Mine never left, it’s been there all this time. </SmugMode>
How long have you had it?
I’ve had my current personal domain for 22 years, but before that I had a succession of hand-coded personal websites going back to the janky free webhosts we had in the 1990s.
Geocities old-timers unite!
respect - twins
Awesome stuff!
same 22 years and counting (https://markobajlovic.com/)
(I had let the dns expire once early on)
Mine too. So old I have a 5 letter domain.
I’ve got 4. Ancient nerds unite!
Hah, for some reason when those were available I was registering crazy long ones. It was more about getting the words back then for me.
Honestly I’m surprised mine was still available since the 5 letter one (which is now my main personal domain/site) is actually my newest. It was around the time Popular Science rebranded PopSci, and I was able to grab NowSci.
Respect!
I have a URL that’s 30 years old this year and it’s still valid and it still redirects to my personal homepage.
(Bonus: The oldest Internet Archive snapshot of it is from 1997.)
Not trying to one-up, but I registered daychilde.com in 1996. It’s actually on my to-do to redesign again as I leaned in a bit on the AI for art, although it’s a bit older than the 2025 the articles are from. heh. I’ll get there.
I think the next iteration will use 1600s fonts because I adore those - https://fonts.google.com/?query=im+fell
deleted by creator
Circumstances outside of my control forced me to switch domain names. (I could not afford to pay for my own domain name 30 years ago.)
AI scrapping bots prevent me from making my own site. I want to learn how to poison the pages for these scrappers just like gamers nexus is doing. Sigh.
Webrings still exist:
(It’s how we found new sites before search engines.)
To your parenthetical: not really. It was stuff like Gopher, Veronica and Archie.
Webrings were a thing that evolved alongside things like Altavista, before Google became dominant. They’re still a great option, given the current circumstances and low barrier to entry, though.
I’d love to do this but I’m totally tech illiterate
Start here: https://neocities.org/
You don’t even need to use genAI slop for it. There were HTML editors in the good old days, even before all the bloated framework slop.
Cool thing about html is that even just writing a bunch of text and saving it as mypage.html is a valid website. Give it a shot and open it with your browser.
Then you can just go from there, one step at a time.
Man I hope so.
I’m skeptical, but I hope so.
Also sharing the concern that people are able to vibe code some crap and too many words in their writing as a cause rather than more positive changes.
It is empowering to run your own things. I have been hosting my own services and sites since 2006.
If you had odd interests the best knowledge came from someone’s web page or (RIP) a Geocities page
Hell, the best resource on the internet for an aspiring bike mechanic is still… https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
Worth noting, some of his opinions may be out of date as he passed in 2008 but the things he wrote and shared are still super important. Dude taught me how to build wheels just 3 years ago
