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Yahoo Doing What They Do Best ⁋ by olia

+ 2014-08-26

Sad news: five years after the deletion of Geocities, Yahoo sysadmins found out (I hope not from this blog) that some parts of the empire are still visible and usable and made a new clean up, replacing profiles and directories with the page promoting their smallbusiness hosting service.

They even removed profiles of GeoCities Plus users, including the glorious spunk1111/, the famous ASCII artist Joan G. Stark. Though the promise was that those pages will stay up. “If you’re a Yahoo! GeoCities Plus customer, your friends and family can still view your web site as usual. However, you can no longer access your files or update your pages with GeoCities tools” was stated on a help page which is erased as well, but the Internet Archive remembers.

As my Clear GIFs collection vividly shows, yahoo blocked access to the two transparent pixels on their server
pixel.gif, used in the layouts of Geocities itself, and visit.gif, the web beacon that was tracing accesses to Geocities pages.

The pixel c.gif is still there though. Yahoo blocked access to the clipart directory now, but c.gif they didn’t dare to touch. It supports our earlier assumption that this file is a corner stone of the WWW, and if one pulls it out, the world build with HTML will collapse, burying underneath the ruins of old websites modern services, online shops, social networks and the Large Hadron Collider.

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Skywriting at Megarave ⁋ by despens

+ + + 2014-08-16


Skywriting (excerpt)
86 video/MIDI sound captures of Geocities home pages featuring welcome_plane.gif

Megarave
Kunsthaus Langenthal, Switzerland
28 August – 16 November 2014

Thanks to the Geocities Research Institute’s intern, Joel Holmberg (olia-3), who helped identify copies and variations of welcome_plane.gif.

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Good bye, Netscape ⁋ by olia

2014-06-14

One day in 1998, Pure10 moved into the Dreamworld suburb of the Area51 neighborhood, house #6246. He build his home page using Intel’s Web Page Wizard. He made index2.html with more pictures, and index3.html which tells more about him, and Index.html with “Possibly more stuff to come”.

In an attempt to modify the template he made quite some copy-paste mistakes and messed up the HTML syntax. To the search engines of that time he wrote:

Matt, Pure10, pure10, PURE10, dudes, dudettes, corrado, Corrado, G60, Suzuki, Katana, waverunner, map, Mcmurray, McMurray, PA, rmc, RMC

Late in the evening on March 17th 1999 he revisited his Geocities home and noticed: “Hmm, haven’t really done anything with this for a long time, maybe I should, huh ? Okay, okay…” Pure10 uploaded a new pic.

He added links to the Corrado Club of America, weather forecast for Pittsburgh, USA airways and stock market charts, then sent his files to the server for the last time. He made it in the first minutes of a new day, at 00:24:42. This is how his homepage became the first one to be last updated o the 18th March 1999 — the day when Microsoft released Internet Explorer 5.

Pure10’s page becomes the first one rendered in Internet Explorer in our archive and to appear in this new frame on Tumblr. 15 years later it is the date when we at the Geocities Research Institute say good bye to Netscape and switch to Internet Explorer.

Dragan Espenschied justifies this move:

With the release of Internet Explorer 5 and it being shipped with Windows 98SE and Windows 2000, this browser can be considered to be the default window into the web for a long period of time.

We don’t do it with light heart. We know that our followers will be disappointed, we will miss it ourselves, but to continue with Netscape would mean to go nostalgic, to ignore history.

The framing of Netscape made every page look great, with Explorer it is different. To quote Dragan again:

While Netscape considered itself a product with a strong identity and therefore very recognizable visual design,1 Internet Explorer tried to look like an utility, the web becoming part of the operating system.‎ So while Explorer copied the structure of Netscape’s user interface, its appearance is more modest and transparent. With its toolbar being smaller than Netscape’s, web users gained a few more pixels, the Microsoft-Windows-only ActiveX plugin interface, smooth Java integration and many proprietary tags like <marquee> opened up new forms of expression — yet in hindsight Explorer’s staggering dominance is regarded as a dark age of the web. For most users, an actual loss was experienced through the lack of Explorer’s support for the <blink> the tag — a widely used way of bringing animation to the web, introduced by Netscape in 1994.

One thing is for sure: you will see much fewer home pages with garbled text on them. While Netscape strictly adhered to the HTTP protocol and displayed non-latin alphabets  only if the headers were set correctly — which many users did not know about –, Explorer tried to find out on its own what character encoding a page might be written in, and was guessing right more often than not.2

So, enjoy a glimpse into the web of 1999 written in Vietnamese, Russian, Korean and Chinese.

  1. See an overview of how Netscape looked on different platforms at Two Rovers Consulting, the designers in charge for it. [↩]
  2. We also have improved on the HTTP headers sent to Netscape in the meantime, some of the older home pages now would show up with the right character set if visited again. [↩]
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“All the animations were mine. None of the graphics were.” ⁋ by olia

+ + 2014-06-12

As mentioned in the post about the earliest under construction signs, there is not much sense in knowing what exactly was the first under construction sign or rainbow bar and who exactly created them. At the same time it is a great opportunity to talk to the people who made graphics, or wrote scripts, or put together collections that were used by many and influenced the web. By this you get reminded about the motivations of early web users, their idea about the state and the future of the WWW, and learn about their work flow.

It was a pleasure to talk to Steve Kangas, the creator of one of the earliest under construction signs, the digging man . The sign can compete in popularity only with the under construction ribbon. Steve is also the author of the restless counter . He made the warm welcome to the internet and left an important reminder null. In 1995 he put these and other graphics (99 in total) together on the Animated Icon Browser website. It is still online!

On the page about himself Steve Kangas recalls:

“Early in 1995 I saw a graphical web browser and decided that the web was the most staggeringly awesome thing happening on the planet. I quit my profession and have devoted my time since then to exploring the web, spending an average of 10 hours a day online, either surfing or creating web projects. This is an excessive amount of time for any one pursuit – more time than it will be possible for me to sustain – but, well, it was worth it (in my opinion). I felt like a spectator at the Big Bang (“isn’t that neat! Imagine the universe that will grow from this!)”

Al the GIFs on Animated Icon Browser look familiar, they all became viral. They are all superstars. And there is something they all have in common: they are obviously not made by the same person. I asked Steve if the graphics were made by him or if he knows who are the authors. He said:

All the animations at http://209.197.100.244/mmmm/ were mine. None of the graphics were.

All the animations used pre-existing graphics, most of which seemed fairly commonplace at that time. I have no idea who created the original graphics. Many of them came from a site called “Icon Browser” (that’s why I used the phrase “Animated Icon Browser”). […] It was an influential site at the time – people everywhere used their icons. Maybe you can find it somewhere.

My goal at that time was just to advertise the possibility of animation. It’s hard to imagine now, but when Netscape 1.1 came out everybody was excited about the possibility of using font colors other than black and link colors other than blue. When Netscape 2.0 came out, it was mind-blowing, by comparison, that images could actually animate.

I spent many hours in Photoshop, modifying popular icons frame by frame, trying to keep file sizes under 3K. That’s the most absurd thing now, but it really seemed necessary then.

Of course I looked for the Icon Browser site. Believe it or not, it is still here http://www.ibiblio.org/gio/iconbrowser/. Put online in February 1994 and last updated in 1998. 7296 icons for all possible themes and interactions.


Look, the third pic in the 4th row http://blog.geocities.institute/wp-content/uploads/eye1.gif it is the one Steve Kangas used for his crying icon .

The Icon Browser collection is huge and eclectic. You don’t even have to ask if the graphics are original or found. But i contacted their author Gioacchino La Vecchia , early web adopter and founder of the Italian W3C . He confirmed, that all the 7296 GIFs were collected by him, not created. He saw himself as a search engine, as an aggregator:

Icons crawling was manual. Download or extraction adapted case by case […] at that time was not easy to find icons for web sites or applications.
No image search was available (like it is today with Google). So IconBrowser was a primary resource for web and apps developers.

The early web was very eclectic, because web pages were constructed using elements copied from other sites and different collections, from desktop icon collections published on cover CDs, sample files included with graphics or animation software packages, or files that have been popular before the WWW, on BBSes or the UseNet.1 And, I think now, that Steve’s and Gio’s collection’s were influential because you could find there all kinds of stuff. And I think now that being eclectic by themselves they were advocating and pushing this style.

The next pic is a screen shot from a typical homogeneous clip art collection to be found on CDs attached to web design manuals of that time. Its good that early users did more surfing than reading.

  1. see also Dancing Girl File Not Closed Yet [↩]
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13 000 followers ⁋ by olia

2014-06-06

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“looks so different…almost like fb” ⁋ by olia

+ 2014-05-29

Myknet is on WordPress now. This news will not make it into international headlines. If you don’t belong to rural and remote First Nations of Ontario you are not on myknet.org, and probably never ever heard about this free hosting service for aboriginal peoples of Canada.

I got to know about it two years ago from the Austrian anthropologist Philipp Budka, and since then was surfing it regularly. … continue reading →

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What was the first Under Construction and who cares? ⁋ by olia

+ 2014-05-09

Today, looking at the “oldest” (last updated 1995-09-30) page in our archive, I again found myself in a chain of thoughts that I usually try to avoid, because they are formed by the questions that are time and energy consuming to answer … and these answers are not important for anything. Pure сuriosity and avidity.

So, yesterday I looked at the page, saw the under construction sign,

and asked myself and the Internet: How old is this particular file? Was it the first ever Under Construction sign? What was the first Under Construction sign? On what page did it appear? Who did set the trend to talk about the pages as being “under construction”? What was the first page “under construction”?

Internet Archive doesn’t remember. Google doesn’t know. Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t answer.

Anybody can help? Does anybody here know somebody who knows the guy who made the first Under Construction image?
And what to do with similar questions in the future? To ask them in a blog? On Twitter? Put an ad in the Guardian or the New York Times? How to reach users who were making their pages in 1993-1995?

On the other had, as I mention above, getting answers to these questions doesn’t help to understand the web of the 90’s and didn’t bring me closer to the question that I really want to answer: What did it mean to make a webpage? Maybe even the opposite, such facts are turning history into anecdotes.

As for Under Construction idiom:

I know that it was not used on the very first CERN web page.

This screenshot comes from the book The Whole Internet, 1993. Ed Krol annotates:

It’s important to realize that the home page and everything else that’s available is not “built-in” to your browser. […] Therefore, don’t be surprised if you see text that doesn’t match our sample screen. The Web is constantly changing; that’s part of its beauty.

But already in 1994 — if to believe the screenshots in the book Using World Wide Web, published that year — one could read on the home page of the World Bank at www.worldbank.org “This World wide web Server is under construction and there will be many changes in the immediate future as more data becomes avalable for publication.”

Encyclopedia Britannica (www.eb.com at that time) also warned its visitors: “The World Wide Web database is under construction.”

census.gov used a different phrase: “construction continues”.

Stanford’s WWW Virtual Library referred to their Mechanical Engineering document as being “under continuous construction”.

And this particular line was around already in September 1995.

related:

update 10 May 14:
Jason Scott reminded me about the 5 years old the thread on Metafilter where user twoleftfeet states that in was him who made the first UC icon in 1995. It is great to know the author of glorious null and the website he comes from.

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GIFs, Animated GIFs and GIFs formerly known as Animated ⁋ by olia

+ 2014-04-05

We live in a world where people say “GIF”, but mean “Animated GIF”. In the 1990’s, and during the first years of the new century — or lets say before this format’s glorious comeback — there were two genres: GIFs and Animated GIFs. There were collections of GIFs and Animated GIFs, there were famous GIFs and famous Animated GIFs. I was reminded about it by the welcome message on the Sailormars Transparent GIF page.

Here are transparent GIFs of my favorite sailor senshi, Hino Rei. I have collected some over the web and made some of my own.

In January 1999, when the page was last updated, it was clear that the GIFs behind the link would be static. Here are some of them.

But why then GIFs and not JPEGs, especially knowing that images are technically scans of magazine pages? It is because of transparency. And the author of the collection manifests it clearly in the title of the site: Transparent GIFs! The ones that will work great on your own Sailor Mars page, regardless the color or texture of your background.

I think that today when we start to acknowledge another retro hero — the clear one pixel or invisible GIF — it is the right moment to remind that in the 90’s, the term Transparent GIF meant not an invisible pixel, but a GIF that is “cutted out”, that uses a principal feature of GIF89a format: transparent color. And their role in web site design can hardly be overestimated.

When a browser encounters the transparent color, the browser doesn’t show any graphic information, which enables the web page background to show through. That’s how Web pages create the illusion of non-rectangular figures.”
Creating Geocities Websites, p.169

Properly anti-aliased images with transparency are the basic building blocks of a third-generation site
Creating Killer Web Sites, p.52

So, GIFs could be rectangular and transparent, static and animated. And there was another subcategory which I would call “GIFs formerly known as animated”. These are graphics that were originally animated, got famous as animated, but can be found as still elements on quite some pages.

The web got static explosion …

… static fire …

… and a cat that is just there.



Why would users stop the animation? I see three reasons:

  1. The animation was stopped to be used in the background in times before animated backgrounds became supported with Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 4. Alternatively, the site’s author used a browser that didn’t support GIF animation at all and got only the first frame. This is BTW what Twitter made earlier this year with all the animated backgrounds of user profiles: it converted Animated GIFs to one frame PNGs. Mine looks like this now. And everytime I open my twitter timeline now I think I’m on Netscape 3 again.
  2. The user screwed up during uploading or downloading the animation or a technical error damaged the file.
  3. The author of the page read web design manuals before designing the page and got convinced that animated GIFs should be used with the greatest caution and be avoided completely if possible.

I know only one design manual from the second part of the 90’s that didn’t object animated GIFs, Creating Geocities Websites, published 1996. Other authors were quite straight about it.

David Siegel in Creating Killer Websites, 1996, mentions:

If you want your visitors to go out to lunch while your page loads, fill it full of 8-bit dithered GIFs …
p.137

Jakob Nielsen in Designing Web Usability, 1999, strongly suggests:

Ask yourself whether your point would be communicated as well by a non-animated graphic
p.143

Paul E. Robichaux in Jazz Up Your Website in a Weekend, 1997, reminds that animation is distracting and prolongs downloading time. He warns:

[…] don’t overdo it. Enough people have expressed annoyance with overuse of animated GIFs that Internet Explorer 4.0 and Netscape Communicator 4.0 both include options to turn off GIF animation all together.
p.202

Curt Cloninger in Fresh Styles for Web Designers, 2001:

The only thing more eye-catching than a transparent gif on a textured background is a transparent animated gif on a textured background. But first, a word of caution: as with all web animation […], use gif animation wisely and sparingly
p.28

When I read such instructions, I think how great it is that you didn’t have to read any instruction to make a webpage.

Some days ago my attention got attracted by this colorful screenshot:

I went to our archive to enjoy the rainbow flag and other elements animated. But it appeared that in reality, the web page of Italian architect Federico Cribbio looked the same as the screenshot. He used Formerly animated GIFs:

His Italian and European Union flags and even the gay pride flag didn’t flutter, the Welcome sign didn’t rotate, “Chiao a Tutti” was not blinking. He also paused the two hippos, who were born to tramp the backgrounds of early web pages.

Federico Cribbio either got unlucky uploading his images or took design manuals a bit too seriously. On the other hand, maybe he knew that once his homepage will be just a screenshot posted on Tumblr.

P.S. You may also want to read some notes about previously static files becoming animated. And have a look at the comparative gallery of Animated GIFs and Glitter graphics, it features graphics from the beginning of the last decade, when GIFs got huge, blingy and static.

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Happy 1999! ⁋ by olia

+ 2014-04-01

It is the 1st of April 2014 IRL and the 1st of January 1999 in Geocities time (the day of last update of the screenshots appearing on our Tumblr at the moment).

What do we remember about this year?
It was the end of the browser war and beginning of plugin wars. 3D on the web was a reality! Dragan designed sites in VRML and started to teach others to do so.
I got a web design professorship.

The Webby Awards was still giving awards to net artists. Museums started to collect web art. Dot.com reached its zenith. Flash was taking over amateurs’ and professionals’ minds.

What to expect from the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Tumblr in 1999?
First of all, on the 18th of March 1999, we will switch from Netscape to Internet Explorer, since IE 5.0 was relised on this day.
Second, as it seems one Geocities day this year will be almost equal to a day IRL, meaning that we have around 70-80 pages in the Geocities archive abandoned every day in 1999. (72 screenshots appear on Tumblr daily.)

null

“Oh…and HAPPY NEW YEAR!” writes the author of the new Sonic website on the first day of 1999 and presents a screenshot of his old one in the Netscape browser. As if he knows that we will be bewildered by it 15 years later.

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It has been a wonderful 12+ years ⁋ by olia

+ + + 2014-03-31

A curious page was just posted on the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age tumblr. You can’t see, but there is a message behind the annoying AOL pop up window. The author of the site got to know about the Geocities shut down and logged in to say goodbye to those who would visit it by chance or because they are still waiting for an update.

Geocities is closing down later in 2009, so long everyone… It has been a wonderful 12+ years since I created this site.. and it is now vanishing away… (I never update it in the past 10 years anyway).. Well. my love for Hotaru will never fade away with the website. For any inquiry, please contact me at my current email address here…

Lastly, I would like to thank everyone for your visit on my never-been-updated website. Thank you very much.. thanks..s.s. million times……. and sooo long….. (noticed my improvement in english??? =D)

BTW, if you wonder why the page that was obviously updated in 2009 appears on the Tumblr now with the last modified date being December 30th 1998: the reason is the HTML frameset. We observed many cases where the frameset was apparently created when the home page was first published, and references files that have been updated years later.

Because the file that outlines the structure of the page identifies the page’s age inside the Geocities archive, it is not rare that the home pages were actually last updated much later than they are presented on our Tumblr.

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