Interesting Internet Nooks

You know when you are sometimes just browsing the web, and you stumble upon a fascinating place that could be an art piece in a museum? Yes, those weird, odd, interesting websites, either because their old and charming, or because they’re trying with a different concept. Today, I am sharing a few of those places I have found over the last years.

🏠 Websites

  • The World Wide Web History Project is a website dating back fro 1997, whose goal was to document and preserve the history of the World Wide Web. It was nominated the Cool Site of the Year in 1997, and it contains a lot of information, and interesting artifacts, such as this e-mail from Tim Berners-Lee concerning the proposal of the IMG HTML element.
  • Nathan’s Toasty Technology Page is one of those extremely random websites which feels like a museum in and of itself. It contains a lot of information and screenshots from old software, from error messages, to menus, to anything else you could imagine.
  • Old Internet Files is a website containing old Internet files, such as DNS zone files, hosts information, domains information, etc. Let’s call it a collection of old Internet-related files.
  • GifCities is a more museum-like website, brought by the Internet Archive. It was part of a special project where the Internet Archive compiled many of the GIFs that could be found in GeoCities websites. I get some GIFs for this website there sometimes!
  • JAKE.MUSEUM is a more modern version of a digital museum. It is a collection of “visual and hypertext media” by Jake. I really enjoy this idea of preserving websites and keeping your own small museum on the Internet.
  • ITcorp.com has been running since 1986. It is a very simple, plain HTML, website, that is one of the oldest, still-running, websites.
  • Windows 98 Icons is a collection of icons from Windows 98. The author of this website has also written a piece on the design of said icons. He mentions that the icons “made the operating system feel like. place to get real work done” due to their “hard edges, soft colors and easy-to-recognize symbols”.

📝 Webpages

  • A One-Person Oral History of Geocities HTML Chat is a blog post describing someone’s memories of the now defunct GeoCities, what it was, how it worked and how their HTML chat worked at the time. It’s not something I ever experienced, but it sounded fun!
  • Putting 5,998,794 Books on IPFS describes the experience of archiving a massive amount of books, and therefore data, using IPFS, and the challenges that come with it. Anna’s Archive claims to be “the world’s largest open-source open-data library”. As far as I understand, this shadow library does not, by itself, host any of the content. Instead, it is a massive search engine with the collection of the metadata of all these books.
  • Archive Your Old Projects is a nice read, where Arne describes what he does to his old projects. The too long didn’t read is: keep them online, and I tend to agree. Lots of my old projects don’t have their website anymore, but I keep them around in some repository. I hope for the future I will build some sort of digital museum. For web projects, Webrecorder can come in handy!
  • This Page is Designed to Last is a showcase of a webpage that is… well… designed to last. Some of the learnings are to return to vanilla HTML/CSS, do not minimize the HTML, prefer one long page over several, avoid hotlinking, use native fonts, compress imagines and reduce the risk of broken URLs.

Today, we as society, produce terabytes - or is it already petabytes? - of data daily, mostly temporary data, fleeting data. Perhaps too much data. A common topic thread that spawns most of these links - and this post in general - is the idea of archival and curation. It is good to see that some people take the time to curate web pages, make digital “museums”, and keep preserving and running old websites until today.