The Internet Archive Wayback Machine makes it easy to relive your past, assuming your past is documented on the web. I was poking around sites I built a long time ago and discovered what I thought was lost, the Enonymous website, circa 1999 AD.
Oh, boy.
This is bad web design from just about the height of my bad-web-design phase. When critiquing it, it's hard to know where to start… Suffice it to say that the techniques I once used are exactly the wicked ways of designing websites that I evangelize against today. There are tons of problems, and here are some bad ones:
- The HTML isn't valid
- Page titles are missing on some pages
- The images don't have alternate text
- It's a poster child for the
<font>tag - The templates use Microsoft Frontpage! (most embarrassing)
A comprehensive list would be long. ("It's really ugly" would be in there somewhere.) The site was created in '98, so it almost goes without saying that the layout was table-based. At least I didn't use frames.
I wish I could find some of my older stuff. My first site launched in 1994, but either the Internet Archive Wayback Machine wasn't archiving that long ago, or my oldest sites just didn't have enough incoming links to justify crawling them. It's too bad. That would have been a real laugh riot.
All of those really old sites are dead now, but some of them are permanently stored at archive.org to ensure my humility for all time. Be careful what you build. Your sites are more enduring than you know.
About Enonymous
Enonymous was a simple, crappy e-mail client that sent "anonymous" e-mail through open SMTP relays, which are misconfigured SMTP servers that spammers still use today. Enonymous wasn't for sending spam. It was for sending love mail, hate mail, funny mail, etc. It was minimal, and it didn't do much, but it worked and it was free; therefore, it became popular. I worked on Enonymous 2.0 for a while, but never finished it.
At some point in 2000 a company started marketing a security product called Enonymous, so I changed my software's name to e-Nonymous. In retrospect I think that was a silly choice. I had the name first, so neener, neener, neener!
not useful