Updates in Month/Day/Year format:

2-28-17 Old-Site of the Day: GameCubeNetwork.com, in 2002. DenOfGeek just published an article examining the Nintendo GameCube's life & how that system's failure influnced Nintendo, so I thought this old GameCube news site might be interesting for today. This is just a few months after the GameCube was launched, & hopes for the system were still high.-->
Breaking News...for tomorrow... I just found out a site I love will close tomorrow. It's against the rules to say anything til then tho. I'm trembling; I'm so emotional I'm shaking. D': Bye Mozzie; I'll miss you. :'(
Ok. Just got an update. The site I love will announce that they're closing tomorrow but will stay open for 2 more weeks.
Tommorrow's news has put me in a poor mood. So here's A Bible Verse for Today: Ecclesiastes 1:12-14
They made the official announcement early: DMOZ.org is closing on March 14.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 475; Unique: 205; Wow...lots of views for one day. This may be the most visits I've had in one day. Thanks!

2-27-17 Old-Site of the Day: ClassicGaming.com, in 1998 This site was eventually rolled into IGN; if you type in the domain name today you'll be redirected to IGN's main page. I'm not sure if IGN kept all the info that was here tho. I know IGN doesn't host fan sites, like this Pac-Man site I enjoyed.-->
Bible Verse of the Day: Psalm 34:15
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 230; Unique: 92

2-26-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 20; Unique: 10

2-25-17 Old-Site of the Day: GreenIguanaSociety.org First appears in the Internet Archive in 2000. Still online, with an active message board. Layout hasn't changed very much, tho the adoption board is gone.
Bible Verse of the Day: 1 John 5:7-9
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 277; Unique: 117

2-24-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 21; Unique: 13

2-23-17 Old-Site of the Day: bobburns.mycottage.com Bob Burns collected sci-fi movie props durring the 50's, 60, & 70's. At the time props were considered disposable tools, not art in-and-of themselves. Here's some pictures. Online since 1997, last updated in 2015. Looks like he uses a Java program to make a menu for his site. The menu no longer works, but the site still has a nice collection of links to other sci-fi/fantasy film sites.
Bible verse of the Day: Mark 16:16
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 239; Unique: 120

2-22-17 Old-Site of the Day: Oxberry.com Orxberry makes camera equipment, particularly optical printers & film scanners. Their website first appears in Archive.org in 2001. It disappears for about 3 years before reappearing in almost it's current form. Optical printers were used in motion picture production to combine two or more images before computers could do so. They're still used in film restoration. Cinefex has a good article about their history.
Bible Verse of the Day: 1 Corinthians 1:10-20
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 89; Unique: 44

2-21-17 Old-Site of the Day: Frank's Disney Page Found this while trying to find info about The Black Cauldron on DMOZ. Hasn't been updated since at least the mid-90's. This site has a link to a review in IMDb's usenet archive; it's how I found out IMDb kept that stuff.-->
Bible Verse of the Day: Luke 9:51-56
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 166; Unique: 72

2-20-17 Old-Site of the Day: Kmart.com, in 1996 K-Mart's closing the first store they opened, so today I decided to post a link to their old website. Not bad, tho I'd like to see an online catalog, & they could've replaced that giant logo with something a bit more useful to the end consumer, like a printable coupon or a sale announcenment. Here's a link to an article about the 1st Kmart closing
Bible Verse of the Day: Numbers 13:21-24
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 98; Unique: 54

2-19-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 25; Unique: 12

2-18-17 Argonaut.com, in 1996 Argonaut software developed the 1st StarFox game. This is a bit later, has info on their 3D engine, and a cryptic list describing upcomming games. (They couldn't tell us much about them; contracts with publishers prevented it.) If you fast foward a bit to 1998 you'll find info about one of the games they were working on: Croc: Legend of the Gobbos. It's a fun platform adventure game, if you can get used to the sometimes frustrating camera.-->
Bible Verse of the Day: Job 41:1-8
Visits to WebSiteRing: 216; Unique: 95

2-17-17 Over 5,000 Views! Thank You! Old-Site of the Day: MagicDragon.com Here's another site with a cool domain name. Has info on an eclectic interests in categories. What do Scotland & as Sci-Fi have to do with each other? I don't know, but I do like the info they provide. According to Alexa.com the trafic stats you see on MagicDragon's front page are no longer accurate. Too bad; I'd kinda like to see an old site that gets 200k visits a day.
Bible Verse of the Day: Nehemiah 2:13-18
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 150; Unique: 70

2-16-17 IMDb Message Boards Closing File this under Breaking News. I just found out that IMDb is closing their forum, & from the looks of the announcement, they're going to delete all the content too. That bugs me. Even if I was never able to get an account (they wanted my phone or credit card number) I still liked the forum. There was a link to it at the bottom of every movie's page; the comments, tho sometimes harsh, provided extra info on the movie. I'll miss that. Doubly sad: the Internet Archive can't crawl IMDb's forum; the robot.txt file blocks them. Even the forum closing announcement is blocked.Here's an archived version of the anouncenent, for future reference. This should qualify as fair use, IMDb can't make money from a forum closing announcement, & it's a very small part of their site. If soemone disagrees I can remove this.
Old-Site of the Day: StationWagon.com Has information on station waggons (what else?) Started in 1997; stopped updating in 2002 when the webmaster's life got more complex. Used to have a messge board & a for sale section, but those are down now. Still has a nice article on station wagon history. Uses Comic Sans, if you have that font. Thanks to Lancer502 for the suggestion!
Bible Verse of the Day: Ecclesiates 3:14
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 207; Unique: 95

2-15-17 Bible Verse of the Day: Matthew 15:10-20
Old-Site of the Day: TheMushroomKingdom.net A Super Mario fansite, still updated today with large sections on the games, their history, characters, & spin offs. This is the 1st place I read that confirmed the Japanese Super Mario Bros. movie was real. They have an encylopedia, which they tried to turn into a wiki. Their forum members can edit it, but, as far I know, no one's used the feature. Here's what The Mushroom Kingdom looked like in 1999. At the time they were hosted by ClassicGaming.com; they wouldn't get their own domain name til later.
Here's TheMushroomKingdom's Banner:

And here's their 88x31 button:
They also have an interesting half-width button:
Visits ti WebSiteRing Today: 125; Unique: 64

2-14-17 Old-Site of the Day: AsiaDragons.com, in 1997 That's really a cool name isn't it? It's just another early web portal, but the name sticks out. There's a directory which may be fun to explore, tho it seems a bit on the small side. I do like the site's funky mid-90's styling; they're even funkier than Excite in 1996. Still AsiaDragons.com is well-designed & fairly easy to navigate. They had a feature where you could view a list of the latest sites submitted. Most look like spam, but there's a few interesting links.
Bible Verse of the Day: Deuteronomy 24:5
Almost forgot, today's Valentine's Day! Give your loved ones something sweet!
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 197; Unique 103

2-13-17 Old-Site of the Day: HappyPuppy.com, in 2000 A well-reguarded video game site. Started in the mid-90's by a small developer as a place to download game demos. Added reviews, previews, etc. Sold to TheGlobe, a chat room service, in the late 90's. TheGlobe was hit hard by the dotcom bubble, & their sites limped along til TheGlobe was sued for spamming MySpace users. Now HappyPuppy only exists on the Internet Archive, & as a parked domain name.-->
Bible Verse of the Day: John 1:1-5
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 84; Unique:39
2-12-17Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 9; Unique: 4

2-11-17 Bible verse of the Day: Proverbs 12:27
Old-Site of the Day: TheVideoGameCritic.com A large video game review site created by one person, Dave Mrozek. Still around and regulary updated, tho he had to get a new domain name. Pay those renewal fees promptly folks!-->
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 126; Unique: 56

2-10-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 16; Unique 12

2-9-17 Old-Site of the Day: Serebii.net This may be the oldest continually-updated Pokemon fansite. These are the oldest updates the site has archived; they're even older than what the Internet Archive has on the site. Some of the updates were made before Serebii bought a domain name; if anyone knows his original URL they might be able to find an earlier version in the Internet Archive. If you scroll down you can see remnants of the site's old layout. Cudos to Serebii for keeping it up, & for not creating one of the 100's of anti-pokemon sites created around 2000-2001. Here's a page with instructions for linking to Serebii. Includes a button with the site's old initials: SPP, for Serebii's Pokemon Page. Here they are, if his server's working correctly. The instructions said to link to the banners on his server, so that's what I did!


-->Bible Verse of the Day: 1 Peter 3:18-22
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 220; Unique 95

2-8-16 Old-Site of the Day: AlligatorAlley.com A pet store in Oklahoma city, specializing reptiles. No, they don't carry alligators, but they used to. I can't tell if they're still there or not; there's a link to their Facebook page, but the link's broken. Here's the earliest version of their site the Internet archive has: from 1999
Bible Verse of the Day: Proverbs 30:24-28
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 164; Unique: 74

2-7-17 Old-Site of the Day: AnimeCafe A rather well-designed anime site last updated in 2004. Has a large archive of reviews, trivia, & a parents guide. Here's the earliest version the Internet Archive has, from 1998. Looks like they still are using the same layout today. Kinda impressive.
Here's a button they provided for other sites to use when linking to them: They actually had a few larger versions too. Here they are on AnimeCafe's link page.
And here's my button, if you want to link to me:
Bible Verse of the Day: Mark 2:21-22
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 301; Unique: 127

2-6-17 Old-Site of the Day: jmargolin.com The homepage of an engineer who worked for Atari. Most of the articles are about his struggles enforcing his patents. Actually, I'm sympathetic. Remember, the term "patent troll" was invented by Intel because they were tired of being sued by folks who had an idea before they did. Reading someone's complaints isn't much fun tho. His writings on the early days at Atari are more interesting.
Bible Verse of the Day: Exodus 30:15
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 153; Unique: 75

2-5-17 Visits to WebSiteRing Toady: 9; Unique 7

2-4-17 Old-Site of the Day: tsr's NES Archive Before Wikipedia became the one place to find info on everything, fan sites like this thrived. This one has a lot of articles considering it was maintained by one person. There's great articles on the Famicom Disc System; this may be the 1st place to give in-depth coverage of it outside of Japan. Also has great articles on Tengen, the history of Tetris, & unlicensed NES games. Finding things on the site can be a chore tho.--> It's hard to develop a good hierarchical orginization scheme. When I first heard of web-logs, I thought they were a dumb idea, but today I realize I was wrong. Organizing a site chronologically is much easier than developing a good hierarchy, & with a search engine or a tagging scheme users can find what they need more easily than they could with a poorly-developed hierarchy. (Cudos to DMOZ for developing a fairly good hierarchy.)
Bible Verse of the Day: Acts 22:12-16
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 192; Unique: 89

2-3-17 Well, I moved the January's updates to the archive. I still need to tell my search engine to recrawl the site, but everything's organized now! Really, I should think of a better way to archive these...
Bible Verse of the Day: Matthew 5:16
Old-Site of the Day: BadMovies.org This was a great B-Movie site, with a large selection of reviews & a nice forum. Sadly, the web master stopped updating it a few years ago. Life changed; he got a family, & he had little time for updates. It's gone offline in the past 3-days; I linked to the last version the Internet Archive has. Maybe it'll come back. Hey, I can hope, right? At the very least I don't want a spammer to take it over; it still has a front page ranking on Google & Yahoo for the keywords "bad" & "movie." (I didn't check Bing, but Yahoo uses their index now, so there shouldn't be a difference.) I just checked the site again, & it's up, so here's a link to BadMovies.org's still-active forum, and here's a link to the earliest version of BadMovies.org in the Internet Archive, from 1998.
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 234; Unique: 129

2-2-17 Old-Site of the Day: Real.com, in 1997 I've had a certian amount of respect for RealPlayer for awhile now. Developing a streaming video/audio program is a significant accomplishment, as is surviving the dot-com bubble. While tracking users seemed horribly scummy in 1999 it seems like normal operations today, & most internet programs released in the 90's had major security flaws. Developers were so excited about the web's good possibilities that they neglected to think of the bad.
Bible Verse of the Day: Matthew 20:1-16
Over 4000 Views! Thank You!
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 134; Unique: 67

2-1-17 Old-Site of the Day: PageTutor.com I've tried twice this month to link to Xoom.com's old HTML tutorials. The 1st time I linked to an old version, without all the info I found interesting. The 2nd time I found the index file, but most of the info was hidden behind lots & lots of redirects. While trying to find a better version, I discovered that Xoom copied the tutorials from another site (with permission from the site's owners of course). Moreover, that site, PageTutor.com, was still online! Looks like it hasn't changed much since 2000.
Bible Verse of the Day: Genesis 1:16
Visits to WebSiteRing Today: 84; Unique: 50

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