Past Websites of the Week
...Because Web 1.0 was awesome
19/01/2024: Nana’s Place
First Created ? - Last Updated ?
There’s a little caveat to be aware of with this website. When I viewed it in Chrome with no ad-blocker, it looked like a dystopian vision of capitalist hell and was virtually unviewable. When I viewed it in Brave however (which blocks ads automatically), it worked fine. So now you know.
In the long ago before times when people first made personal web pages, they were often nothing more than snapshots into that person’s life, interspersed with animated gifs and littered with guest books. Nana’s Place is a great example of that type of site, complete with family photos, favourite recipes, and movie recommendations.
Nana’s Place has an oddly fitting late-90’s-goth aesthetic, with bold red writing (Comic Sans, naturally) on a red and black background. I couldn’t find any dates but it’s a Tripod site (can you believe Tripod sites are still live? Angelfire, too) so I’m guessing it must have been made in the mid-late nineties. Most of it still works, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get over the disappointment of finding that the link to LUMPENSTEINS CHAMBER OF HORRORS (“Beware. Our cat Lumpy is coming for you! She's got her own scary movie site”) is broken. It led me instead to a modern Yahoo page which on the day I visited, provided me with the news that the Princess of Wales is laid up after surgery, and social media is controlling my life. Now I’ll never know what Lumpy thought of Demon Knight.
It feels a bit voyeuristic in 2024 to be made privy to the sort of information that’s now reserved for friends lists on walled gardens like Facebook. I know that Nana married “...a guy whose net nikname is Punchy”, she collects cow trinkets, and one of her hobbies is “...stitching together small childsize dolls and dressing them in actual kids clothing.”
I’m not creeped out, you are.
If you decide to drop by Nana’s Place, sadly you can’t mark your visit by signing the guestbook because clicking on it just takes you to the Lycos frontpage (yes, they still exist, too!) but you can grab a sweet recipe for barbecue chicken wings.
12/01/2024: Frogland
First Created 1995 - Last Updated 2006
My daughter’s mad about frogs at the moment. Frogs, toads, and mushrooms. Her bedroom’s starting to look like a weird 60’s acid trip. Do you know who else is mad about frogs? This person:
The person in question being a webmaster called Dorota, a self-confessed “...freak who really likes frogs.” Frogland (surely Dorota’s magnum opus) is a huge site presented on a salmon pink background which includes the FrogBlog (for all the “…latest random Froggy News!”), an extensive frog art gallery, Froggy Games, and frog jokes (“What happens when you mix a frog with a bathtub scrubby-mit? A rubbit!”)
This website was obviously a labour of love. The ultimate froggy passion project, if you will. Among all the fun things is a plethora of information about frog species (did you know the pixie frog is one of the largest frogs in South Africa?) and frog care—so much of it in fact that Dorota has kindly provided a page called Teacher’s Corner, in the hope that kids will “...have lots of fun learning about frogs AND playing on the Internet!” Honestly, Dorota seems like an all-around awesome froglerino. I wonder if they ever envisaged a time when teachers would beg kids to STOP playing on the internet?
15/12/2023: Pi Zine
First Archived 2002 - Last Updated ?
Who remembers zines? They’re making a bit of a comeback online. Back in the day, they were small self-made magazines—usually photocopied and then stapled, covering topics ranging from punk music to literally anything. Pi Zine promised to deliver games, poetry, stories, pictures, essays, and “...oodles and oodles of great writing about feminism and grrrl issues.” This sounds like it was an utter bargain for the low, low price of “Just one dollar and fifty cents, as well as a stamp!” (never forget the stamp!)
You know an old-school webpage is going to be good when the homepage’s background is glittery purple dragon scales. The zine’s writers have amazing Web 1.0 handles too, namely thirdwavegrrl and miserywinter. My teenage self could only have dreamed of coming up with such awesomeness.
I assume physical copies of Pi Zine no longer exist, but thankfully there are some remnants of its former glory left on the site in the form of highlights from all four issues. Spooky Girl’s plea to adopt a cat had me wondering about the fate of Percy, who sounds like the cutest vampire kitty to ever prowl the night: “Are You A Lonely Little Goth Child? Well, of course you are - don't try to deny it! What you need is a cat! At A.S.A.P. there is the perfect cat for you - Percy! He is a neutered black cat about 8+ years old. He is a domestic short hair and has beautiful green and golden eyes. He's clean, calm, and very affectionate. The best part about Percy is his cute little fangs. you gotta check them out. I could swear he was a little vampire. So if you're looking for the perfect companion - come to A.S.A.P. and check out Percy! But hurry, we don't adopt out black cats near Halloween because of all the sick people out there.”
Pinky Royale from Zine Guide sums this all up much better than I could in Pi Zine’s (criminally) single review: "Goth poetry and thrift store reviews for the greater Santa Barbara area. Drawings of spiders and teeth, too. A good article on 'How To Beat Up Boys,' which, if you're a boy, could be seen as 'What To Watch Out For When You Cross The Line, Dumbass.' There's some information on runaways, and how to get help or help out. Sometimes life can be a big barrel of rancid pork rinds, drowning out that glimmer of hope that exists everywhere, and those damn goth folks really know how to balance their hope and their despair. Kudos."
If I’d stumbled across this site while the zine was still operational, this would have been me:
08/12/2023: Emerald City
First Created 1995 - Last Updated - 2006
This website is a bonafide treasure. Emerald City was an online publication that reviewed fantasy and sci-fi novels. It ceased publication in 2006 but every issue since 1995 is still available to read.
The book reviews do not hold back the sass. From a review for The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie: “I don’t like trade paperbacks. They’re unwieldy, like hardbacks but without any of the expensive-feeling durability, and they’re even more prone to broken spines and bent corners than mass markets because of their size. Really, they’re the worst of both worlds. (NB: Not that I’m adverse to people giving them to me for free.) And so it’s a measure of quality that, despite my having Joe Abercrombie’s debut The Blade Itself in trade paperback, I didn’t hold its material handicap against it. I carried it around with me; I took it on the bus; I read it in the bath.”
This is from a review of Emerald Eye, an anthology of Irish horror fiction published in 2005: “...if you look at the cover of the book you will probably conclude two things. Firstly that it is self-published (which it isn’t, it just has a cover that doesn’t do the book justice), and secondly that it is a collection of fantasy stories. It is predominantly green, and features a girl with a long braid that transforms into Celtic knot work. To be fair, the introduction does say the book doesn’t contain any leprechauns. But it doesn’t contain any fairy princesses or handsome, muscle-bound swordsmen either. Indeed, the stories by McCaffrey, Shaw and White seem very much out of place, because Emerald Eye is mainly a horror anthology. Not that this is a bad thing, but it does come as something of a shock.”
A bad book cover (allegedly).
There seems to be a bit of a running theme regarding early ebooks, particularly early self-published ebooks—i.e. the site’s writers weren’t fans. There was an entire essay published in Issue 59 (July 2000) explaining why ebooks were a terrible idea. Reading this is a joyous tumble into a now hazy past, written long before Kindles existed: “At present the only way that most of us can read an eBook is on a PC. As I quickly found out when I tried to read one, this is a pain in the butt. A book I can take with me anywhere. A PC is stuck on my desk.”
It’s interesting to see how attitudes towards ebooks and self-publishing have changed (or, I hope they’ve changed!). From the About page: “Electronic publishing is very cheap and easy. As a consequence the is a vast amount of material out there, most of it self-published and not very good. We try to review only the best quality SF&F fiction. If some of that is published as e-books, all well and good. But if you are publishing electronically because you can't get accepted by a print publisher there may be a good reason for those rejections.” Ouch!
They did make an exception when it came to Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Magnificat, which was described as “...a little Sheri Tepper-ish, in that it aims an incisive intellectual stiletto at the heart of patriarchal theology and impales it mercilessly.” Unfortunately for the ebook-wary reviewer, the book did come “...on a standard CD” and “...the installation process was nowhere near good enough.” Can you imagine selling or reading a book on a CD now? The olden days were wild.
17/11/2023: Tokyo Toilet Map
First Created 1996 - Last Updated - 1997
This website does exactly what you think it does—it’s a literal map of toilets in Tokyo, which is handy (or it was in 1996), but also just a little bit gross.
Voted "Harsh Site of the Day" in July 1997, this compact webpage features pictures of Tokyo’s clean and dirty toilets, “cool” graffiti (definitely NSFW), and the all-important Tokyo Map (which will only work if you use Netscape v2.0 or higher!) There are also reviews of the toilets to go along with the pictures (“This toilet is simple and clean. I think this toilet is a little known hot spot.”) If you ever time travel back to 1996 and want to visit Tokyo, you’ll never be caught short again. My favourite review was of a dirty toilet, although it included a five-star rating which is a head-scratcher after reading the review: “This toilet is under stair to platform and a lawless zone. It is shit outside of bowl and the worst smell. Help me! After taking this picture I felt nauseated.” I’d have given this particular toilet two stars at most.
Sadly, I’ll never be able to learn "How to use Japanese style toilet bowel", because this page uses Shockwave Player which was discontinued in 2019. If I ever do find myself in a position to use a toilet bowel (which I’m now imagining as some sort of sentient demonic toilet with digestion issues), I’ll just have to muddle through the experience without proper guidance. Thanks for nothing, Adobe.
03/11/2023: The Resort
First Created 1992 - Last Updated - 1997
This is the oldest website I’ve so far discovered for this series that still exists. How does it still exist?! Probably only the Mystical Head of 'Bob' knows. (Bob is the ultimate oracle who can answer any question. He used to be a Magic 8-Ball but it “went away because of a letter from Tyco's lawyers indicating that they didn't appreciate my abuse of their Copyright”).
A beautifully preserved early web time capsule, this website features grainy photos of The Resort’s residents, a preoccupation with Renaissance faires, and an enlightening guide to enlarging your nipples, among many, many other weird-ass things that probably only ever made sense to twenty-something coders in the nineties with a penchant for conspiracy theories and martinis.
The Resort was purportedly a real place—a self-proclaimed “geek house” in the Santa Cruz area inhabited by people with names like Banshee and Pooteur (it might also be “the temple of a religious cult who eat babies and nail young kittens and bullfrogs to trees”). If you’re not sure what a geek house is, you need to read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland because this website could honestly have been a meta advertisement for the novel.
Bob demands that you visit!
29/09/2023: Hazenworld
First Created 1998 - Last Updated - 2014
How to best describe this noisy, blinking, colourful behemoth? It describes itself as “Home for music, lyrics, pics, info, Animated Gifs, Elvis Costello Stuff”, and it hits all the classic Web 1.0 tropes. I’m talking inescapable background music, starry night background, a large spinning globe on the front page, and a multitude of animated divider bars. It’s truly glorious stuff. Also, this guy really loves Elvis Costello.
My personal highlight is a preserved copy of an old Geocities guestbook—surely one of the wonders of the ancient world. There’s also a page that I think hope is a joke, called ADULT PIX OF ME! Click at your peril (the bone-eating troll in the Complaints Department is cute, though).
18/08/2023: Topher's Castle
First Created 1997 - Last Updated - 2018
This is another one of those websites you never knew you wanted to visit until it popped up on wiby.org.
A beautiful rainbow of a site that isn’t afraid to play with multicoloured fonts, Topher’s Castle is a vast repository of information as disparate as cruise and travel, and guides to every character in Winnie the Pooh.
My favourite part of the site is Topher's Breakfast Cereal Character Guide, described as, “a non-commercial site with the sole purpose of assisting visitors in locating information on their favorite breakfast cereal characters.” According to the now-defunct Voting Booth, the ancient internet’s favourite cereal character was Big Yella. Big Yella is new to this British millennial, but he looks like a cross between Mr Benn and Bert the Muppet.
Personally, I would have voted for Cliffy the Clown.
Can you imagine waking up to that face staring back at you from across the breakfast table each morning? Time to rise and shine, kids! Finish up those sugary wheat puffs and get yourselves off to school right quick, or Cliffy will come fer yer eyes with a sharpened cereal spoon!
11/08/2023: Rock Jem
First Created 1997 - Last Updated - Recently
All this recent talk about Barbie has led me to reminisce about Jem, the most truly outrageous doll to blast out of the 1980s. Barbie may have tried to compete back in the day with Barbie and the Rockers, but Jem and the Holograms were the true doll rockstars and every discerning 80’s child knew it.
Credit: Something About The Boy
Derek was a fine piece of manly plastic candy, though. Perhaps he should have joined up with Jem and created a supergroup.
Someone else who knew it was the creator of Rock Jem, a massive fansite with a focus on the accompanying Jem cartoon series. This site is still going strong after 26 years and has welcomed 700+ visitors a day.
Credit: www.victoriartilloedm.com
There really was never a contest. You can clearly see Jem was a bad bitch, and that’s before I’ve even started on their slightly sinister rival band, The Misfits.
Rock Jem really leans into its early internet heritage and features a brief history of the site on its About page, complete with screenshots of the website in earlier incarnations. There’s also an entire page dedicated to Jem Fan Site History.
FYI, I would still kill or maim for a working pair of Jemstar earrings.
21/07/2023: Prime’s Face
First Created 2008 - Last Updated - 2011
A site that dares to dream, “WHAT WOULD OPTIMUS PRIME LOOK LIKE WITHOUT HIS FACE MASK?!”
A small collection of pictures taken from official Transformers sources show a variety of things going on behind Prime’s mask. In my favourite picture, it looks like Prime is weeping after being torn open by a very large can opener:
The page is part of a larger site called The Obscure Transformers Website, “devoted to the unseen, the unknown, and the unwanted of the Transformers universe.” There’s also a fuck-ton of old Toy Fair Catalogs.
14/07/2023: Hollywood Tarot
First Created 1998 - Last Updated - 1999
A humour site that provided real tarot card readings based on the Rider-Waite Tarot (using the Hollywood Tarot, of course). Sadly, this function no longer seems to work. I was told this cryptic tidbit though: “Your football team's going to lose. Sorry.”
I don’t support a football team. What could it mean?
Thankfully, you can still peruse the entire Hollywood deck and read the fates of various celebrities through 1999, as divined by (the totally not fictional) Madame Esmeralda and Lady Esmene. Spoiler: Bruce and Demi aren’t going to make it.
23/06/2023: Lissa Explains it All
First Created 1997 - Last Updated - 2016
May I present to you the website that first taught me to code. Lissa wrote HTML, and later CSS, tutorials in a clear and concise way, on a brightly coloured website that didn’t burn your retinas to look at. Back in 1997, she seemed like a genius–and she was only 11! Although, it is mostly her fault that “Caroline’s Titanic Page” was created, only to blight the world with a background midi playing My Heart Will Go On on an infinite loop.
16/06/2023: Buffy Phenomenon
First Created January 2005 - Last Updated February 2016
Because Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans love nothing more than discussing which episodes were the best, Buffy Phenomenon has kindly curated an enormous collection of greatest episodes lists, with the lofty goal of creating the definitive best and worst episodes list. If that doesn’t grab you, visit to indulge in the starry background and links buttons shaped like stakes (surely modelled on Mr Pointy).
09/06/2023: Diabella Loves Cats
First Created 1997 - Last Updated January 2021
If there is anything on this good green earth that absolutely nobody could disagree with, it’s that Diabella loves cats. This webpage is primarily geared towards providing information about cat rescue but the best part of the site is the enormous collection of vintage cat graphics. “What's better than a cat?” Diabella asks. “A dressed cat!” There are cartoon cats in 60’s outfits, cats in humourous t-shirts, cats eating burgers with elves, cat fairies, and cats in bikinis. If you were wondering, there’s a dog section too.
