I have a lot of respect for anyone who can design a good looking website.

I can code like crazy. And I was a freelance classically trained illustrator for 10 years. But ask me to design a website and it's all spinning giffs, midi tracks, and Comic Sans. Some kind of early 90's geocities nightmare.

I feel old when I say that my first website was on Geocities.

"No We Will Not Code for Free"
(Parody of the "Cheers" theme)

We're underpaid, clients' scope today takes everything we got.
You turn to us with all your troubles cause "companies charge a lot."
You want our work but you won't pay.

No we will not code for free.
You are not exempt from our fee.
If you want a free site, build it yourself. We're not your coding slaves.
We won't build your crap no matter how much you plea.

"Paying us back" don't mean a thing, money talks, bullshit walks.
If you want a cheap site then go to Geocities.

Yeah sure, the Metaverse will be bigger than the Internet.

I really believe that. Short of a system collapse, there's nothing which will stop some Web/VR/AR amalgam from eventually going mainstream. If anything, a prolonged pandemic will make humans hunger for more digital entertainment and socializing options.

Might take 5 years, or 25, but it will happen in some form. Eventually, people will even readily accept various augmentations to their bodies to further immerse themselves and connect to digital experiences.

BUT:

We're still pre-bubble.

Does no one remember the dotcom crash?

Facebook/Meta will become the new Yahoo, decimated to a sliver of its former glory. Million dollar hype NFTs will become the new $10 parked domain names. 99.99% of all current efforts and content will end up like a modern day Geocities Archive.

So yeah... when I read that my pension fund is considering "investing in metaverse technologies"...

...you fucking bet it's time to transfer to a different fund!

Had a blast from the past the other day. Testing an issue with an AngularJS app in IE11 on a project managers Surface.

Nothing works. Just a blank screen. I open the JavaScript console to hundreds, maybe thousands of errors. They all seem eerily familiar, but I can't place them. It's like something from a past life.

Then I see one that brings the issue into sharp focus.

"{{variable_name}} is a reserved word"

No it isn't, I think. That hasn't been a reserved word in JavaScript since...

Me: "Is your browser in Compatibility Mode?"

PM: "Yeah, it's for one of our legacy programs"

Me: "You need to turn that off to test this app. It thinks you're using IE6, so it's having a 2 decade old shit-fit. I haven't seen those errors since I was a teenager making crap on Geocities"

I never thought an error message could make me feel so old 😩

These were back in highschool and I was around 13 or 14, and no one taught me any html and have to figure it out myself by reading scarce references:

*When I started to try configuring my Friendster profiles with CSS ;
*when I successfully made cute sites for me and my friends in Geocities with personalized free domain names;
*Oh, i made little pages on local for my favorite bands;
*and, when I experienced computing shit at DOS level

Those are little things that drove me into learning indepth programming.

Who on here used GeoCities?

I never got to see it since I'm born after yahoo bought it but do you maybe even have your old site to showcase?^^

It all started with... Geocities.

After writing my first php script that displayed a random forum signature image. Took me far too long but the end result was worth it.

Felt proud after my first mini refractor that automatically picked up images from a folder on my geocities web hosting lol.

Cannot tell you how much win I felt at the time :)

Every time I have to touch a webpack config I remember Geocities much more fondly. Hell, even Frontpage wasn't so bad really.

Got this book from my parents back in the early 2000's and made a website for my little sister; an Avril Lavigne fan-page for her and her friends! Hosted at Swedens counterpart to Geocities, Passagen.

Today I make simple websites for small local businesses together with my father.