Or a “links” page. I haven’t seen that in a long while. No affiliate garbage or anything just a page linking to other sites that the webmaster liked or whatever. It’s hard to remember when that fell out of fashion but it did seem to add a personal touch as well.
I've always wanted to pay it forward in the same way, but lots of things on the web seem overly complicated now that'd make that hard to do, and I've lost attachment to most communities.
I remember those times, I miss them. I had a modem back in the late 1990s and used to buy .net magazine (in the UK, back before there was a framework of the same name) on my way home from school and it had the number of people estimated to be on the Internet printed on the spine. It all seemed too good to be true, we were worried it might get shut down by governments. There was the TV program "the net" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(British_TV_series)) that used to give you an "info dump" at the end that you were meant to record on your VCR and play back frame by frame.
In Jan 2000 I got my first proper job at a web hosting company and used to read Wired magazine before it became (as far as I recall) fascinated by the stock market.
I miss the optimism and simplicity of those times.
It seems like every generation (minus those who came of age in WWI/II) think this is true for them.
Is it really true, or are we just all reflecting back to when we were younger and the world was simpler because we understood less.
In the sense that even corporate sites if you found it would have a little corner where the 'webmaster' had a page that mentioned the server, or his cat, or some silly pic. Some sort of character or tidbit before any of the branding drones were really aware of the web. All just because the 'webmaster' was the only one really in charge / who understood the site was even there and they wanted to share.
I suspect to some extent the APIs were the same. Someone who really didn't mind was all "Yeah sure if someone wants to see what I did.. awesome."