Tag: architecture

Posted on by

Ancient Web: The Outhouses of America Tour Has Been Online Since 1996

The Outhouses of America Tour was created on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1996, which is almost too perfect an origin date for a website about outdoor toilets.

Visit the Outhouses of America Tour

The site says it began as a joke and then kept going until it became a genuinely large collection devoted to outhouses, backhouses, loos, and related sanitation history.

Its navigation includes real outhouses, definitions, FAQs, trivia and folklore, models, postcards, sketches, outhouse racing, outhouse digging, and visitor submissions.

That is significantly more outhouse infrastructure than most people expect to encounter before breakfast.

The joke became an archive

The strongest old-web sites often begin with a subject too narrow to justify a conventional publication. That is exactly why somebody can cover it properly.

The Outhouses of America Tour preserves examples from different regions and contexts, including restored structures, homemade buildings, unusual designs, military sanitation, and historically associated sites. One featured entry points to an outhouse connected with William Faulkner’s Frenchman’s Bend display in New Albany, Mississippi.

The archive also wanders into composting toilets, humanure, preparedness, and practical sanitation, which makes sense once the joke has accumulated enough real information.

The page openly asks visitors to send photographs of their favorite outhouses, especially ones they built or restored. That participatory model is pure personal web: a curator picks an odd subject, strangers discover it, and eventually the audience helps build the collection.

The site calls itself the home of a comprehensive outhouse information collection and proudly notes that it has been in business since 1996.

More importantly, the HTML still carries the shape of that era: image buttons, long navigation, visitor comments, small jokes embedded in labels, and a curator persona rather than an anonymous publishing system.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many sites where an absurdly specific interest becomes valuable simply because someone refuses to stop documenting it.

Twenty-nine years after launch, the Outhouses of America Tour is still standing.

That sentence is doing more work than intended.

Return to the Outhouses of America Tour

Posted on by

Ancient Web: Starforts.com Made an Obsession Out of Pointy Forts

Somebody looked at a geometric fortress on a map, decided star-shaped forts were extremely cool, and then spent years trying to catalog them around the world. This is an entirely acceptable reason for a website to exist.

Visit Starforts.com

The site explains the basic problem that produced the star fort. Medieval walls worked badly once artillery became powerful enough to batter them and attackers could hide near the base of rounded fortifications. Bastions projecting from the walls let defenders cover approaches with overlapping fire and reduce those protected “dead zones.”

The result was military architecture that looks almost decorative from above: triangles, diamonds, ravelins, ditches, covered ways, and increasingly elaborate geometry wrapped around cities.

The list is the fun part

Starforts.com began with the ambition of listing every star fort in the world. The author eventually admits that this is probably impossible because there are simply too many of them, including forts that were destroyed, buried under cities, radically altered, or only survive as traces in modern street plans.

That failure is more interesting than a finished checklist.

Individual pages combine maps, satellite views, photographs, historical notes, construction dates, sieges, modifications, and the author’s running commentary. The tone is not museum-wall formal. The site is openly enthusiastic about pointy fortifications and happily uses the word “starfortesque.”

There is real historical value underneath the enthusiasm. The archive documents how one engineering response to artillery spread across Europe and into colonial fortification, then evolved again as artillery improved and the classic bastioned system became obsolete.

For a modern webmaster, the useful lesson is almost embarrassingly simple: choose a subject narrow enough that ordinary people think you are slightly nuts, then document it better than everybody else.

This site is one stop from CacheRat’s larger Ancient Web research list.

Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list

If you have ever zoomed into an old European city on a map and wondered why the parks and roads suddenly form suspicious triangles, Starforts.com is where the afternoon goes.

Go back to Starforts.com