Lessons from My Terrible Websites of Long Ago
Using The Wayback Machine, I was able to dig up some of the terrible websites I made as a teenager. At first I was nostalgic, and then I was horrified. It’s amazing how much changes in 10-15 years.
I was originally looking for my very first website — Neo Cosmo Canyon — which was a gaming site I had hosted on either Angelfire, Geocities, or Tripod. It was a colossal 90’s internet trope, packed with animated GIFs, tiling backgrounds, framesets and table-based layouts.
So just in case you need a place to dig up dirt on me, there’s no need to go searching yourself. Apparently I like to dedicate most of my website to completely negating any chance I’ll ever be president, let alone gainfully employed.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the Schadenfreude.
Lesson #1 : I Hate Teenage Me
In an effort to be transparent and edgy, I was an absolute asshole to people I cared about. I had a top 10 list of the hottest girls I dated for fuck’s sake. It even had their pictures on it (that have since been removed, and I’m sorry to anyone that was on that list). That’s so disgusting to me today that my hands shake a little just typing it.
I don’t know if I was as bad as the misogynist men that inspired the #yesallwomen discussions, but I feel extremely guilty about the parallel existing at all. No, I take that back. I was one of those men. A 19-year old is an adult and shouldn’t have his actions excused for youthful ignorance. Especially when it harms others, which I’m sure I must have if anyone other than me ever looked at that website.
I can’t say I’m sorry enough to anyone that knew me back then. How the hell are any of you still friends with me?
Lesser reasons to hate myself include:
- In my top 10 restaurants included among its illustrious venues: Taco Bell. I want to somehow go back in time and kick myself in the balls.
- In my game reviews, I misspelled the word graphics as ‘grapics’ on every single one. I copied and pasted my table-based template half a dozen times without noticing that. ugh.
Looking at all this makes me reflexively react with “Holy crap, perhaps people shouldn’t be allowed to use the internet at all until they’re like… 25.” But learning from mistakes is part of life. Learning from public ones is even easier sometimes.
Lesson #2 : I’ve Always Been a Huge Geek
In case I ever needed to check my geek cred, all I have to do is look back at these terrible websites. Almost everything I did was about anime or games. Much of my “graphic design” back then was just using PhotoShop to manipulate found images from my favorite games and anime. Thank goodness I was also bad at SEO back then.
I think this may have been something a lot of people my age experienced then. The internet was still fairly new to me, so I thought that video games and anime were something only a small subculture enjoyed. Little did I know what lied beyond the borders of the New Jersey Tri-State Area.
And even though most of my tastes have evolved, I still enjoy similar music. A little less hard rock and metal than before, but still hitting the electronica pretty hard.
Lesson #3 : Design & Development Skills
Most of these terrible websites are heavily broken, so I know that my designs weren’t as bad as they look in The Wayback Machine. But even through my rose-tinted glasses, they were still pretty bad.
I definitely learned minimalism and the value of negative space very late. Perhaps that’s why I gravitated toward WordPress and other CMSes that gave me a starting point to work from. Today’s data-driven design was yesterday’s take a template and mod it.
In any case, my code on those sites may seem dated today, but they were fairly standard back then (not that anything was truly standardized in practice in the HTML1-2 days). I used framesets more than most professional sites, but it offered a lot of versatility with the way over-the-top UI designs I was building. And they were all fully compatible with Netscape, AOL, and Internet Explorer!
A few cringe-worthy notes:
- I had desktop themes for Windows 98 on my ‘portfolio’ … In case you don’t know what that means, I skinned all my programs and the OS windows in a somewhat matching way, and considered that something awesome that other people would want to see on my website.
- All my files were in the root directory. That’s right, images, style sheets, scripts, etc. all in one handy-dandy folder.
- I apparently wanted to make my sites have several different skins, and I didn’t have any CMS knowledge back then, so I just built content pages and iframed them inside various interfaces I built. Super inefficient, but at least somewhat ingenious.
- Never mind. I just found a layout I built that had iframes perform the equivalent of a php include or a widget… 6 of them. This is no longer cute.
- I’m really sad that I couldn’t find the site I made with Flash when I was learning that. It used this image from Tenchi Muyo and I animated cherry blossoms blowing by in 3D to go by now and then. I’m sure it’s not as cool-looking as I remember it being of course.
I’ve been a developer almost exclusively for over 5 years now, doing little to no design work. I can definitely say I’m rusty in that field. Will this be a terrible website I look back at in disgrace too? Only time will tell.
Why Am I Sharing This?
Part of it is because I think exposing parts of myself that I regret will help people understand how far I’ve come. Another reason is to give myself something that I can look back on and see it for myself. But I think one of the most important reasons is my fear that someday I might forget what it was like to be 14, 17, 19, etc. I might look back with rose-colored glasses and just think of myself as a more physically fit and less wrinkled version of my present self.
I want to have something I can re-read again a decade from now and remember what it was like to be a teenager. Part of this is my fear of having Alzheimer’s one day too, I suspect. I’m hoping that I can just Google my unique name whenever I want to and find the mixed up good and bad of who I was.
At some level, it’s also interesting to look at stuff like this because THIS is the internet. A lot of stupid people posting stupid things and hoping desperately that someone else on the planet will notice them.
Disclosure: While I am being somewhat transparent here, I am still curating this. I’m going back and fixing spelling and grammar mistakes. I’m formatting the articles in a modern way so they’re at least legible on a modern website. I’m also going to exclude anything I think would cause harm to anyone else, but I’m doing my best not to re-write my personal history.
Read For Yourself
I’ve curated a few of my old articles here if anyone wants to join me in despising my 19-year-old self. And in case it doesn’t go without saying… anyone considering me for a job: please don’t click these. If you do, you should at least be prepared for some stupid rants, some offensive content, and terrible taste.
You can also see more of my youthful stupidity with the tag: Old MySpace Blog Posts.
Now excuse me while I curl up into the fetal position and hate myself.