I made some groovy table-based sites by setting up the table layout with the FrontPage GUI and then editing the raw HTML it generated. It taught me HTML and opened the doors to web development for me. Same story using Visual Basic and my segway into programming.

It was pretty amazing to me that you could do WYSIWYG (wow, that's an anachronism itself!) valid HTML development, and then hand-manipulate the HTML and it let you put any invalid shit in there without complaining.

I remeber messing HTML stuff with HotDog

I remember hotdog! I preferred "netobjects fusion" more than any other similar though.

Still have not found anything that makes design as easy, and visual, like netobjects fusion.

Ah, tables…I spent so much time tinkering with them to try to get my pages looking right.

And then came the day in high school when the computer club advisor told us about Netscape supporting frames. Frames were _so_ exciting.

Ah, the good old days where guestbooks and webrings were commonplace. I remember it was an exciting time to be on the Internet. I felt far more connected to people's personal pages back then.

I proudly proclaim to my younger cohorts that I was once in a Space Quest webring. I wear it like a badge of honor!

I still have a buckazoid around here somewhere.

Anyone interested in starting a modern webring?

I've wanted to move my blog content off Medium, but then no one would ever see it.

Here's a modern webring: https://github.com/XXIIVV/webring

I still post my content to my own site. People still see it; mostly finding it through search.

When yahoo categorized results.

Agreed. When the web technologies were more simple and rudimentary and HTML page hosting free and easy for beginners (e.g. geocities), it took very little to start writing HTML, adding some tiling background images, gifs and midis to express yourself. The variation in website look and feel back then was extreme.

Myspace then Facebook (plus forums) obviated the need to build your own site to express yourself online, and disdain for "poorly designed" sites, i.e. general snobbishness, I think discouraged people from messing around. I love that old web! You can still do something similar on Google Sites or similar, but of course it's more constrained.

> People didn't really judge each other or bragged about how this tech is better than that

I judged people - IIS was terrible and you were better off with Apache, mod_perl and CGI.pm. I still can't believe how far ahead of its time CPAN was!

Really? While I developed many sites in FrontPage, it was always looked down on by most people I knew. Many hosts outright refused to do full integration with it or run its extensions. The Generated HTML was far better than Word would generate, but it still was wonky unless you really knew what to avoid or were doing something incredibly simple.

Not running its extensions was mostly a result of the fact that that required running IIS on Windows NT. IIS had a number of high profile problems, and Windows NT 3.51/4.0 (remember, bare metal not VMs) really wasn't ready for running at that scale or in that context. Compared to putting in a SPARC-based machine running Solaris, it just didn't make sense - much harder to manage, less efficient use of resources etc.

How to install the FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions to an Apache Web server

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/202198/how-to-insta...

The good old WYSIWYG days. That was the hot thing in the late 90s like NoSQL was a few years ago.