Showerthought: I tried to fix my old Geocities page and broke the whole thing

I dug up my old login info from 1998 and tried to update my guestbook script. I changed one line of HTML and suddenly the whole page was just a black background with bright green text. I learned that 90s web code is a house of cards, and you can't just poke it. Anyone else have a story about trying to 'fix' an old site and making it worse?

2 comments

2 Comments

anderson.spencer1mo ago

My Angelfire fan page went down the same way. Those old table layouts were like a Jenga tower, and pulling one piece out was a disaster. I had to just let it rest in peace.

barnes.morgan1mo ago

Ever wonder if those old table layouts actually taught us to think ahead before coding? I mean, you had to plan the whole page in your head before you started... now it's too easy to just slap stuff together and fix it later. Maybe we lost something when we stopped building those jenga towers.