You know the ones. The days of topsites, cliques, fanlistings, and blend challenges. Of image maps and iframes. Of plugboards and dollmakers. Of vexels and pixel text. When trendy hyphenated site names like “radio-romance” and “rainbow-kisses” abounded. When every site featured a section of stolen email forwards masquerading as original visitor content. When a blog or personal site wasn’t complete without an extensive tutorial section on how to print screen, save pictures, make scanlines, and customize scrollbars.
Everyone needs a good trip down the annals of archive.org once in a while, and these past few days have been mine. I figured I needed a bit of downtime, since I now have four jobs (two paid, two unpaid volunteer/intern positions) as of yesterday. Maybe all this archive-stalking represents my longing to return to those bygone days when building a poorly done website cemented your status as the coolest genius ever, playing tag was still appropriate, responsibility entailed doing an hour of homework, and “working” was a fabulous word that only existed in grown-up land. In any case, my time spent in the throes of sentimentality led me to make the following lists:
Things that wouldn’t fly today, especially not all on the same website:
- Layouts smooshed against the left side of the monitor with one-inch wide content columns and 9px Tahoma text (or 10px if you just want your visitors to go almost but not completely blind)
- Layouts featuring half-naked celebrities and brush splatters that only sometimes conceal the half-nakedness
- Navigation like this: [ x x x x x x x ] or this: [x] [x] [x] or this: x; x; x; — so unique!
- Pixel stretching and transparency to create columns — ugliest thing ever
- “About” pages titled “Profile” and “Basics” with all the same meaningless info — “Name: Meg. Age: 13. Location: In your pants. Buy Me Presents: September 21. Eye Color: Shit brown. Hair Color: Psychedelic pink. Shoe Size: 7. Likes: Cell phones. The color pink. Dislikes: Getting hurt. AIM Screenname: xoxoimxcoolzyo.”
- “Random Facts” pages with details like “I hate liars and cheaters” because obviously that makes you different from everyone else — I don’t know about you, but liars and cheaters are my favorite people!
- A long list of favorites, because everyone cares that you like Fridays, The Notebook, Fall Out Boy, Diet Dr. Pepper, and Desperate Housewives
- “__ years young” — can you say most annoying way to describe your age ever?
- “I’m worth $2,167,000 according to humanforsale.com!” — Is that for slavery, prostitution, or both? Okay, that was kind of insensitive.
- Splash pages — “Stuck in frames? Set yourself free!” “Requirements: Cookies. A kind heart. No sticky fingers!” “Pop or Drop?” “Click on the image above, or click ~here~ to enter.” “Add to favoritez / Set as homepage”
- “I ♥ all my sisters and affiliates! ♥ Amy ♥ Bob ♥ Jill ♥ Jane ♥ Lorreen” plastered across said splash page
- Decorative site titles: “:+: ____M.E.K.A.N.A._:+: (v2)”
- Decorative site titles that are supposed to make you look sexy and mature as a preteen: “// UrBaN-sLuT; {dot} ORG(asm) // —”
- Excessive usage of smileys and “lol” in blog posts about your new flavor of toothpaste and how your crush won’t talk to you
- A million different skins because you can’t be bothered to make one decent layout, because quantity trumps quality
- Changing the cursor to crosshair or help upon hovering on a link — or, even better, making cursors disappear entirely
- Going on hiatus every other week — grand opening #1, 2, 3, … , 4802
- Buddy-icon makers that crash browsers and install spyware as a bonus gift
- Webcam popups and portals — wow, that staticky-looking box in your sidebar transforms into a slutty picture! Lovely!
- Ugly blends that are more or less collages of floating heads
- Stupid personalized comment text: “c13mments” “K13ssez” “Sm20ches”
- No-right-click scripts — I came across one of these for the first time in years on a blog the other day and just about died
- Visitor counters that are really hit counters that you probably spend hours refreshing
- Abusing semicolons — oh wait, that still happens, and it’s still annoying
- Telling your visitors you won’t be updating because you’ll be at your great-aunt’s house
- Telling your visitors you’ve updated your blinkies page with one extra blinkie
- Flashing “new!” blinkies beside every new piece of crappy content
- Iframes 300000000px in height
- Wak’s Ask & Answer script
- Popup layouts
- Popup anything
Things that I maybe-kinda-sorta-but-don’t-tell-anyone miss:
- Anything on the above list that’s more funny than painful
- Really intricate layouts with amazing graphics and lots of places to click — I’m easily amused
- Well-done blends and vexels — they were pretty, okay?
- Pixel text and pixels — they were cute, okay?
What did I leave out? Any good sites I should plug into the Wayback Machine?