Tag: personalweb

Posted on by

Ancient Web: Jade Cat Mixed Genealogy, Paint Shop Pro and Free Web Graphics

Jade Cat / McKenzie’s Mint is what happens when genealogy, cats, Paint Shop Pro, family documents, free buttons, travel photos, and early-web graphics all decide they can share one domain.

Visit Jade Cat / McKenzie’s Mint

The site’s genealogy section contains surname indexes, Ahnentafel charts, ancestor photographs, research tips, and a page of family documents with images and transcriptions of wills, affidavits, letters, and other records.

Then the navigation abruptly turns into a web-design supply cabinet.

There are BladePro presets, tubes, button sets, border backgrounds, graphics sets, retouched photographs, a color tutorial, and linkware graphics intended for other people to use on their own pages.

Before templates ate the handmade web

This is one of the useful things about surviving graphics sites from the period: they show how personal websites reproduced themselves.

Someone made a button, divider, background, or image set. Somebody else downloaded it, linked back, changed the surrounding HTML, and used it to build another site.

Jade Cat explicitly distinguishes between graphics offered for reuse and images that should not be copied. That small bit of etiquette mattered in communities where people passed visual components around constantly.

The rest of the site remains just as personal.

There are cat photographs, Washington, D.C. links, trips to Scotland, Paris, Florida, Wyoming, and the Caribbean, information about the West Baden Springs Hotel, wallpaper, genealogy organizations, antivirus information, and a memorial section connected with September 11.

The homepage even includes an old “escape someone else’s frames” link and a spam disclaimer.

Nothing has been flattened into one content vertical.

That makes the site useful as more than nostalgia. It preserves how ordinary people organized research, family history, creative work, travel, and downloadable web assets before a publishing platform decided what their page types should be.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains old personal sites like this because their mess is historical evidence.

The genealogy tells you about a family.

The button sets tell you about the web they lived on.

Return to Jade Cat / McKenzie’s Mint

Posted on by

Ancient Web: Loadstar’s Lair Put Tigers, Leonardo and Valve Radios Under One Roof

Loadstar’s Lair does not have a niche so much as it has a set of obsessions sharing a hallway.

Visit Loadstar’s Lair

The front page points visitors toward Tiger Territory, a Leonardo da Vinci section, Ye Olde Valve Radios, Vulture Culture, Ascension Art, New Zealand pages, a mailing list called “Justifiable Junk,” and something wonderfully labeled a “Navigation Remote Control.”

There is also an “E-mail this link to a friend!” graphic and a reminder that the page can break out of frames.

This is not retro styling.

It is the actual grammar of an older web.

A personal site that became several reference sites

The Leonardo material is the clearest example of how substantial the project became.

The section identifies its material as dating from 1998–2000 and organizes information on twenty-seven paintings attributed to, or formerly attributed to, Leonardo. It branches into anatomy, astronomy, botany, mathematics, cartography, architecture, geology, portraits, sculpture, music, mirror writing, chronology, fables, and his work under Verrocchio.

Then it wanders into machines.

There are pages on civil designs such as clocks, cranes, drilling machines, canals, flying machines, a parachute, and a horseless carriage, alongside military designs involving cannons, ballistas, missiles, a submarine, a tank, and scythed chariots.

Tiger Territory grew in another direction, collecting photographs and material about tiger biology and conservation. Other areas document vintage valve radios or simply follow the author’s interest somewhere else.

Modern publishing usually asks a site to explain itself in one sentence.

Loadstar’s Lair appears to have answered that problem by refusing it.

The result is closer to a personal library whose rooms were opened to the public. Each subject accumulated its own pages, references, images, and navigation until the site became useful far beyond the original homepage.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes sites like this because the older web often rewarded curiosity before it rewarded branding.

You came for a tiger.

You might leave knowing how Leonardo designed a crane and wondering whether you need a valve radio.

Return to Loadstar’s Lair

Posted on by

Ancient Web: Vedge.org Is a Personal Homepage With a Machine Shop Attached

Vedge.org opens with “Please excuse the mess,” which is exactly the correct greeting for a personal homepage containing a GUI toolkit, a machine shop, vacuum tubes, casting experiments, BSD, and a deep-fat fryer.

Visit Vedge.org

Julien Nadeau Carriere’s site connects several worlds that modern platforms would normally separate.

There is open-source software: Agar, Edacious, FabBSD, CAD tools, and build systems.

Then there are shop charts for lathe bits, thread depths, cutting fluids, milling cutters, sheet-metal gauges, wire resistance, and torque limits.

Then the gallery starts.

Software engineer meets machine shop

The shop section includes a vacuum-tube base press, hydraulic blanking press, sheet-metal work, ultra-high-vacuum equipment, a glassworking lathe, PCB fabrication, milling machines, aluminum and brass casting, resistance spot welding, a Tektronix curve tracer, vintage computers, and custom-built servers.

It is hard to imagine a better demonstration of why personal websites remain useful.

A platform profile wants to know what category you belong to.

Vedge.org does not care.

The same person can write software, run OpenBSD and FreeBSD systems, build electronics tooling, machine metal, cast brass, photograph the sky, document a BBC Micro, and keep reference tables for screw threads.

The site turns those interests into adjacent directories rather than separate identities.

Its open-source work has also escaped the homepage. Agar, for example, became a cross-platform GUI framework with its own project site. Vedge remains the personal hub where that software sits beside everything else the author actually does.

That context is valuable.

Technology history often gets rewritten as a sequence of projects and products. Personal pages preserve the workshop around the project: the tools, side interests, reference notes, and half-related experiments that explain how someone actually works.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes many sites where useful technical knowledge survives because somebody treated a homepage as external memory.

Vedge.org is practically a filesystem exposed to the public.

The mess is the feature.

Return to Vedge.org

Posted on by

Ancient Web: Franco Maria Boschetto Built a 4-Gigabyte Teaching Website

Franco Maria Boschetto’s homepage announces the size of the site itself: more than 4,100 megabytes.

Visit Franco Maria Boschetto’s website

The Italian-language site says it has been online since November 28, 2001. More than two decades later, Boschetto is still adding material.

Calling it a “teaching site” is accurate but insufficient.

The homepage links physics lessons, student work, religion, Bible studies, virtual laboratories, Dante and science, Tolkien and physics, alternate history, model making, Roman coinage, travel writing, stories, poetry, astronomy, books, music, puzzles, photographs, and whatever else has joined the pile since the last update.

One homepage, no niche

The architecture belongs to a period when a personal domain could be both classroom and attic.

Boschetto identifies himself as an engineer and educator. His homepage directly addresses students and teachers, and a large portion of the site is structured around lessons and educational projects. But it never stops there.

A visitor can move from online physics to Newton’s apple, Schrödinger’s cat, Roman currency, biblical mathematics, science in Dante, speculative timelines, family material, and a model museum without leaving the same authorial universe.

The homepage reports a site size of roughly 4.16 gigabytes and shows updates continuing in 2026.

That physical size is funny because old personal websites are often imagined as tiny collections of HTML files.

Given enough years, they become archives.

Boschetto’s site also preserves an older visual language: dense image-based navigation, counters, badges, quotations, explicit screen-resolution guidance, and a front page expected to serve as the map for everything the author has ever decided belongs online.

A modern content strategy would separate these subjects into brands.

The old web often did the opposite.

It trusted the domain name to mean “this is the place where this person puts things.”

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many sites whose real subject is not physics, history, music, or computing.

Their real subject is the person who kept building them.

Boschetto’s site has had more than twenty years to prove the model.

Return to Franco Maria Boschetto’s website

Posted on by

Ancient Web: Titanic-Bot Got an Entire Web Page Because Somebody Bought a Terrible Toy

A 1998 bootleg toy turns the Titanic into a giant robot. Naturally, somebody built a full web page and dropped an iceberg on it.

Visit Reasonably Clever’s Titanic-Bot page

The page identifies the toy as “Titanic-Bot,” a Fall/Winter 1998 bootleg associated with Flying Dragon Toys. Its ship mode resembles the doomed liner, while the transformation produces a robot whose smokestacks protrude from its chest and whose masts become weapons.

This alone would have been enough material for most websites.

Reasonably Clever kept going.

The scientific method, approximately

Christopher Doyle’s page documents the packaging, item number, robot mode, transformation, artwork, and construction. Then it asks the only question that actually matters:

How does Titanic-Bot handle an iceberg?

The test procedure is gloriously stupid and completely documented.

First the toy is floated in water. It barely floats, but it floats. Then Doyle freezes a block of ice. Finally the iceberg is dropped onto the toy from roughly six feet.

Titanic-Bot survives.

The resulting page is exactly the sort of object the modern web tends to erase. There is no SEO justification for spending this much effort on one terrible transforming toy. There is no affiliate funnel, no ten-item list, and no attempt to turn the subject into a content franchise.

Somebody found an absurd object, thought it was funny, photographed it carefully, wrote down everything about it, and published the joke permanently.

The page still carries period web debris too: references to Macromedia Flash, LiveJournal, homemade graphics, and the old habit of placing legal trademark disclaimers directly beneath something profoundly unserious.

Reasonably Clever describes itself as wasting the reader’s workday since 1995.

That is almost a mission statement for an entire lost category of web publishing.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes many pages that survived because somebody cared about a subject far beyond any reasonable commercial value.

Titanic-Bot is one of the dumbest.

That makes it one of the best.

Return to the Titanic-Bot page

Posted on by

Ancient Web: Komar.org Let the Internet Control 25,000 Christmas Lights

For more than a decade, random people on the Internet could visit a house in Colorado and start turning its Christmas decorations on and off.

Visit Komar.org

Alek Komarnitsky’s personal website is already a classic old-web junk drawer: travel stories, wildlife cameras, home projects, photography tests, sysadmin material, family pages, solar panels, BBQ experiments, and enough links to make a modern UX consultant quietly leave the room.

Then there were the Christmas lights.

Twenty-five thousand lights and a web control panel

The archived 2014 Christmas page describes three live webcams and more than 20,000 controllable lights. Visitors could switch zones on and off and inflate or deflate decorations including Elmo, Frosty, Santa, and Homer Simpson.

The electrical table gets even better.

Komarnitsky documented 22 circuits, 76.2 amps, and a total of 25,000 lights. He calculated the full display at roughly 9.1 kilowatts and estimated the operating cost based on Colorado electricity prices. The page also logged setup dates, snow, equipment, webcam changes, and the final shutdown of the display.

This was not an Internet-of-Things startup.

It was a guy wiring his house into the web because that sounded funny.

The project also pointed visitors toward celiac-disease research rather than asking them to pay for the spectacle. The page says Komarnitsky ended the long-running controllable display after the 2014 season and later sold the equipment.

What survives is a perfect artifact of an era when a personal website could become temporarily famous because someone built a ridiculous technical thing and exposed the controls to strangers.

Komar.org itself is still active, with material extending from the late 1990s into 2026. That continuity makes the old Christmas project even better: it remains embedded inside the same personal homepage ecosystem that produced it.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is full of sites where the web was treated as a workshop rather than a publishing platform.

Komar.org is what happens when the workshop reaches the breaker panel.

Return to Komar.org

Posted on by

Ancient Web: Canadian Mind Products Is a Java Reference Library Attached to an Entire Worldview

Canadian Mind Products is what happens when a programmer decides a website does not need to pick one subject, one tone, or even one reason to exist.

Visit Canadian Mind Products

Roedy Green’s site describes one of its goals as teaching people to use computers effectively, particularly the Java language. Around that technical core grew a sprawling collection of downloads, hardware notes, Java material, applets, environmental writing, ethics, Esperanto, quotations, essays, and personal argument.

The navigation feels less like a publication than a map of one person’s brain.

The Java part alone is a web artifact

Canadian Mind Products became especially well known for its Java material. The site still exposes a Java section alongside downloads, hardware references, applets, site maps, and old utilities. It also built tools for mirroring the website locally, including a “Replicator” system whose documentation explicitly discusses keeping a copy in case the site ever disappears.

That preservation instinct feels almost prophetic now.

The broader site is much stranger than a programming reference. Technical pages sit beside environmental advocacy, politics, religion, human rights, money, relationships, and long personal quotations. There is no editorial effort to make those categories feel like one clean brand.

That is precisely why it belongs to the older web.

A personal website could be a technical manual in one directory, an argument in the next, a software archive somewhere else, and a running notebook everywhere in between. Search engines indexed the pages individually, so the whole site did not have to fit into one marketable identity.

The result can be abrasive, useful, obsessive, outdated, insightful, or all five within a few clicks.

What matters historically is the shape of it: one person accumulating knowledge in public over years, without flattening it into a content strategy.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many personal sites where the useful material is inseparable from the personality that organized it.

Canadian Mind Products may be one of the purest examples.

It is not tidy.

Neither was the web.

Return to Canadian Mind Products

Posted on by

Ancient Web: The Cat Drag’d Inn Turned Decades of Road Life Into a Travel-Letter Archive

Most travel writing edits out the broken starter, the dirty laundry, the ant invasion, the missed connection, and the problem of finding enough quarters for the campground shower.

The Cat Drag’d Inn keeps all of it.

Visit Travels With Oso con Migo

The long-running travel pages are written as letters to “Virtual Travellers and Pen Friends” and wander through road trips, train journeys, campsites, repairs, old friends, weather, food, postcards, mechanical trouble, and whatever else happened that day.

The result feels less like a travel guide than correspondence that accidentally became a public archive.

The trip is whatever happened between departure and arrival

A 2007 entry moves from water-well work to a hike among volcanic rocks and a ringing basalt “bellstone.”

A 2018 train journey records showers aboard Amtrak, factory views from the window, missed schedules, dining-car meals, Wi-Fi trouble, family visits, oysters, lobster, old camping equipment, and the peculiar view of America you get from rail lines rather than highways.

By 2023 the same voice is still there: campground fees, a red-tailed hawk caught by the CritterCam, wiring jobs, food-bank halibut, Arizona and New Mexico roads, a bus starter problem, trash pickup at a rest area, and invitations for future travelers to come along.

That continuity is the real subject.

The writer does not separate “important” events from the boring mechanical details that make travel possible. A blown irrigation fitting can sit beside a landscape description. A bus repair can take as much space as a destination. A meal can become a paragraph because that was what happened next.

Old personal websites were unusually good at preserving this kind of scale.

They did not require every entry to justify itself to an audience metric. If the author wanted to explain a campground shower policy or the behavior of Amtrak Wi-Fi, there was room.

The Cat Drag’d Inn also preserves a recognizable personal vocabulary across years: “AridZona,” “Virtual Travellers,” recurring vehicles, friends, pets, jokes, quotations, and the habit of ending letters with an invitation to write back.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes travel pages like this because they preserve the journey at human resolution rather than brochure resolution.

The destination matters.

So does the bad fuse on the way there.

Return to Travels With Oso con Migo

Posted on by

Ancient Web: The Wererat’s Lair Kept Its Mid-1990s Web Design on Purpose

The Wererat’s Lair does not merely look like a mid-1990s website by accident.

It has been actively kept that way.

Visit The Wererat’s Lair

The site mixes pet-rat material, personal pages, role-playing games, photo galleries, old web tutorials, MIDI, and years of updates into one hand-built maze.

The navigation literally tells visitors to click on stones to enter the Lair.

That is the correct energy.

Hand-coded in 1996 and still being maintained

A 2019 update includes the line: “why did I ever code this by hand back in 1996?”

That dates the site’s basic architecture and explains a lot about what survives.

The update log stretches across pet rats and gerbils, D&D and Pathfinder campaigns, local web-design projects, family losses, galleries, and site maintenance. In 2020 the author noted that keeping the main Lair looking and sounding like the mid-1990s took actual effort. Old MIDI files and Java applets had stopped working, so parts were converted or replaced to keep the experience alive.

There is also a practical layer beneath the cave graphics.

The site maintained rat-care resources for decades. A 2024 update says the “Rat-help” section had finally ceased after nearly thirty years, while classic answers were left online. Elsewhere are rat-book recommendations, galleries, memorial pages, and older care information.

The web-design material is its own time capsule. One tutorial walks through a JavaScript photo album using arrays, form fields, and numbered image files—the kind of thing personal-site authors once copied, modified, and learned from directly.

The Wererat’s Lair therefore preserves more than appearance.

It preserves a way of making websites: write the HTML yourself, bolt on a script when you need one, collect whatever subjects interest you, and let the whole thing become structurally weird over time.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes personal sites like this because genuine old-web continuity is rarer than retro styling.

Anyone can imitate 1996.

The Wererat’s Lair was actually there.

Return to The Wererat’s Lair

Posted on by

Ancient Web: John and Mary Kormendy Watched One Texas Yard for 22 Years

A backyard bird list becomes something else when the same people keep it for twenty-two years.

Visit John and Mary Kormendy’s House Birds page

From spring 2000 until summer 2022, John and Mary Kormendy lived near Dripping Springs in the Texas Hill Country and kept track of the birds around their house.

By the end, the page recorded 125 species seen and two more heard.

That is already useful.

The comments make it better.

Natural history at household scale

The page does not read like a generic species guide. It records what happened at this particular place.

Some birds were breeding residents. Others appeared only during migration or cold weather. Some once-common visitors became rare. A Rufous hummingbird overwintered at the property for multiple years. A Crested caracara appeared only twice in roughly two decades. Golden-cheeked warblers passed through even though the property did not have enough mature oak habitat for them to breed there.

The notes are full of small observations that field guides cannot provide.

Mary once saw a roadrunner leap from the roof to catch a Black-chinned hummingbird. Black vultures sat together on the upstairs deck. Woodpeckers hunted insects from the railing. Ringtails occasionally arrived and moved through the trees “like ballerinas.”

The Kormendys say they updated the pages heavily during 2020, when pandemic restrictions kept them home and paying closer attention. By late that year they had photographs of 64 of the 125 species on the list.

The archive also records change.

The couple moved to downtown Austin in 2022. The page says one final update remained and then the house-bird site would be “finished forever.”

That phrase is strangely perfect for a personal web page.

The site did not fail.

The observation period ended.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes personal natural-history sites because they preserve long spans of attention that are difficult to reconstruct later.

One yard, watched long enough, becomes a dataset with stories attached.

Return to the House Birds page