My old Angelfire portfolio made me cringe so hard I rebuilt it in a day
Back in 1999 I put up this Angelfire page for my freelance graphic design work, all tiled backgrounds and blinking gifs, the works. I pulled it up last weekend on a Wayback Machine crawl and literally laughed out loud at the guestbook where I answered questions in Comic Sans. The layout was a table-based mess with a hit counter stuck at like 1,200 visits, and my bio bragged about my 28.8k modem speed like it was a flex. So I spent Sunday rebuilding it as a modern portfolio for fun, but I kept the same bad copy just to see how it aged. What really got me was how much design changed in 25 years, yet I still miss the chaos of that old web. Anyone else ever dig up their old page and feel a weird mix of shame and nostalgia? How long did you keep your first site online before you nuked it?
Small thing, but Angelfire and Wayback Machine don't mix the way people think. The crawler skipped a ton of Geocities and Angelfire pages, so that hit counter and guestbook you pulled up might just be the only copy that survived.