A trip down memory lane

You were lucky. We used to have to write our homepages on paper!

Here's a quick overview for impatient people:

My personal homepage on Geocities in the Good Old Days™. Good grief, I can't believe I used to be proud of it. The lines and bullets were supplied by Geocities themselves. The background was the least eye-stabbing one I could find on the net. The scripts were made by The Omega, some of them on request - I'll have you know they worked just fine in the late 90's, whippersnapper! I can't blame anyone for the banners, unfortunately.

What I came up with after I got my own domain. (I was evenly tied between deadlybrain.org and sabotendar.org, and was about to design the latter like a jumbocactuar... thank goodness nothing came of that...) It ran on a commercial content management tool that would've been very expensive if my spouse hadn't happened to be one of its developers.

My first homepage whoopteedoo! (1997)

...is lost in cyberspace. Be thankful. The Geocities basic page builder gave me an amazing selection of 4 colors. The end result was a red background, yellow text, blue links and green visited links, AFAIR. Among the graphics I remember being able to add were tacky fire and ice lines. I think it had three pages - the index, a poetry page and a link list, out of which the link list made up most of the content. The poems I threw together on the spot as filler. Here they are:

Today I saw a Volvo which was driven by a mole My muscles all began to twitch I drove over a hole. My head began to spin around and made me kinda dizzy, and in the glove compartment sat a rat which squalked Thin Lizzy. My rear view mirror hummed a tune I drove up to the sun although I cried: "I will get fried!" the bats were on the run. The rat pulled my suspenders off and then it stole my pants My teeth were full of cavities my legs were full of ants. Then I heard thumping, heavy steps I improvized a grin And quickly saved my masterpiece before my boss came in.

Human language is as far as I can see a waste of time, because I'd rather stay at home Than go to school and read some lousy poetry In which I know I'm sure to find this very poem. Porno on the Internet is a thing we'll soon regret. Laws are coming, justice done, censorship for everyone. That's because Bill Clinton likes to give everyone the yikes.

That design wasn't up for too long - even then, I apparently had some standards. The content, however, remained like this for a year, if I am to believe the old notes I have.

The folly of youth (1998-2001)

Ah, the 90's - the era of lame (stolen) gifs, pages littered with animations and blatant overuse of Javascript. I used to think that this was a large homepage... nowadays, I've realized that it was simply an unwieldy one. I don't think it's ever appeared on webpagesthatsuck.com, but that's probably because there are pages that qualify more. Well, that and hardly anybody has even seen (or heard) this horrible thing, thank goodness. Its most original feature was my whiny teenage poetry.

Hey, at least I did the HTML by hand in the Geocities advanced editor (even if I had to copypaste a lot in the beginning). While I'm glad that I can use stylesheets now, I still kinda miss the days when 15 MB was enough room for a whole homepage and embedding content was a matter of writing <EMBED SRC=thingamabob.mov>...

After the Yahoos bought out Geocities, I've had quite a lot of grief with it. Long story short, I'm not happy with their emergency authentication system - it's totally unable to send a new password to a separate verified e-mail account. Instead, it relies wholly on sensitive and easily gathered data such as home address, birth date and your mother's maiden name, so you can't be blamed for faking (and promptly forgetting) it. I had my password - Yahoo didn't. I had to resort to sending them a cease and desist letter just to get them to take the damn site down.

Below are some samples of this old site - enough to give you an idea of why it deserves to rest in pieces. The pictures are from the time when I only had a crummy Apple OneScanner. The fact that the top banner on the entry page doesn't always appear isn't a bug, it's a feature. (Once you've seen the banner in all its glory, I think you'll agree.)

Welcome to USA... Useless Stuff And more!
Yes, I made this. I was 16. You can stop laughing now.

It's a friend watering his vegetables. No, really.
How to become an anorexic - a step by step guide for the German teenager.
Isn't the after supposed to look better than the before?
Honestly, what were they smoking?
I am Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate!
Some lovely vintage banners, courtesy of Photoshop: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Black Twiggy (2001-2004)

My spouse used to work for a small company named Dupoint. We made extensive use of their flagship, the content management system i.site, at home. i.site taught me many valuable lessons, such as the distinctions of a good default navigational model and the fact that accessibility tends to be greatly hampered by usability (there was no way to stop some types of links from being automatically opened in new windows, for instance).

The generated menus were functional, but rather messy. Being creative with them was a challenge - these are the style rules I had to write for the sitemap (many thanks to my friend Henrik who, among other things, suggested the negative margin)... no, they didn't work in Internet Explorer. It looked much like my current sitemap plus right borders on the links (ideally), only the aforementioned gets by entirely on widely supported CSS markup.

The layout used tables for structure, but style sheets for formatting - rather silly really, but it worked. I had huge problems getting the top image not to leave a gap in Mozilla, which I solved by making the image a block level element (again, many thanks to Henrik for the idea). Nowadays, I try to avoid using tables for design. They clutter the source and are a general pain in the ass because they don't like to stay fixed.

The line of text beneath the top graphic is one of a whole bunch of random quotes that may or may not have something to do with said graphic, or this site's title. Or the entire domain. You take a guess.

The old Deadlybrain.org's big sales point was the humongous Pocket Bish gallery. It consisted of badges I'd earned from Pocket Bishounen and Pocket Bishoujo, grouped by anime/game and displayed with a review and short character bios. I decided to scrap it because the reviews have grown dated, the whole thing has lost its novelty value... and I wasn't going to add alt tags to 200+ pictures. With it went a lot of silly cutesy unoriginal stuff (which I've replaced with silly cutesy original stuff).

Really, I knew from the beginning that my menu system was a joke, but man, what a lame one... the corresponding menu items today are, from the top: About me, Projects, Writings, Random whatever and a links section I got sick of. The basic layout still survives on my music page, where its unneccessarily tight main column makes the meager contents look decidedly more substantial.

Deadlybrain.org v.1

Themes and dreams (2004-)

You're looking at it right now. The reason I'm mentioning it is because I implemented it when I still was using i.site. Its messy menus actually made possible a neat layer effect. The most straight-forward way of describing it is: Pick a page on this site with a document menu and hover the mouse over the items. You'll see that the hover background replaces the background of the currently displayed menu item. On i.site, the two backgrounds blended into eachother.

The reason is that i.site used divs around the links, and the class for the current menu item was on the div. My current homebrew system (yeah, having a developer for a spouse owns ) uses multiple classes on the links instead.