This is such a great suggestion, actually.
So, tell us, what *did* it feel like to make your first website?
https://donotreply.cards/en/do-post-what-it-felt-like-to-make-your-first-website
(via @danhon https://dan.mastohon.com/@danhon/113018272551284688)
I was ~15. After much begging, I'd got access to the internet. My ISP offered the usual for the time - internet, email and usenet access, plus web hosting.
I was the kind of kid who had got used to exploring GUIs. I wasn't a coder but I was pretty computer literate when I could click around. I never chose the "recommended settings" for anything and of course I had found Weezer's Buddy Holly video.
I had no idea where to start to be honest. I went exploring and found Word could save to HTML...
Not only would Word save to HTML, but it would let you edit it too, flipping back and forth editing the code or editing the visual stuff in the usual Word way, and seeing how code changed:
https://front-end.social/@sarajw/112218176408848931
(skip to the thread payoff: https://front-end.social/@sarajw/112220736071571763)
This is how I learned how to build websites!
It was love at first upload. My URL was saraw.clara.net. Nothing to be seen in the Wayback Machine I'm afraid, first save in 1999, and it saved only the frameset. I was using framesets!
Do I want to try and install Word 97 just to prove to myself there really was an HTML editor built into it? I swear that's how I learned HTML. I think for my personal history I need to know. And take some decent screenshots...
I loved it. I still love it.
I still don't really know why it's so satisfying to build up a web page (not even a site, just a pretty page will do) from scratch like that, why turning plain text into fancy webby stuff was such fun. Is such fun.
And it can be so *quick*. I think that's one reason why burnout is high lately - there's so much overhead now and... Not always for any good reasons.
All the overhead (DevOps, frameworks, all the stuuffffff) gets in the way of change stuff! See results!
A throwback memory appeared:
The first summer after discovering all this, I suffered my first long period without internet on my dad's boat - addicted already - and what did I do? I planned a website design.
I had a block of squared paper - and you know the "cool S"? I first drew up a whole font in the same style, and used it to make titles to use as headings and as buttons for my links within my new navigation-to-be. I coloured them in with neon highlighters.
I scanned them when I got back 😄
@sarajw This is why I love @eleventy. For my money, it's as close to what I wanted once I figured out what I was doing 25+ years ago — reusable templates, a bit of processing, and the option for total control, should I need it.
For what it's worth, I started in 1996 with Frontpage in my school's brand-new Windows 95 lab during my senior year. I quickly found it wasn't cutting it, and I would need to actually learn HTML to achieve my vision (the best Boba Fett fan page on all of Geocities).
@sarajw @eleventy Who needs the internet archive — I have it on my actual website!
I wrote a post about it a few years ago, where I link to both a 1998 and 1999 version of it.
https://illtron.net/2019/04/boba-fetts-lair/
The earliest working capture on the Internet Archive is the 1999 version, from 2001. I'm a digital pack rat, and so I'm really bummed that I don't have my very oldest stuff.
@Chris oh gah, that's so cool.
I lost all my earliest stuff years ago after I wiped and reinstalled a PC. I decided all the old data didn't need to come with and could just sit on an external hard drive, which itself got wiped at some point. There's a whole load of stuff I'm so sad I don't have any more 🥲
@sarajw Yeah, my very oldest stuff was only ever on PC-formatted floppy drives since I did all of it in the school computer lab at first. Everything on Geocities was overwritten every time I made a change, since it was all pasted into the File Manager. I actually have old school reports, poetry, and other assignments from the mid-'90s though.
There may be chance the floppies still exist in some box, but I doubt they'd work even if I had a floppy drive to read them.
Clara.net. goodness. My dad was super angry at me for getting Claramail because he thought that email had to be kept on a computer not accessed through a web page. 😑
I can date it to 96-02 ish before it went down.
Not an experience I'm used to having here, but fair. 😀
Goodness, you look so much younger! 😀
96 was 6th form college. 😀
My dad was an early adopter of the internet and went on bulletin boards. Downloaded some games off them for me.
I'd probably have been more of a technical person if he hadn't given me an inch thick book on programming in Basic and said "work your way through that".
When I was 14. :-/
There are so many resources and games out there. I really enjoy gamification of learning but I'm a big games nerd. 😀
@sarajw my first ISP offered email, Usenet and IRC, no web space. When I got my own phone line and ISP I got 5mb of space that I could FTP to.
I made my pages with notepad.exe and followed tutorials from the local Netguide magazine and htmldog
@flamed I did quickly migrate to notepad once I realised that Word kept inserting useless HTML elements 😄 but it was the WYSIWYG effect it had which got me started :)
Of course once I realised I could just open the .html file in the browser and refresh it after every change, the whole Word interface seemed very cumbersome. Everyone gotta start somewhere!
I remember W3Schools being very helpful back then, as well as view-source of course 🤩
@sarajw I spent days downloading a shareware/trial version of Front Page 97, connection kept disconnecting…
I wound up with a cracked version of Dreamweaver which I spent time in the code editor part.
CuteHTML was another editor I used in the early days as I also used CuteFTP for getting my websites onto the servers.
@sarajw at some point I ended up with an official boxed version of Front Page. It got leant to someone and I never saw it again.
I don’t remember the exact order of getting/using these tools but they were all in the period between 96-99
@sarajw @danhon I believe it was from playing with a demo copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver from a magazine cover CD. Hosted on the free hosting that came with Freeserve (our ISP back then).
Everything seemed magical. The web was not yet commercialised; it was a sea of interlinked pockets of enthusiasm and nerdery and friendliness. You could bump into new ideas and concepts constantly, never sold anything. It truly felt like the future anyone would want. And *I* could be part of it?! Stunning.
@sarajw @danhon Man, the "Bert is Evil" days and earlier. I still remember playing with Netscape Navigator on Windows 95 before we got our Modem. On a Pentium 166MMX with 16Mb RAM and a 1.2Gb HDD. Wondering what the internet would actually be like at home - I don't think we even had it at school yet. Browsing the Help page, watching the logo of the world spin. Plowing through all the menu items to see what was there.
I miss those days.
I had been on a Pipex 1 day course on html in Jan ‘95 and coded up my first page, then went on to build up a site and push it live. I remember being really scared that anyone in the world could see and read what I had designed but the excitement was extreme. This really was something new.
Was 3 or 4 days before it got its first visit. Bit of a letdown, but set expectations for the future! 🤣
@sarajw I was in my mid-teens as far as I can tell. The timestamp on this file is 1997 but it could have been earlier. Hosted on Compuserve, then Geocities and finally Tripod before I got my own hosting.
Making your own website was liberating. You could literally look at how other sites were built and very easily copy/paste things you liked, expressing yourself through what you created.
Good luck doing that with a React or Angular site.
Oh, crikey. Pale text on black tiled backgrounds b/c Netscape v0.x supported that kind of malarkey. Caslon old face b/c online-goth was A Thing, and then slow hacking about with PotatoShop to build glitchy animated GIFs for title images.
I guess there was a lot of zine culture in what I was attempting, but with less pritt and more swearing.
@sarajw @danhon It was the space year 2000. I was 16, and my secondary school class had finished our GCSEs and were starting to drift apart.
Freeserve was all the rage in the UK. Free internet access! Free email addresses! Free webhosting space! I was making the most of the first two and not using the third at all. (1/3)
…so I put together a website for my year group. It hosted photos from our prom, a messageboard, and lots of easter egg pages. I built the entire thing in Microsoft Publisher.
People really looked forward to updates, and the messageboard was very popular for a while. The school itself even asked if we could do something official which rebellious 16-year-old me politely declined while we made fun of the headteacher. (2/3)
@bendaubney Freeserve was great! Mum was much happier with the phone bills once I moved onto it, hahah. I also had an online friend with a cable connection, who had a backup dialup account which he let me use for free for ages :D
Somewhere I have a fsnet website on the web archive I think, hmmm... Those early sites are so full of teenage overshare though 🫣
Sara Joy 
Jake in the desert
Georgimus Prime
Chris Coleman
Frank Skornia
PJ "Vote Green" Coffey
fLaMEd
Quester 🌤️🌈
Matt Wilcox
Simon Cox 
GreenSkyOverMe (Monika)
Ben Buchanan
Bob Monsour
Michael Hanscom
Fox Lee
Daniel Durrans
Dervish
Julia Rez
Twobiscuits🚴♂️ 
Lauren Herda
maique 
Ben Daubney 