My old site's guestbook script crashed the whole page for a week

I was updating my personal site from 1998 last month, the one with the starry background and comic sans headers. I added a simple Perl guestbook script I found on a freeware site. The next day, my hit counter showed zero visits. Turns out, a syntax error in the script made the whole page fail to load in Netscape. I spent three evenings checking line by line before I found the missing semicolon. It was a huge relief to see the visitor counter start ticking again. Anyone else have a script break their classic site like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

garcia.charles1mo ago

My buddy's blink tag loop crashed his Angelfire page for a solid month. He just gave up and let it become internet archaeology.

fionarodriguez1mo ago

omg did you see that article about the guy who lost his whole geocities page from a broken marquee tag? classic html was so fragile sometimes. your missing semicolon story gives me flashbacks to debugging my own old perl scripts. it's wild how one tiny typo could just nuke a whole site back then. honestly kinda miss that era even with the headaches.