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Vent: Spent a whole weekend trying to fix a broken animated GIF on my old GeoCities site
I was trying to update my old Star Trek fan page from 1998, the one with the black background and those little star graphics. The main animated GIF of the Enterprise had a broken frame and just showed a big red X. I figured I'd just find the file and fix it in a modern editor. But the original file was lost, and finding that exact 88x31 pixel badge from a 90s webring took forever. I ended up digging through the Wayback Machine for three hours just to get a clean copy. Then, the colors went all wrong when I saved it, because the palette was limited to 256 colors. I had to use an old program called Paint Shop Pro 5, which I found on an abandonware site, to get it right. The whole fix, from noticing the problem to uploading the new file, took about 14 hours over two days. Has anyone else gone down a rabbit hole trying to fix one tiny, specific piece of their old site?
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evanpalmer1mo ago
Totally get it. I once spent an entire evening trying to match the exact shade of neon green from my old blink tag. Ended up having to run a virtual machine with Windows 98 just to open the original HTML file in Netscape Composer.
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