what the internet was and not a bunch of walled garden xitter links I’ll never ever read.

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.

Nice! If you remember the full URL, it's very possible it's on archive.org. My first couple websites are on there, fortunately (or unfortunately, considering how dorky they are hahah)

Mine was a Linkin Park fan website, also hosted on Angelfire from around then. IIRC frames were the subject of a holy war at the time. I thought they were magical and had the same frames layout as you, but read a lot of stuff about how they were awful design so I created both frames and noframes pages (the latter having the nav bar across the top).

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.

This is the most responsive website I've visited in a long while.

I hope so too! Jouni is still active and recruiting maintainers here: https://simpsonsarchive.com/about.html

I hadn’t realised this had resurfaced after snpp.com went down! Pleased to see I’m still listed as a contributor to the computer list - https://www.simpsonsarchive.com/guides/computers.file.html

You are very welcome! It makes me so happy to hear that I could add a little to your day. Frontpage was my first IDE as well!

You've reminded me of how intensely frustrating it was to be a fan of a TV show pre-WWW and pre-streaming, when networks would shuffle shows between different days and times, trying to find the perfect lineup (or trying to accelerate the demise of an underperforming series).

Was there a time or place in where money flowed to musicians, journalists, and artists instead of their managers?

Thank you! I remember having a great time putting that one together!