Some of you may have noticed a new tab at the top of the website labeled "retro mode". Some of you may have also clicked that tab and been redirected to a different version of the website. If you haven't, don't worry it isn't going anywhere. In fact feel free to visit that tab now before I talk about it in this article. This retro mode tab is a new version of the website I put together to mimic the old Geocites feel. Anyone on the internet in the early 2000s likely remembers Geocites. It was a website that let anyone host their own personal site for free. One thing to also note is that Geocites websites had a certain look and feel to them. They were all colorful and full of gifs. Very much form over function. Well, I was feeling nostalgic a little while back and I decided to make a version of my website that captured that style. 

    I started by heading over to gifcities.org. Gifcities is a website owned by the internet archive which has a large archive of old internet gifs and blinkies, all free to use. I used their website to download an under construction gif for the top of my homepage. Every website back then was in a perpetual state of "under construction" and always had a gif or two to represent that. I then browsed the internet for random 88x31 blinkies (the little gifs at the bottom of the page). After that I drew the sidebar icons as well as the guestbook button.

    Next I started work on the programming. I used some divs and flexboxes for the layout to make it dynamic so it works well on smaller resolutions such as mobile phones. The central div was given an iframe for the main website content. The left sidebar was given the navbar buttons and the top was given a header blinkie.

    As for the main content of the iframe, I made the homepage to start. First of course was the under construction gif. Next was several links and a short description. After that I added several webrings. Webrings were the old internet way of finding other websites. Websites would link to each other in a circle and that would allow you to move between them and discover other sites that may not be on a search engine as search engines were fairly new at the time. Then I put some buttons on the right and a hit counter to track how many visits my website has gotten. Finally I found a jquery marquee script to make the scrolling blinkies on the bottom. I then made the About, Archive, Gallery, and Webring pages in a similar way.

    You can visit the website at old.fluffpumpkin.net.