A lot of the times I just post about the aoscene however the e/n web scene or “everything/nothing” scene was a huge part of my life as well. The e/n scene is what you would call a ‘blog’ today.
A huge site that played a huge role an e/n site I’ll never forget would have to be tim-only.com . I think it was only around for a few years but anyways this dudes content and layouts kept me inspired.
I remember php wasn’t really out yet and it was just perl/cgi scripts. Newspro, Anti-leech, topsites, guestbooks, stat counters, tag boards. Fuck what a great time.
What a pain it was at first installing newspro then. There wasnt one click installers like there is today.
Many sites would host the download links to these scripts there was no github. Each site had a section called “Downloads” which would consist of:
- Apps
- Fonts
- Cgi Scripts
- Progs
- Games
How about 88×31 and 88×11 link me buttons. That’s how you found new sites to visit from people’s affiliates/link pages and top sites.
There was no Google ranking; it was topsites cheating. That’s how you drove traffic.
It just amazes me the endless nights of coding and the amount of months spent building content driven websites and now you could build the same sites within days.
How about when web cam’s first came out?
The shitty pixelated selfie image you took and displayed on the sidebar of your site.
My favorite was a program I called pAmp that I put together in VB6. It was basically a clone of Chatamp by numb (an AOL prog).
But it would take the current song you were playing in WinAMP and append a text file on the server. Then I would php include that text file to show what i was playing at that moment.
I remember when tag boards were the next big hit pretty much a guestbook but they would be displayed on the sidebar always viewable where users could post whatever.
Man when was the last time you saw a guestbook on a site ?