Yes. We could make our own little shitty website on a free server like angelfire, with a traffic ticker so we knew if anyone had been there. Mine was a stupid little parody website my friends and I set up for keeping track of acronyms and abbreviations we saw online. Didn't realize we had something there, and could have been Urban Dictionary lol.

[–] Celenas@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Echoing this, it's a very similar feeling! We also had guestbooks for people to leave comments and these things called webrings that would let you explore more similar sites. I remember running a small fansite and forum. It was an interesting time.

[–] curiosityLynx@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

Ah yes guestbooks. My first foray into actual programming (rather than just HTML) was when I wanted to add a guestbook to my silly little website, followed a tutorial, found out tutorial was borked and went looking for advice on what was going wrong (multiple things). By the time my guestbook worked properly I knew PHP(4 or 5) reasonably well.

[–] ChampagneEquinox@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

Yeah I gotta say, "Webrings are back!" was not on my 2023 bingo card. But I'm not hating it by a longshot! It feels like a nice hybrid of the lil Angelfire/Geocities sites and yahoogroups/onelist. Usually fandom communities were hand in hand with those two platform elements, and I've missed that tight-knit community feeling.