Tiny Home Pages
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 again1. And we built websites upon websites, mainly for ourselves and others.
I remember a page for our Counter Strike Clan2, a Star Trek Fan Page3 on GeoCities and a collection of my favourite links (depicted above). There are 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 damned4.
Good times.
Only to destroy them again later. Installing a fresh Operating System from scratch was much more common back in the day.↩
Of course we had a Counter Strike clan, everyone did. Were we any good? Naw.↩
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.↩
In fairness, though, cross-browser compatibility was much harder back then.↩