A collection of 88x31 pixel web buttons from the 1990s and 2000s
anlucas.neocities.org
anlucas.neocities.org
There were a lot of websites about that, but only a few were really popular. The structure was very basic: header, left sidebar with links, centered content, and right sidebar with small chatbox, polls, random quotes, and affiliates. The affiliates was simply that: a link to another website in exchange of a link to your website. They started using text links but they usually evolved to 88x31 buttons, first simply JPG then animated GIFs.
Being in the affiliates section of the top websites (again, only for this subject) was the best. I remember spent hours and hours (translated into days adn weeks) designing my buttons in MS Paint (yeah, pixel by pixel) so I could convince the webmaster of the popular website to include mine, because a lot of the time they decided based n the button and not the website itself.
Anyway, sorry for the long rant (maybe younger people will learn something today), but as a lot of people I miss the old internet and I could talk hours about this!
Luckily I had only like two close friends enrolled at that school!
https://web.archive.org/web/20010219045610/http://www.pichus...
A nice blend of nostalgia and triggering, "Get RealPlayer Now!".
You and me both.
It’s a tangent, but I remember watching The Matrix when it first came out and in that scene where Smith is looking out the window telling Neo that they choose that current timeframe for the simulation as it was humanity at it’s peak, I thought it was a little ironic as clearly things were just getting exponentially better all the time.
I mean, a lot of things have got better, but we lost a lot along the way too. The web certainly didn’t live up to its early potential (or more accurately, we just tossed it for something way inferior that was less hassle).
I guess really it’s just surprising to look back at that scene and think there’s some truth in it.. especially given that now it’s 2022 and we’re all flying round Mars in our self-driving Jetson cars.
Oh, but it could have been far, far worse. We almost lost the web to Adobe/Macromedia/Flash. And then almost again to activeX.
At least we still have the open, accessible, extensible web standards. Only that the top-layer: the applications and sites built have been embraced by a few monopolies.
I'm rooting for WASM (because of my dislike for JS) but I'm also cautious for one of the FAANG taking wasm and re-trying the old flash/activeX trick again, but now with a "only runs on android" or "requires azure certification" angle via WASM.
(FireFox stands as a lone exception to this but I get the impression, probably wrongly, that Mozilla is always a couple of dollars from bankruptcy).
But both java applets and JS was mostly open. I recall you could open most applets and get the Java code or some form of it, rather easy. But it might simply be that concealment wasn't important back then. Idk.
These were not “advertisements” as we now know the term. No, these buttons were mostly put up by users themselves, on their own web pages. Yes, ordinary users used to have their own web pages, mostly without paid advertisements. These buttons, when they linked to commercial products, were unpaid product endorsements.
In particular website authoring tools would add these unprompted as self-advertisement.
That was part of the joke of "made with GNU emacs" or whatever, that you were manually adding the same advertisement the "Made with Microsoft Frontpage" users had foisted on them.
You're using some narrow definition of "advertising" that doesn't match common use. You don't need to be paid to be a walking billboard.
When the program you were using inserted these it was analogous to license plate frame advertising today[1]. Consumers don't get paid for those either, but it's advertising for car dealerships.
There was also a culture of voluntarily inserting these, but that doesn't mean some of them weren't product placement or advertising.
1. https://www.zazzle.com/car+advertisement+license+plate+frame...
https://www.google.com/search?q=imagesize%3A88x31&tbm=isch&s...
Still, webpages can't compete with the shareability and "virality" of social media by default; it's what made them popular. The simplicity of use is also a prerequisite; there's millions of people who can't write a line of HTML or CSS, and 99% of them never will. I sometimes daydream about some service that will somehow combine the best of both worlds. Total customization with viral sharability, and without requiring technical skill. Maybe something like that's already been made; maybe we can learn something from why it failed.
I'll just tell you to reject pandemic protocols and vote against established politicians and try absurd and dangerous pseudomedical cures.
Isn't it better that me and my ilk have to design our own websites and hence signal our shittiness by having shitty aesthetics?
I can't speak for Twitter, but Facebook in its early days was incredibly personalizable. Not to the extent of GeoCities or MySpace, but you could do all kinds of things with your profile page. "Pieces of Flair" was my favorite: http://www.krembo99.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/200707...
Then one day, Facebook went corporate, and all of the customization stuff disappeared. I imagine a lot of small businesses ceased to exist when that happened, because people used to sell different Facebook customizations.
It seems to me that if it was easier for ordinary people to add custom CSS to their browsers, a cottage industry could be made for skinning people's social media feeds.
[0] maybe with exception of something like Gutenberg in Wordpress.
img {
image-rendering: pixelated !important;
}I thought for sure "life" would be over by now but www.netaddress.com still looks like a 1990's website. There's some info about payments so I dunno if it stayed free, but it's crazy that it looks like you can still login if you have an account.
From their FAQ. Built to last.
I ... Want to go back guys.
I wish I kept I copy of “Sky’s Obervation Deck”, my crappy little Geocities page about Star Wars (I think…), proudly part of some random web ring, and surely with its share of <blink>.
But despite having at some point bookmarked a similar site/page that had hundreds of these little images… age and link rot and fragile bookmark services of old have long since lost the link , and now I don’t even remember what to search for to even find such little images, there was at least a few generally accepted nouns for them … perhaps the collective HN wisdom remembers these little images and can help me find them or just want to share more early internet stories about these kinds of images.
On a similar note, does anyone else find that new forum software UIs aren't nearly as nice and easy to navigate as the forum software of the early 2000s?
(Though I used to have much more powerful tools for Usenet and email.)
It took some getting used to but now I'm actually starting to prefer it to phpbb esque forums. Apart from the terrible space utilization that is.
- Begin signature with -- following be a space and carriage return
- Have up to four lines of text following that
- Figlet/ASCII art was allowed
I don't recall what imagery I had, but a few different lines that I had for a long while were:
- Of all the things I've lost, I miss my pants the most.
- In the beginning was nothing, which exploded.
- I beat the Internet. The last boss is really hard.
It was a different time.
One thing I'm glad has gone away is signatures that include a quote from someone famous (or net.famous), along with attribution. I'd skim a post, see the name of a person at the bottom, and associate that identity with that name, sometimes more than the name of the poster. At one point I was doing email and Usenet in Emacs, I wrote a feature to deemphasize sigs: https://www.neilvandyke.org/sigbegone/
- launch app
- type in URL
- BAM! Crash!
Using an HTTPS-stripping proxy I tested it on a 1995 Apple Macintosh PowerBook 540c with a 33 MHz 68040 CPU running Netscape 2
Here's the video, I got bored after 10 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX1EmE4xFog
Another comentor said "You'd have enough time to go eat breakfast, mow the lawn, take a shower, and then come back to it being only 58% done." and apart from mowing the lawn it's actually true.
The linked article/comments answer when they appeared but not why that size. Lots of guesses, no solid answers.
Horribly unbalanced but side splittingly funny when you'd take your friends head off with a the disc from the Xena TV show.
I made one for hetzner: https://jason.nabein.me/buttons/hoh-88.png
and one for Runbox email: https://jason.nabein.me/buttons/runbox-88x31.png
Although I should change Hetzner to Netcup now
Then it became an odd ad-hoc standard of that era of the internet, where you'd include 88x31 buttons because it was cool and popular. While others would be advertising their page based on how cool the buttons looked, and making them fit that standard 88x31 buttons so they were more likely to be included.
Edit: Oh, someone answered in another thread - appears to be as another person remembered here: https://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31.html
They were very commonly used in 90s websites. Typically, you would create one html page for a Nav bar on the left and multiple html pages for your content that would appear in a content frame. In creating a link on the nav, you'd have to specify to render the content in the appropriate frame.
They fell out of favor in the early-mid 00s due to issues with proper rendering on various screensizes and browsers. In addition, web crawlers could not know whether a page was supposed to be rendered within a navigation context or not, so you'd often find google linking to content pages but without the navigation frame included, leaving users stranded on the page.
iframes solved these issues to a large extent, along with better, more powerful CSS.
Still around and under active development.
Still has the same icon.
Still the best image viewer / converter / kitchensink.
And nowadays I can stream a live view of Tokyo in 4K on mt 3rd monitor just for some ambience... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOjmvL3e7Lc
Why 88x31 other than consistency?
(It's from a cyberpunk movie of a similar vintage. I forget the title.)
I mean it sincerely. My eyes!
Aren’t.
They.
Clickable?!