after watching doug block's Home Page (1999) documentary a half-dozen times over the past year, i realized how much i missed having a personal home page.
not an itch.io page. not a github repo. not an imgur album.
an actual personal home page full of links to interesting places and people, and a little blog area to write personal stuff in. i haven't had a personal blog since the early 2000s.
i wanted to have some fun, so I hauled my dusty ol' iMac G5 out of storage and installed Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks. i hadn't used any of them in almost 20 years.
i thought it might take me a week to build a home page...
... it took me a year 😅
so this is my little attempt at rebuilding what we lost in the 90s. let me know if you've got a little homepage i can link back to in my hyperlinks area.
@vga256 Now that's old school. But the logo you used has a special place for me because I actually bought Dreamweaver 1.0 (they had a great student discount). I wish I had kept the box... And about Fireworks, I'm still pissed that Adobe killed it.
@andreitorres DW1 was wonderful. it got a lot of flak for bloating code, but i think designers have forgotten just how difficult table-driven design was without it.
Fireworks is something very special. I did all of the graphic design with it for the site, and I never had to touch photoshop once. i'm using Affinity Designer now, and it still can't pull off what Fireworks does.
@vga256 Yeah, and DW also provided an easy way to do basic animations without Flash. I also loved DW1 clean minimalistic UI (that got bloated over time).
@vga256
I remember my first page was on GeoCities. Then when Yahoo took over GeoCities I just had my own web page built. It took a few years before I actually got it working but all the information was there, I just had to learn how to do links better. I have migrated it a couple times since, and I don't know if it fits your definition of homepage, but it can be found at https://peacefulhippo.info . Feel free to follow me or block me as you choose.
@vga256 Beautiful page - love that you made it completely old school. Must've been fun!
My discovering of NeoCities have also really fueled the same ideas. I never really had a personal home page, but I certainly had a need for it for various reasons.
Here is mine https://frans.today/
Surf the web well!
@vga256 I also used Dreamweaver and Fireworks, and I was quite good with it despite English is my second language. I even did very popular webpages with it. I always liked tinkering with colors and graphics, but nowadays I am lazy, just setup a css and use Emacs as a website generator, which is comfy, but also somewhat limited.
@writer13_press0451 yes. it is possible to do some of this stuff with css, but it is incredibly time consuming to properly align all elements. fireworks and dreamweaver did it automatically.
both very slow programs, but very nice to work with.
@vga256 I still have my page up, and yeah, they're a bit of a nostalgic curiosity nowadays, aren't that? come to think of it, I even alluded to it in my Mastodon bio...
I've been thinking/reading about platforms, ownership and siloing lately, and even today I realized I wrote what would be a blog post as a Mastodon thread, just because of the convenience of doing it from my phone. So I picked up the laptop and copied it over to my page: https://hisham.hm/2024/02/12/that-time-i-almost-added-tetris-to-htop/
part of what i hope is that we can recover the structure of some of the web through stronger and more dense hyperlinking. part of the siloing problem is (google) Search itself - it became a solution to a problem that could have been solved in other ways.
@vga256 Suppose I could throw my first site back up. Jeez, I didn’t even know about index.html, wtf it’s “test.html” even. I suppose v2 came shortly after.
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