When I was little and new to the Internet, my first Internet haven was the fan Digimon community (FDD: Fictional Digimon and Digidestined). I tried making a website for my characters then, like it was cool to do at the time, but I didn't know what to put on it. Some years later, my school friends and I made personal websites on Brinkster (which offered ad-free free hosting at the time). I think I put up a bit of art, some adoptables I got from various sites, some life updates and changed the layout a couple of times. Then, we moved to Blogspot. Then, Livejournal. Things after that are a blur - people just stopped using HTML to do anything, and everything started looking the same.
Somewhat recently, I saw a friend's personal website and was inspired to give it another try, and so corow.net happened. The name is from corowne (one of my internet handles; crow + corone + crown) and .net which is the TLD for cool kids (my 100% correct opinion). Development started approximately 17 April 2022.
I am using the following:
More things will be added as I make more things for this site, probably.
The pixel graphics I made were mostly created in PaintTool SAI 2.
Some graphics were generated in Photoshop using Indexed mode conversion. (These are the ones with halftone/dithering.)
The fan Digimon websites from way back when are what I think of when people mention the old web. The creators would often write dialogue in the voices of their characters, make pages to introduce them, and post the art/writing they did for their stories...I'd spend hours looking at the characters and Digimon they designed and imagine my own.
Something I distinctly remember from those sites that I haven't seen anyone mention at all in recent years, is the chromeless windows I'd sometimes see those sites use. They were the ideal and the best of web design to me back then - you'd do a splash page with a nice image, and then clicking on it pops up a sleek chromeless window with a simple border. The chromeless script can still be found on the Internet. I originally obtained it here, from Lissa Explains it All.
Modern browsers no longer allow chromeless windows so the old script no longer works, but I've done my best to recreate my favourite version of it from memory using divs within the page. Initially, I wanted to have my entire site load within a fake window, but my ideas quickly got out of hand...now I have many chromeless windows I guess...
(Yes, the maximise button doesn't work; I didn't want to give it functionality but thought it looked weird without the button)
This was inspired by DOKODEMO over at Neocities! (About Me page) I just thought it'd be cool to make it so that windows could move, do basic stuff, etc. It's not meant to be a full emulation of a desktop.
As it turns out, this was a lot more involved than I expected on the JS front. Windows had to have unique IDs, listeners have to be initialised within the window itself, loaded windows have to run checks to make sure any links target the correct frame etc. I had a choice of making everything run on AJAX or use iframes in the windows, and opted for the latter because it allowed use of the native back/forward buttons (also because I did not want to deal with any more AJAX). Also, I have to manually manage the z-indices of every window so that they stack correctly. Bootstrap tabs are semi-broken because tab IDs are not currently uniquely generated, so if you open 2 of the same window, the tab links will target the same tab and the second set of tabs will not work.
Anyway this was a poor idea because it has poor accessibility (ironically forcing myself to write alt text for images regardless) but it looks cool and I get to design pages in an interesting way. I'm considering making a more plain/mobile-friendly view of the site so that it's possible to link specific pages though.
This is just a list of other things I remember from my childhood that I may or may not implement at some point.