First day of Unix

webserver now set up running FreeBSD! woohoo! Learning something new every day aren’t I? ;)

rebuilding life

trying to rebuild a small site, where I can show wallpapers and images and small things. I don’t think I’ll rebuild a big site now. Possibly on my laptop on the way to china…

I have lost everything

The Corporation

Old Weblog

Hi 👋 2003 Scott here! I stumbled upon a forgotten URL on the Wayback Machine that shows some of my earliest surviving marks on the internet. It was scraped on in Aug, 2002 when I was 17.

This website made use of “cutting edge technology” of the day (like transparent iframes) which only worked on Internet Explorer (not Netscape or America Online’s built-in browser). I remember making a big point about this because I wanted to brag to my friends about my “mad website skillz” but some of them thought my site was really bad and I later learned it was because it only worked in Internet Explorer.

I went so far as to include a screenshot of how the webpage should look for users who had a compatible browser. In hindsight I doubt this was aimed at actually helping anyone load the website, but instead it was a subtle way to show off the layout for people who didn’t have (or didn’t know how to launch) Internet Explorer. CSS must have been pretty edgy back then too. DHTML? I hadn’t heard that term in a while!

Squinting at the text in the screenshot reveals a healthy dose of cringe. “…if they can’t run IE 5.5 then they shouldn’t be my friends”, oof. Multiple references to fight club too. Apparently I self-hosted this page, probably using classic ASP and IIS on a Windows 2000 server computer over a home DSL connection. I do remember that day shorting my PC’s power supply rail to the case and the computer not turning on for a while, but eventually it came back on.

The Wayback Machine also caught this “access denied” page with a Holy Grail reference.

What a trip! It’s interesting to think that young peoples’ internet activities are better archived these days, for better or for worse.

The Edge

Hi 👋 2003 Scott here! I stumbled upon a forgotten URL on the Wayback Machine that shows some of my earliest surviving marks on the internet. It was scraped on in Oct, 2001 when I just turned 16. The page has a JavaScript fly-out menu but none of the links point to pages that were archived. I don’t recall if “the edge” meant anything, other than a “branding” phase I went through briefly as an internet-surfing kid. The background of this site is #003366 which is one of my favorite colors, even today!

Blocking Geocities Ads

Hey looks like I wrote the previous section today… weird… oh well. here I go! Today I started researching and I was all bumbed out because Yahoo! changed their ad policies for the personal home pages. It used to me that they could put a geocities ad at the bottom of the page (like a full size banner) and it would stay there. Your only other option was to accept the annoying “ad square” at the top right of the screen. Well I’ve always liked the “geo bar” (they called it) because it doesn’t pop-up at you and it looks nicer on a webpage… well Geocities didn’t like it. They said that someone can add the ad at the bottom of the page if they want to, but there’s now going to be a pop-up “ad square” no matter what. Great! How annoying! For the longest time I played with the HTML code - back and forth - uploading and downloading. Finally I figured it stood up to the name “unhackable” because I realized they add a chunk of HTML in the code to make it happen… so I had to think of a different way to hide this. Well, I figured it out - a fool proof everlasting good-for-all script that I can add to make the ad go away (mostly) see the little 3 pixel wide bar on the right side? I’m workin’ on it… ok I’m adding this 20 mins later. I fixed it! Now there is no banner snowing at all…. isn’t life great? :o)