Member-only story
The teenage girl’s internet of the early 2000s
Cliques, webrings, and blinkies
Recently I revamped my personal website, which was hard, because I’m a web developer by trade, not a web designer. Last time I did it was as a teenager making websites for fun in the early 2000s. I thought I might try to reuse some of that, as some of the trends back then (pixel art! Monospace fonts!) are now trendy again. But I found myself lost on Web Archive for hours, remembering how the internet used to be.
They say the internet never forgets, but only fragments of my first website remain there. But it’s enough to trace my path, from just fooling around by adding a cute background to my page to writing my first line of Javascript (honestly…it was to cheat at Neopets). It’s kind of surreal because that entire subculture of hobby web development I was part of back then was entirely teenage girls. It’s like boys didn’t even exist except to sometimes blog about or post about on the BBS. The big things were:
Webrings: Webrings were big across the internet back then, but especially among my friends and I. We had our first webring on the now defunct Expages, which was a site where anyone could make a page. We called our ring the “2000” ring. It was fairly primitive as rings go, we had to add you manually if you wanted to join and then everyone had to update the code on their page. More sophisticated rings you could join using a form and the put code on your site that updated automatically. You could then browse the members in order.
Back then this was pretty exciting because it was often how you discovered new websites.
Table-based Layouts: That’s probably how I encountered my first “layouts” which back then were very sophisticated HTML tables. Of course I got into the trend, my first ones being very tiny tables with a menu and an iframe. Making these layouts was pretty hard until CSS (cascading style sheets) got big because you had to style each and every cell and row manually. I…
