Author Archives: despens

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Best viewed with … ⁋ by despens

+ 2011-01-23

This box is the only place on the site not using the browser’s default font.

Original URL:  http://www.geocities.com/Eros_992165/index2.html

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Bizarre Counter ⁋ by despens

2011-01-23

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/EchoHeart9/index2.htm

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⁋ by despens

2011-01-23

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Tower/1244/

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We Love Math ⁋ by despens

+ + 2011-01-23

In the Tower of the EnchantedForest neighborhood, “MathMan” Bruce A. Titen published weekly entertaining math questions and riddles since Septemer 27th 1998. Apparently a teacher loving his profession, helping kids, parents and other teachers developing a passion for maths.

Today, some teachers are trying to stay in contact with their pupils through Facebook. A place without any wizards.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Tower/1133/

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Designing Security ⁋ by despens

+ 2011-01-23

From the Geocities URL http://it.geocities.com/teutoburgo/java/javi/JaVi.html there is a redirect to http://teutoburgo.web44.net/java/javi/JaVi.html, leading to an interesting piece of interface design.

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A nice place ⁋ by despens

+ 2011-01-23

The place you see in the above photographs is where I create my software. Where I listen to my music. Where I surf and read mail and where I spend my spare time. Sometimes, I play with my daughter. She likes to see colors (some screensaver or some special image, or the iTunes visual effects or the Tuxracer challenge).

From “Hobbies the Hobbiest” by Antonio Maschio. For every photo on his site, Maschio noted exposure time, focal length and ISO number.

Many private home pages are dealing with the computer setup of their creators, often with photo documentation and technical descriptions of the periphery. The home computer was still regarded as more personal than the web, the personal web page as an extension of the computer on the desk.

Original URL: http://it.geocities.com/tonibin/varia/mac.html

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A cautious approach ⁋ by despens

+ 2011-01-22

The Israeli author David Grossman kept a huge amount of data on Geocities, spread over several user accounts: tzafun, Davidgrossman, Familygrossman, grossmanarticles, … probably many more. All subfolders’ and files’ names are capitalized and meaningfully named. Pictures are only showing typographical headlines, no photos.

The hypertext is simple and easy to follow. Though it suffers a bit from over-categorization, there are many files that contain only a few sentences.

Grossman had an ambivalent view on the Internet:

The Copyright message in the footer of every page is quite interesting:

Although pages on Geocities and amateur web sites in general were based on copying graphics and text elements, many featured detailed copyright messages or dreaded “right click disabled” JavaScripts. The users felt the instability of the new medium and tried holding together their dear creations. Ironically, Geocities itself was probably the most brutal to the web pages hosted there, inserting floating logos and commercial banners into them that can not be seen anymore when browsing the Geocities Torrent.

Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/GrossmanTopics/

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Happy Birthday Chris ⁋ by despens

+ 2011-01-21

Chris’ friends made him a Geocities page for his birthday in 2003. Every congratulator got a present button with their name on it that would lead to a collection of GIFs. For example:

Can prefab facebook cakes, made by Susan Kare, compete with these?

Original URL: http://de.geocities.com/fbt_geburtstagchris/

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Globes ⁋ by despens

+ + 2011-01-21

Detail from beautiful globe navigaton:

Original URL: http://de.geocities.com/ferien_in_deutschland/2001/

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Old GIF, new browser ⁋ by despens

2011-01-21

On a page without a title, according to the meta tags created with “Internet Designer Pro 300”, I found this distorted GIF on a completely black page.

Usually I don’t like it that the current generation of Browsers treats everything like a photo and enlarges pixely GIF animations by blurring and mushing. This happens when for example an image is originally 32 pixels wide, but the browser is instructed via HTML to show it 128 pixels wide. Instead of exposing the pixels as they used to, today’s browsers use unpleasant interpolation, hiding their digital nature.

Artists working with enlarged pixel animations rightfully hated this change in GIF treatment, but after some time responded with image files that already contain the zoomed version, done with an algorithm of their choice.

I assume from the style of the source code that when the page was originally created, the image would be displayed like this:

Strangely, in this case the blurred version is much more fascinating. Not only does the flame look like a candle on a grave, it is already so old that the method of displaying images itself has changed. I almost see the years passing by.

Original URL: http://de.geocities.com/feloxxl/

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