Somebody once decided that the six colors of Bassett’s Jelly Babies needed personalities, musical instruments, skateboarding abilities, fan rankings, eating techniques, and an entire website. This is why the personal web was good.
The page belongs to Alex Churchill’s old personal site and wastes almost no time establishing the premise. Churchill was a serious Jelly Babies fan. The six standard colors are treated as distinct characters with names and biographies, and the page expands the manufacturer’s branding into something halfway between a fan club and a tiny candy mythology.
Baby Brilliant plays lead guitar and is described as a highly proficient skateboarder. Other Jelly Babies get their own instruments, personalities, flavor ratings, and lists of readers who chose them as favorites. There is a live-looking ranking table preserving the accumulated votes.
Then it gets more specific.
The site catalogs methods for eating Jelly Babies. Visitors contributed descriptions ranging from biting them in half to sucking away the outer sugar before reaching the jelly. A section of official jokes preserves crimes against comedy apparently printed on actual packets, including “jellyvision” and “extra-jell-estrial.”
This is not archival work in the conventional sense. Nobody sat down intending to document late-1990s candy culture for future historians.
That is precisely why it is useful.
A website could simply be somebody’s thing
The larger personal site is full of clues about the environment that produced this page. Churchill wrote about Cambridge computer access, complained about Netscape 2.01, mentioned telnetting to the university’s Hermes mail system, and proudly displayed a “Designed with Notepad” badge.
The Jelly Babies obsession even escaped the website. Churchill notes that he was interviewed by Varsity, Cambridge’s student newspaper, about it.
There was also the sort of interactive nonsense modern websites rarely bother with: readers could vote, submit eating methods, and hunt for a secret URL. Finding the secret page could lead to a Jelly Baby being sent through the post, with Churchill apparently covering the postage himself.
No funnel. No account creation. No engagement dashboard. Solve the weird little website puzzle and a stranger might mail you a piece of candy.
For a webmaster, the interesting part is how much personality survives in plain HTML. The page’s value has almost nothing to do with technical sophistication. It survives because the author made something so specific that replacing it with a generic modern page would destroy the point.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains plenty of serious technical archives. It also contains pages like this, because the Web’s history includes people spending server space on extremely important questions such as which Jelly Baby is best at skateboarding.
That history deserves preservation too.