[HN Gopher] Republishing my Simpsons fan site, twenty years later
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Republishing my Simpsons fan site, twenty years later
Author : zebomon
Score : 192 points
Date : 2025-01-05 22:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bingeclock.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bingeclock.com)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| >I had more fun being creative online when the stakes were so low
| that it seemed that just by playing I had already won something.
|
| 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."
| MPSimmons wrote:
| We see opportunity cost as such a danger, and you're right, it
| probably holds us back from enjoying life quite a lot.
| pryelluw wrote:
| Have you seen the Python Atlanta website ? https://pyatl.dev
|
| 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.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| _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.
| pryelluw wrote:
| This is the latest iteration after multiple Django based
| rewrites. Last night I was looking into just running a wiki
| but that would require more time, which I don't want to
| spend. More important things to do like finding speakers
| for the group events.
| flpm wrote:
| I think the problem is the pressure to "monetize" projects that
| today's internet puts on everything: either monetize the
| attention (ads) or by generating expertise (the "personal
| brand"). Back then it was just for fun, so it looked and felt
| more human and less corporative. We need to make the web human
| again, specially now with generative AI.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| My dad has saved snippets from the newspaper that he read over
| the years. One of those snippets he gave to me is stuck to my
| refrigerator.
|
| >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.
| ToDougie wrote:
| > 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."
|
| 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.....
| lathiat wrote:
| Somehow, the (much less impressive) Star Trek fan site I created
| in 2000 when I was 13 is _still_ online.
|
| 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/
| pryelluw wrote:
| 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.
| lathiat wrote:
| Ha ha thanks :) yeah the guest book was an external service.
| Along with the image based hit counter :)
| hypercube33 wrote:
| These are the best. Thank you. anyone have any xfiles sites?
| bitwize wrote:
| I'm looking for a character shrine for Akane from _Ranma 1
| /2_ myself.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| https://wiby.me/?q=Akane+Ranma came up with
| https://geocities.restorativland.org/Tokyo/Pagoda/3879/,
| does that count?
| bitwize wrote:
| That's perfect!
| wil421 wrote:
| Smoking man theories were the best!
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| > You HAVE to do https which means you need a certificate.
|
| 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...
| MrVandemar wrote:
| > 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's like claiming Skype is dead but my last job was at a
| small company with many international customers and Skype
| was still their daily driver for international calls.
| metalman wrote:
| I see the above discussion as a describing a process,
| very much like evolution, with web sites bieng the
| species of interest, and how they are bieng shaped by,
| internal competition, for resouces (and prey), errr food,
| preditors, parisites, and environomental changes. neat!
| noirscape wrote:
| Email will never die, no matter how much most people want
| it to do so. The protocol is arguably the best proof of
| "worse is better", which is why it's held out for so
| long.
| afpx wrote:
| Unless there's something important, I check my email
| about once a week these days. Otherwise it's just for
| authentication.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Work vs leisure.
|
| I rarely send emails for leisure, but I send and receive
| dozens a day for work, both internal and external.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Depending on if you work or not, I feel there's a _bigly_
| dissonance in the perceived prevalence of email, phone
| calls, and other such traditional(?) channels of
| communique.
|
| 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.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| > Yeah, this one sucks a lot. But, email is dead, so...
|
| 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...)
| layer8 wrote:
| The DS9 theme MP3 is still functional!
| na4ma4 wrote:
| It's kinda funny how your site has outlasted most of the sites
| on the Links page :)
| rapind wrote:
| The good internet is alive! You just can't find it is all
| (google).
| bamboozled wrote:
| 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.
| fsflover wrote:
| > I wish this was still what the internet was
|
| Here you go: https://wiby.me.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I've got the "surprise me" link bookmarked for a random
| distraction, it's great!
| bamboozled wrote:
| Incredibly cool, thanks
| Tomte wrote:
| I'm so happy the Lurker's Guide
| (http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/) is also still online.
| tessellated wrote:
| I was there, when it was still in creation.
|
| jms is such a treasure. Listening to his autobiography,
| narrated by Peter Jurasik, is wholeheartedly recommended.
| tobiasbischoff wrote:
| OMG thats cringe
| ben_w wrote:
| Ah, I remember that colour scheme. I used similar in my goth
| phase, when I had a geocities page.
| wil421 wrote:
| My old website had a bunch of random stuff about DBZ. I still
| can't figure out how to find my old geocities site.
| lkbm wrote:
| If you remember the neighborhood(?)
| https://geocities.restorativland.org/ may help, since you can
| browse through screenshots+titles by neighborhood.
|
| But I remember my exact address, and it's not there.
| Archive.org has it, but you'll need your exact address.
| SilasX wrote:
| Our rival high school's debate/drama team made a website c.
| 1999, and by some miracle, Tripod keeps it up:
|
| https://mcneilforensics.tripod.com
| coffeecantcode wrote:
| 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.
| santoshalper wrote:
| Nice nostalgia piece overall, but I especially enjoyed this line:
| "The distinction between noise and signal becomes decreasingly
| apparent the further one gets from their source."
|
| Very succinct and insightful. I will use that in the future.
| zebomon wrote:
| Thank you for your kind words!
| ethagnawl wrote:
| Tangential but timely: I haven't watched the Simpsons regularly
| in about 20 years. However, my internal clock still sounds an
| alarm every Sunday night about 15 mins before showtime.
| macintux wrote:
| 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).
| Scoundreller wrote:
| In Toronto, we had a slight advantage where the TV channel
| that played most of the Fox content (Global TV on NTSC
| channel 6) bled into the tunable FM range so you could at
| least listen to it on your car radio (or any FM radio for
| that matter).
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/87.7_FM
| ethagnawl wrote:
| That is so cool. I'd not heard of this "phenomenon" before.
| macintux wrote:
| I ran into this a couple of different ways growing up.
|
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| I rehosted my Tolkien fanpage from 1999 or so:
| https://tolkien.stavros.io
|
| I also have my personal website from back then somewhere.
| exitb wrote:
| This is the most responsive website I've visited in a long
| while.
| stavros wrote:
| Well, it is the finest artisanal HTML the 90s had to offer.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Resources like the Simpsons Archive aka SNPP, the episode
| capsules particularly, which are just a collection of lengthy
| text files written decades ago but filled with treasure trove of
| insights and searchable references/quotes, are one of the rare
| simple gems of the Internet that I hope last forever.
| zebomon wrote:
| I hope so too! Jouni is still active and recruiting maintainers
| here: https://simpsonsarchive.com/about.html
| stuartd wrote:
| 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
| 101008 wrote:
| This touches me so deeply... I had a similar experience in the
| sense that I too created a fansite for something I really enjoyed
| back then (first with Frontpage, then iframes, then PHP), and now
| that evolved a lot and I kind of become an expert on that (and a
| business on itself, I am generous!)
|
| 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.
| zebomon wrote:
| 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!
| runsonrum wrote:
| I love it! I will take a closer look at some stage.
|
| 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.
| qup wrote:
| The first website I ever built, where I learned HTML, was a
| Goldeneye 007 N64 fan site. I had all the cheats, all the
| walkthroughs, all the funny jokes and animated gifs. I misspelled
| "license to kill" in the url I created at angelfire.
|
| 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.
| amatecha wrote:
| 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)
| qup wrote:
| I've looked extensively, I don't think it exists. I can't
| remember exactly how I misspelled it, though, so there's this
| little glimmer of hope in my mind still.
| amatecha wrote:
| ahh dang! maybe you've got the URL in an old email
| somewhere? only thing I could think of... fingers crossed
| for you!
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| 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.
| mettamage wrote:
| I definitely drove my visitors mad with my DBZ website. When
| I started making my Linkin Park website, I made the layout in
| photoshop
| qup wrote:
| Flaming text was all the rage then. I had a page about how
| to do that on my E/N website. In paint shop pro
| waltbosz wrote:
| When I created the website for the Ultimate Simpsons Doom II mod,
| I published it at tripod.com. It's still there 22 years later
| https://waltersgameboy.tripod.com/simpdoom/
|
| I miss the old Internet.
| ryanwhitney wrote:
| > I vaguely knew C++ to be the more powerful language but
| regardless of that, it seemed cursed because it was more steps
| away than PHP from building things that I could put on the
| internet.
|
| Still true!
| amatecha wrote:
| Random "early web Simpsons memory": in 1995 when I was taking a
| course to learn HTML, I had a great time browsing the web with
| "super-fast" ISDN (this was amazing at the time), and downloaded
| the Itchy & Scratchy song, in .au format. The filename was
| itchscra.au -- pretty sure I remember this because I spent so
| long trying to embed the audio into my web page and make it
| automatically play, which I don't think I ever got working haha
| viccis wrote:
| Tables were big for web design back then but tbh a lot of modern
| CSS frameworks remind me a lot of that old school table design.
| yapyap wrote:
| So this is the homegrown Simpsons stuff people are talking about
| torgeros wrote:
| Huge shout-out to your dad for being a stay-at-home _dad_ in the
| 00s!
| zebomon wrote:
| He was definitely ahead of his time then, and even more so in
| the 90s!
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| Love the "Match-Ups" page:
|
| https://gardnermcintyre.com/simpsonszip/view.php?page=matchu...
| zebomon wrote:
| Thank you! I remember having a great time putting that one
| together!
| dustincoates wrote:
| My first website was a baseball fan site in the late 90s. I
| discovered Google that way, because I had somehow reached the #1
| result for "perfect game baseball" and got a lot of traffic
| thanks to David Wells (or Cone, can't remember which).
|
| The web was so amateur back then, that I even got an email from a
| sports journalist asking if I accepted submissions from
| freelancers.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Every time I am presented with something like that that reminisce
| me of the 90's web, its innocence, and the unlimited potential it
| presented, I am brought back to Jaron's Lenier book, "You are not
| a gadget" and this often-cited quote out of it:
|
| "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"
| JustBreath wrote:
| Was there a time or place in where money flowed to musicians,
| journalists, and artists instead of their managers?
| boutell wrote:
| Main content of each page not loading for me - maybe it's Flash?
| zebomon wrote:
| There were a few Flash tidbits buried as downloads I took down,
| but the main content should all display, as it's just PHP
| rolling out HTML aside from the rollover up top that uses JS.
| tfinch wrote:
| Thanks to oocities.org the ska-punk band I was in at school still
| has it's glorious table based design
| https://www.oocities.org/peat_bog_man/
| ta1243 wrote:
| Sadly my first major site (with a four-letter dot-com and
| everything) went down before internet archive got to it.
|
| 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
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(page generated 2025-01-06 23:01 UTC)