4-30-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 40; Unique: 28
4-29-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 9:13
Old-Site of the Day: Classify.org A content rating system for websites. Provides a button for rated sites, plus age-related, & content-related meta tags. Started in 1994 or 1995.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 251; Unique: 130
4-28-17 Old-Site of the Day: Euroseek.com Euroseek was founded in 1996 as the first major European search engine. A series of sad, events led to them selling their engine to Entireweb. They're trying to return as a directory. You can read about Euroseek's history here. Here's what Euroseek looked like in 1998.
BibleVerse of the Day: Proverbs 11:3
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 151; Unique: 85
4-27-17 Old-Site of the Day: Thunderstone's Web Site Catalog Thunderstone's made enterprise search systems since the 80's. Here's one for the web. It tries to automatically organize sites into a directory. Not unusual; Infoseek tried to do the same thing in th emid-90's, & Northernlight presorted pages into categories to create a clustering search engine. Works fairly well, but it only indexes a site's home page, & some of the deeper categories need to be recrawled to remove dead links. Online since 1998, but Archive.org doesn't have anything earlier than 2013.
Also, here's an article on how NOT to do SEO, which brings us to our Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 12:2.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 318; Unique 148
4-26-17 Old-Site of the Day: OpenGRiD Google uses links to determine which sites are the best. Here's a proposal to let webmasters tag links to sites to help further improve results, from 1999. Tags would've included different topics and relevancy ratings for those topics.
Bible Verse of the Day:Proverbs 14:1
Visits to WebSiteRing today: 83; Unique: 48
4-25-17 Old-Site of the Day: HandHeldMuseum.com Ah, another old favorite. Has pics of handheld and tabletop electronic games, like the Nintendo Game and Watch series, organized by manufacturer, with gameplay descriptions & a brief review. Member of a webring for handheld game sites. Online since at least 2000.-->
Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 17:16
4-24-17 Old-Site of the Day: BallyAlley.com In depth info on the Bally Astrocade, a late 70's game system. The Astrocade was powerful for it's time, but it was poorly distributed, so it never achieved the success of the Atari 2600 or the Mattel Intellivision. This site is old enough to have a Yahoo group. Looks like the group's still active. Interesting thing about the Astrocade: it had a built-in BASIC interpreter. People could make their own games & save them to a tape. Some of it's commercial releases were homemade BASIC games.-->
Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 18:2
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 176; Unique 87
4-23-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 16; Unique: 15
4-22-17 Old-Site of the Day: UncleOdiesCollectibles A Lost in Space & Irwin Allen fansite, with a focus on collectibles. Still updated today.
Bible Verse of the DAy: Matthew: 9:1-8
And Google's finally crawled & indexed DinoMultiSearch. At least it came up when I checked.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 153; Unique: 75
4-21-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 18; Unique: 16
4-20-17 Forgive me for not describing yesterday's Old-Site; I ran out of time.
<Old-Site of the Day: World-of-Nintendo World-ofVideoGames was just a hub for several "World of" sites. Here's their Nintendo site. It's ugly, but I like the simpilicity, & there is a lot of information there. I wonder if you can still sign up for their email service...EDIT: Looks like you can, but it's no longer free. :(
-->Bible Verse of the Day: 1 Peter 3:1-4
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 294; Unique: 163
4-19-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Acts 6:12-15
<Old-Site of the Day: World-of-Video-Games
-->Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 153; Unique: 88
4-18-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Acts 4:8-12
<Old Site of the Day: Rob's Comics A comic book review & news site from 1999, hosted on Angelfire. It's kinda nice to see a comic site who's webmaster was more concerned with spreading info than making money. Has a button.-->
Renaming DinoSearch to DinoMultiSearch; there's another a search service named DinoSearch.
Over 10,000 Unique views since this site launched late last year. Thank You!
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 262; Unique: 128
4-17-17 <Old-Site of the Day: The Strange (and Rare) Videogames Pics Page The title tells you exactly what this page is about. I like learning about odd gaming systems, so when Unseen 64 mentioned this site I emailed myself the address imediately. It was started in the late 90's by a a game journalist, and had it's last real update in 2000. Good pics of the M2, an unreleased successor to the 3DO. -->
Bible Verse of the Day: Revelation 21:10-11
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 212; Unique: 102
4-15-17 Old-Site of the Day: The Search is Over An old ZDNet article reviewing search engines. Lists features of the major engines that existed in 1997. Nothing on Google yet, missing NorthernLight. Google was still a graduate student experiment, so it's absense makes sense. Not sure why Northern Light's missing. I've heard they were never able to capture much of the market. Nothing on WhatUSeek or ScrubTheWeb; guess WhatUSeek was too small, & I'm not 100% sure if ScrubTheWeb actually worked in 1997.
Bible Verse of the Day: Genesis 19:11
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 198; Unique: 99
4-14-17 Introducing DinoSearch An experimental search page for finding old websites. I haven't tested all of this, but that's the way software development seems to work these days. ;) It's just a few form elements; little harm can come of it, & it might be fun to try, so give it a spin!
Bible Verse of the Day: Acts 12:1-11
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 346; Unique: 190
4-13-17 Old-Site of the Day: The Ethical Specticle A newsletter about ethics, politics, & morals, online since '95. Not something I'd usually post, but I found something interesting there besides the site content. I found a working example of Excite for Web Servers! Here's what Excite's subject grouping looked like! More like Ask.com's old question breakdown than the sort of automatic-DMOZ-creator I hoped for but still fun to find. Here's the directory of EWS files. Everything's blocked with a password, and there's no query forum. :/ Alright, this isn't perfect, but if you replace "apple" in the URL I've linked to you can run a search. Alright, this works better. Again, replace "Apple" with whatever you want to look for. The previous query I gave you would look for documents similar to another document named "Apple" this query looks for documents containing the word apple or related terms. You'll have to experiment to see how to get multi-word queries to work.
Bible Verse of the Day: Jeremiah 29:10-14
Moved last month's updates to the archive.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 432; Unique: 236
4-12-17 Old-Site of the Day: Aliweb.com This was the 1st search engine for the web. It did not look at a web site's pages; it looked for a specially-made indexing document which listed page URLs with titles, descriptions, & keywords. Seems to default to OR searching; I prefer AND searching. Most of the links it returns are dead; I don't think they've ran their indexer in years.
Bible Verse of the Day: John 20:1-10
Visits to WebSiteRing: 138; Unique: 62
4-11-17 Anyone wanna learn COBOL? Reuters has an article stating that banks still need programers who know the old language to maintain their expensive-to-replace legacy systems. That leads me to the old-site of the day: COBOL-12. Online since at least 2004, it's a download page for a free COBOL compiler...for DOS. Actually, DOS is newer that the systems designed for COBOL; the language was designed in the 50's for mainframes & includes some legacy features which only make since in that environment, like line numbers in case someone mixed up the program's punchcards. The compiler doesn't impliment every aspect of the language, and it includes some non-standard features. That's another problem; if you got a job maintaining a legacy system you'd need to know not only the standards-compliant version of the COBOL, but also the ins-and-outs of whatever flavor the bank you worked for used.
Bible Verse of the Day: Hebrews 8:6
Visits to WebSiteRing: 131; Unique 64
4-10-17 Graphics Gems I found an old computer graphics book the other day, Graphics Gems III. Has tips & code for rendering 2D & 3D graphics. Some of the the code was included on a 5.25" floppy, but I don't have a 5.25" drive anymore. This site has the code!
Old-Site of the Day: RealTimeRendering.com This site hosts the Graphics Gems code. I can't find evidence that the Graphics Gems page has been around for more than a few years, but the site itself has been online since at least 2000.
Bible Verse of the Day: Mark 2:35
Visits to WebSiteRing today: 120; Unique: 64
4-9-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 38; Unique: 25
4-8-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Romans 6
4-7-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 17; Unique: 14
Crossed 9000 unique views today. Thank You!Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 132; Unique: 71
4-6-17 Old-Site of the Day: Special Effects: Titanic and Beyond A PBS website about special FX, from when Titanic came out in 1998. The main menu is an image map. Has a downloadable game, Attach of the 50ft. Chicken. There's different versions for Windows 3.x, 95/NT, & Mac Classic. Any hopes for a Linux/UNIX version? ;) The late 90's was an interesting time for FX. CGI was new and exciting, but movie makers still used alot of traditional FX, like glass painting. I wish they still used some of the older techniques. I know it's all art, but that's the point. If filmmaking is an art the techniques used to create a film are just as important as the completed film. Ah well, this isn't a movie site.
Bible Verse of the Day: Exodus 34:6-7
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 111; Unique: 56
4-5-17 Bible verse of the Day: Proverbs 20:1
Old-Site of the Day: Secrets of Sonic TeamThis was another one of my favorite sites in high school. Has photo galleries of Sonic the Hedgehog games, with an emphasis on unreleased versions. Also has an archived version of another Sonic site the webmaster liked. When the site stopped updating the webmaster suggested going to SonicCult for your Sonic proto needs. SonicCult's writers, however, cussed too much for my tastes. They've stopped updating too. Anyone know of a good place for Sonic the Hedgehog news?-->
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 128; Unique: 69
4-4-17 Old-Site of the Day: SuperSearch Another of Easynett's pages. This one doesn't have it's own domain name. It's just a huge list of 90's search services, but it looks like they were able to get some major advertisers to support it. Most of the links are dead. Still there's at lease one working link; this is where I 1st found WhatUSeek.
Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 11:23
Visits to WebSiteRing: 105; Unique: 52
4-3-17 Old-Site of the Day: iFindIt.com Easynett had a whole network of sites linked together with a banner. The banner's broken, but you can take the site names, add .com or .net to them, & find them. This one's a directory of web resources, including other directories. Sadly it was never finished, & most of the other directories are gone. (I've seen this site before in a list of old websites; that's how I knew about easynett.) Easynett also operates AllNY, a minor New York news site. It was still being updated last year. AllNY's a fairy good domain name; I'd bet they make most of their money from that site.
BibleVerse of the Day: Revelation 3:20
I downloaded a copy of BDD bot this weekend. Haven't got it working yet, but I did look at the code. It's been awhile since I programed anything, so it's a bit hard to wrap my head around it. The engine appears to be compliant with robots.txt, which is good. Looks like it ranks results by keyword frequency without considering position. Doesn't appear to support boolean queries. Don't know if it would work with https; may need to be modified to index newer sites.
Visits to WebSiteRing: 192; Unique: 97
4-2-17 Visits to WebSiteRing: 21; Unique: 10
4-1-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Psalm 119
Old-Site of the Day: Easynett.com Ouch, that's a colorful logo, isn't it? Their about page just goes on and on...
Happy April 1 guys and gals.
Visits to WebSiteRing: 167; Unique: 77