Updates in Month/Day/Year format:
1-31-17 Old-Site of the Day: K9Web Many old websites got their start by archiving Usenet posts; we've already covered IMDb. Today's site contains FAQs about dogs copied from Usenet & checked by the webmaster. The 1st page contains the site's history; click on "Dog FAQs" at the top of the screen to access the FAQs.
BibleVerse of the Day: Luke 6
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 150; Unique: 71
1-30-17 Old-Site of the Day: Xoom.com's HTML Tutorials Yes, I covered Xoom earlier this month, & I linked to their HTML tutorials. Turns out I made a mistake; these are the tutorials I was thinking of. The one I linked to earlier only covers basic HTML; this one has sections for laying out your site with tables, for creating forms, & for using frames. They even have instruction for adding RealPlayer Audio files to your site!
Also of interest: Neonaut recently wrote a short article on the history of 88x31 buttons. It even has a button for this site! Thanks Neonaut! OwlMan has a list of 88x31 buttons that have been used on NeoCities, including WebSiteRing's button. Thanks OwlMan!
Bible Verse of the Day: Ezekiel 3:1-3
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 229; Unique 103
1-29-17 Visitors to WebSiteRing Today: 25; Unique: 18
1-28-17 Old-Site of the Day: KillerSites.com In the late 90's David Siegel wrote a book laying out ways to create visually appealing websites using avaliable technology. (Invisible GIFs, Nested Tables, etc.) This is the book's official website. While the methods, fonts, & color schemes have changed, the basic layout of most sites hasn't changed that much. There's a menu where you'd expect it, text where you'd expect it, titles where you'd expect them. Most modern sites don't have an intro page, tho. (Note: I like intro pages.)
Bible Verse of the Day: John 3:4-5
Visitors to WebSiteRing Today: 198; Unique: 89
1-27-17 Visitors to WebSiteRing Today: 10; Unique: 9
1-26-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Mark 8:34
Visitors to WebSiteRing Today: 90; Unique: 46
1-25-17 Old-Site of the Day: DpJohnson's Discount Stores of the 60's A multipage list of 60's discounters. Contains history info, shopping experiences, photos, ad scans, and lots of flashing gifs. The gifs stand in for the stores' neon lights. ;) DpJohnson has other pages, mostly about subjects that make him nostalgic. Note that WTV-Zone is an old web host. Today's site sits on a directory rented to the webmaster, who doesn't have his own domain name.
Bible Verse of the Day: Matthew 6:25
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 82; Unique: 48
1-24-17 Old-Site of the Day: Lycos.com, in 1996 Lycos was an early search engine which indexed the first few sentences on a page, plus the hundred or-so most-common words on a page. They also had 3 directories: a subject directory, a geographic directory and a Top 5% directory. Don't take that top 5% bit too literally; consider it as a poetic way of saying "these sites are the best-of-the-best." By the late 90's Lycos had become a web-portal like Yahoo, and they began to mirror DMOZ's directory. Lycos still exists, but it no longer has it's own web index. Here's what may be an earlier version of Lycos, when it was hosted on a university server.
While trying to find some cites on Lycos, I found this article defining search engine names. Thought it was interesting enough to post.
Bible Verse of the Day: Psalm 20:1
Over 3500 views! Thank You!
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 183; Unique: 93
1-23-17
Bible Verse of the Day: Psalm 147:4
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 182; Unique: 87
1-22-17 Visits to WebSiteRing: 22; Unique: 16
1-21-17 Old-Site of the Day: The Bad Movie Report A B-Movie Review site, hosted by StompTokyo. I used to like this site, but, looking it over, the webmaster used too many curse words. He does have a nice, multipart wright up on his experiances writing & working on an 80's direct-to-video feature: Making a Bad Movie: My Personal Nightmare. Recommended reading if you dream of making a feature film. Dr. Freex, the site's webmaster, never updated the site from a late 90's layout to a mid 2000's layout, like stomptokyo, so most of his internal links should still work.
Mozilla posted a series articles examaning web freedom: You can find a link to them on this page. Here's their article on web inclusiveness. While I can agree that trolls can hurt the web, I've got to wonder who's a troll. I'd much rather see community rules frankly based on a belief system instead of a blanket ban on mysterious "trolls," subject to whatever the mods believe counts as "trolling" or "hating." Hopefully that's not too political; I don't like to write on such things. The web might become more open if ISPs still gave their customers a little bit of webspace with their accounts. I found our old sign up paperwork a few months ago with instructions for setting up a homepage, but, when I typed in the address to do so, I found that the homepage service was long gone. Searching for it brought up an interesting collection of orphaned Southwestern Bell pages tho.
Here's a Bible Verse for today: Ecclesiates 10:20, with multiple translations.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 191; Unique: 88
1-20-17
Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 29:11
Here's something else I found interesting: A list of HTML tags orginized by HTML version. Useful, if you want to create a site which should work on most web browsers of a certain time period, or if you want to keep your site working properly in modern browsers. Some tags are obselete. This is especially true of tags made by a browser's designers instead of a standards committee. (Mozilla & Microsoft added a lot of tags in the mid-to-late 90's, xhtml was supposed to eliminate them; HTML 5 kept a few. There's a good wright up on it at StackOverflow.)
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 124; Unique: 63
1-19-17 Old-Site of the Day: Chubba.com Chubba is a metasearch engine made by WhatUSeek. In the late 90's it mixed results from WhatUSeek with results from major engines; today it just offers an alternate way to search WhatUSeek & a few other web resources. I'm actually using the "site search soloution" mentioned on their main page. It works fairly well, tho I have trouble getting it to index every page. Here's what Chubba looked like in 1999. Not too different from what it looks like today, tho the color scheme & logo are different. I love their "Unbiased Feedback," & the messages at the bottom of the page. The feedback form is very casual, like WhatUSeek's old resubmission message.
Bible Verse of the Day: Philippians 3:13-14
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 143; Unique: 70
1-18-17 Old-Site of the Day: atext.com in 1997 Now owned by a corperate texting service, but in the 90's it was owned by Architext. Excite was made by a group of students at Stanford. They founded a company named Architext to market their search engine. This is their corporate site. Apparently Excite's logo has a name: LEP or Little Excite Person. Cute. While we're talking about Excite, we might as well mention that they made a freeware search engine for websites: Excite for Web Servers. It's easy enough to find saved searches, but it's impossible to find a copy. That may be for the best; it had some unpatched security holes. Still, I'd like a copy, for historical purposes. That, & I'd like to see how it worked. Here's a saved search from Excite for Web Servers. That's not from the Wayback machine; I found it with a Google search. Somehow it's existed hidden on someone's web server for 10+ years. Google actually brought up several saved searches when I was trying to find a copy of Excite for Web Servers. My guess is the program saved popular queries as regular pages for quick access. Here's Excite's site about their freeware site search engine; archived: EWS entrance. Click on the low-bandwith version; the high-bandwith link's broken.
Bible Verse of the Day: Genesis 1:27
Visits to WebSiteRing today: 156; Unique: 87
1-17-17 Old-site of the Day: StompTokyo.com I loved (& to some extent still love) this b-movie site, but it hasn't been updated in years. Moreover, their main page no longer has a working link to their review index. Luckily, IMDb links to a few of their old reviews. Here's a review of Over Drawn at the Memory Bank, a generally poorly-recieved PBS sci-fi special, which StompTokyo's reviewer loved. This page has a working link to a list of their other reviews, which are a fun read. Note that their ratings use 1-5 lava lamps instead of 1-5 stars? Groovy.
Bible Verse of the Day: Psalm 130:3-4
Over 3000 views! Thank You!Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 123; Unique: 66
1-16-17
2,900 Views! Thank You!
Bible Verse of the Day: Job 26:5-10
Site Maintence: The search engine hasn't been working correctly for the past few days. Just tried it, & it looks like it's fixed.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 188; Unique: 81
1-15-17 Sorry, No Update Today. Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 5; Unique: 3
1-14-17 Old-site of the Day: What-U-Seek, in 1996 What-U-Seek was one of the many search engines released in the mid-90's. I like this one's casual feel; note their instructions for resubmitting your site. It's still around, but it's become increasingly directory-like. Still, it has a crawler, so it still counts as a search engine.
Bible Verse of the Day: Deuteronomy 8:2-3
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 184; Unique: 96
1-13-17 Sorry, No Update Today. Visits to WebSiteRing today: 9; Unique: 7
1-12-17 Old-Site of the Day: HotBot Inktomi didn't have a publically accessible search page; they licensed their results to other companies, the first of which was HotBot. HotBot also had a small directory of major websites. It's not quite as much fun to browse as DMOZ, Yahoo, or Infoseek's directory, but it's still useful. In the early 2000's Inktomi & Goto/Overture had a good thing going. When the dotcom bubble hit other major engines the engines licensed results from Inktomi & Overture. Then came Google.
Bible Verse of the Day: Mark 16:16
Here's a button if you want to link to WebSiteRing:
Copy the button; don't just link to it.
Visits to WebSiteRing today: 156; Unique: 74
1-11-17 Old-site of the day: WebCrawler in 1996 WebCrawler needs no introduction; it was the 1st search engine to index every word on a page. It also had a web directory, so it's still useful for finding old websites. Now owned by Infospace, it no longer has it's own index; it delivers a mix of results from other engines. (Bing, Google, and Yandex, last I heard.)
Bible Verse of the Day: Psalm 63:5-7
Visits to WebSiteRing today: 73; Unique 34
1-10-17 Old-Site of the Day: SearchKing.com Search King calls itself a search engine, but it has no spider. Really it's a volunteer edited directory, common in the late 90's. Unlike DMOZ, Go, or Zeal, SearchKing lets each volunteer set up their own portal. Of course there is a set up fee. Today the directory is largely empty, and you can't find a listing on their main page; you need to know the URL, or you could follow this link: SearchKing Directory. Still, the webmaster has some interesting articles; find them here: SearchKing Portal Partner Press. SearchKing's probably best known for suing (and loosing against) Google. Here's details on SearchKing's lawsuit.
Bible Verse of the Day: Matthew 22:36-40
Visits to WebSiteRing today: 59; Unique: 36
1-9-17 Old-Site of the Day: Anapsid.org Melissa Kaplan kept iguanas until 2013. From the mid-90's til then she gathered tons of info about reptile care which she put online to help other keepers. The breath and depth of info here is fascinating, but word to the wise, some of it may no longer be accurate. Use more than one resource.
Bible Verse of the Day: Ephesians 6:2-3
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 71; Unique: 41
1-8-17 Visits: 3; Unique: 3
1-7-17 Visits: 20; Unique: 12
1-6-17 Xoom.com, a late 90's Webhost/Portal Xoom.com started as a place for free downloads. Pretty soon, they offered free EVERYTHING, including hosting with unlimited space and bandwith. (This version is a bit earlier, before they dropped the limits.) Needless to say, they went broke faster than you can say "Dot-com Bubble." Had a nice HTML tutorial tho.
Bible Verse of the Day: Galatians 5:22-23
Visits to WebSiteRingToday: 44; Unique 26
1-5-17 Old-Site of the Day: ScrubTheWeb in 1997 ScrubTheWeb started in the early 90's as a site for teaching people about search engines. In 1996 they started building a search engine, tho it looks like it wasn't working til '97. Still online, the results aren't bad; for awhile it was my first choice for searches. It does not use backlinks to determine relevancy, so popular sites aren't always #1, but the engine does have good advance search features, and I like to find overlooked sites anyway. WARNING: there's no family filter, so some queries may return a few embarrassing links. (I actually emailed the site to find out about it's history; some of this info comes from them. I'll have to get permission to publish those emails...) Here's what ScrubTheWeb looks like today.
Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 8:13
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 171; Unique: 122
1-4-17 Old-Site of the Day: The Spider's Apprentice No, this isn't about someone learning to be an arachnid; it's about search engines. Has info on major search engines of the late 90's and early 2000's, including how to use them, ratings based on catagories, etc. The site says Google has the largest index, with AllTheWeb comming in 2nd place. Altavista offered the best search refinement options, with AllTheWeb comming in 2nd. Poor AllTheWeb; always #2, never #1.
Bible Verse of the Day: Deuteronomy 5:24
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 108 Unique: 62
1-3-17 Well, this is a bit nerve-wrecking, but I've moved the last year's updates to an archive file. If you want to view them, click on "View Older Updates" at the bottom of the page. Hopefully, I didn't mess anything up.
Old-Site of the Day: Galaxy.com in 2000 Galaxy.com is a web-directory, perhaps the first searchable directory on the web. I love it's features and layout, but it's poorly maintained; most links lead to parked domains. In 2000, however, directories were still important, and Galaxy was still well-maintained.
Bible Verse of the Day: Psalm 100
Visitors Today: 246; Unique: 161
1-2-17 Sorry again. No update Today. Visits: 3; Unique 3
1-1-17 Sorry, No Update Today. Visits: 9; Unique: 7
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