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#pet-project-sematary

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Me and my friends, we were those tech whizz kids which were often parodied in contemporary comedy acts. We fixed computers, destroyed them and fixed them again.[1] And we built websites upon websites, mainly for ourselves and others.

I remember a page for our Counter Strike Clan,[2] a Star Trek Fan Page[3] on GeoCities and a collection of my favourite links (depicted above). There have been probably half a dozen more pages which I've forgotten by now.

We fumbled around with the limited knowledge that we had. Someone found a way to convert videos into GIFs. I used it to convert the snazzy animated Half-Life logo from the game's assets to a GIF and used it on our clan page. It took all night to upload and was completely unusable, of course.

I found a program which created awesome Java applets and Flash plugins, and my next page, a page for a Pen and Paper group, essentially only contained Flash and Applets. This was the day and age where you put a note on your page, telling visitors which browser you've optimised for, cross-browser compatibility be damned.[4]

Good times.

  1. Only to destroy them again later. Installing a fresh Operating System from scratch was much more common back in the day. ↩︎

  2. Of course we had a Counter Strike clan, everyone did. Were we any good? Naw. ↩︎

  3. It contained an easter egg where you could shoot me. This took ages to build because I wanted it to work only if you clicked on the part of my image which showed my head. It didn't contain much else. ↩︎

  4. In fairness, though, cross-browser compatibility was much harder back then. ↩︎

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