A quick look at the calendar shows that we’re due for another installment where I try to dig up old links and see if anything survived. The 30th anniversary of my next personal page update isn’t for a few more months, but that didn’t mean my family had stopped appending things to the shared site around the same time. They wouldn’t progress too much beyond that point, but that gives us a chance to look at the collection of links all at once and then be done with it. Since it’s mostly skating and Barbie-related, you will be thankful for this.

V1 - August 13, 1995

As mentioned before (I think), all of our webpages were on one long scrolling site, linked by anchor tags in the table of contents. I lobbied to break away shortly after, but the rest of the family remained intact, mainly because they were only half interested in this to begin with.

The garish yellow USFSA logo in the background would be far from the greatest design choice, as it would get much worse—at least until I tried my hand at graphics, at which point it was a losing battle.

V2 - August 19, 1995

Magic Eye Stereogram Illusions were all the rage, so why not use that for a background? Surely the text will appear seamlessly on top. At this point the pages were split, although most retained the look and feel of the original, but with a blue palette shift on the skating logo.

V3 - January 21, 1996

The background was changed to the giant Earth mural in my bedroom. I had used this as well, just not as an online backdrop. The space theme would persist beyond this point, but I’m unsure if that will rear its head in future installments.

My cat also got her own page, so we’ll be diving into that, however.

University of Delaware Figure Skating Club

In true 1996 fashion, there is no background, and the ‘center’ tag is the only formatting of note. The choice to link to the Delaware skating center doesn’t make as much sense at first, since we don’t live anywhere near there, but around this time, my dad and I took a train down for a competition.

It was a pleasant area, and they still had Arby’s, which had more or less been phased out locally. There’s not much to dive into within the website unless you are in the area and want to figure skate, but it does seem to be fairly complete. It helps that the site is still active despite two URL migrations.

Josee Chouinard Image Home Page

Another link that seems somewhat random. She’s a skater, so perhaps we crossed paths at some point. Most, if not all, of the photo pages are broken links, so aside from some personal info that I won’t be sharing here, there isn’t much to glean.

The (Unofficial) Katarina Witt Homepage

This was a sub-section of the Pat’s Ice Skating page. I’m linking to that, since it’s using the newfangled frames that Netscape 2.0+ supported. It also has the ubiquitous textured tiling background that no self-respecting site would be without. Certainly a step up from what we were doing at the time. Again, images are broken, so we can’t do a deep dive, but the logos and banners are fantastic.

SkateWeb: The Figure Skating Page

As Virginia Blalock states: “This is the premier figure skating site on the Internet. Sandra Loosemoore has compiled skating links of all kinds. SkateWeb also pictures, clipart, funny skating stuff and more..” It was part of a webring, so that’s as legit as it can get.

The main draw, however, is Frogs on Ice. The subpage shows various ice skating moves as illustrated by anthropomorphic frogs. All hand-drawn in some digital fashion, they need to be archived as soon as possible. Beyond the moves, famous skaters got the treatment, such as Tadpole Lipinski, a caricature of Tara “I’m happy my parents divorced so I could skate more” Lipinski.

Outside skating, Sandra runs the Froggy Page. The first link plays an .au sound, which is a long-forgotten audio format. Designed mainly for Java applets, it has even less relevance now, but it's welcome to see in the wild all the same.

The Big Mamie Home Page

We’re finished with skating from here on out (I think). On to local pages of interest. Big Mamie isn’t a kindly old motherly star of ye olde minstrel show but a nickname for the U.S.S. Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. battleship. I believe it’s still docked nearby and is open for tours.

In fact, after looking at the page, it appears that there’s a lot more than just the battleship to tour. There’s a marine museum, carousel, and a railroad museum. Funny how I just drive by it some days and never notice.

The site is rather well-archived, with many of the images surviving, as does the information. Jack’s personal site is worth a look too, especially the advanced HTML techniques like frames and JavaScript. My kingdom for the time when those were placed on the same level as a decade’s experience in Oracle DB management.

University of Hawaii Meteorology Department

Again, I’m not sure why we’re trotting off to far ends of the globe, except for the fact that the ‘net is exactly for this purpose. I guess I’m just not sure why Hawaii weather maps were of interest. There seems to be a rather complete archive of the old satellite images, so they could be worth a look. There are a lot of splotches over maps.

R.L. Stine Home Page

Moving to my brother’s selection of links now. There won’t be many. This one took some time to track down in archive form. Eventually, I did a wide-open search on scholastic.com in order to find the Goosebumps page and then the R.L. Stine section. I’m glad I did, because it’s fantastic.

We often deify the individual webpage efforts, but there’s a charm to the early corporate ones as well. Shackled by the technology, they often had to battle on a level playing field with us mortals, and the sites would be a jumble of bright backgrounds and image rollover animations. All are present here, unique to each sub-page, so as to maximize the number of colors that could be in use.

A quick browse reveals that most of the pages remain, and you can spend some time reliving the glory days of the Goosebumps era. Admittedly, I was too old for them at the time, but it didn’t stop me from breezing through them in a night, just for the camp value.

Treasure Net

A page dedicated to finding treasure. More accurately, it’s for metal-detecting hobbyists. There’s links to equipment, message board archives, and some pictures of the Civil War. The thumbnails appear to load, but most of the larger ones do not. It’s worth a quick look through in those sections, but most of the classified are going to be far outdated.

Nightmare Shop

Several sub-pages were linked to, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll stick with the top-level site. I recall my brother being in a magic phase, where our parents were convinced to spend a few hundred dollars (during vacation, no less) on magic supplies, since he was going to start doing birthday parties to make money. I believe this happened once, and it was for my sister’s party.

The rest of this site looks like it’s for masks, costumes, and props. In a time before Spirit Halloween, there were small shops at the mall with walls of detailed masks. I’d never have the privilege of getting any, since they were expensive, but I could dare to dream. Looking here, they only seem to be between $30 and $40, which isn’t bad. The full-sized Roswell Alien is $1750, but it very well may be real for that price.

The images are all there, and some are even transparent .gif files, complete with a valiant attempt at cutting out the background. Perfect for your next Discord server avatar. Bonus points to the purely image-based menu and the image map navigation. Double points for the fact that this layout persisted until 2019.

Tymon Gardner's Home Page

Remember io.com? No, it wasn’t a free host in the vein of Geocities or Angelfire, but rather an ISP that provided web-based services. I recall one page that used it from back in the day, and I will not tell you what that one was, but being based in the Houston area makes sense. Illuminati Online throws a jab at the AOL logo by combining it with the all-seeing eye. And people get nervous about privacy these days!

The Nightmare Shop in the previous entry used them, as does Tymon’s page. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that has survived, including the Barbie page, which was the original hotlink. The only one that works is the Dell button, but that presents the glorious 1996 version, so Check that out.

Oh yeah, we’ve moved to my sister’s page at this point, not my brothers!

The Hobbes Home Page

I mentioned that my Cat had her own page. It was mainly to add photos of her and try out this new JavaScript thing to make a dynamic page. But aside from that, I added links to other sites, since, you know, that’s what 90% of pages were for.

NetVet Cat's Homepage

Amazing! Not only does the page still exist—at the same URL—but it appears to have not changed at all. Perhaps a link or two have been added, since that’s all the page offers, but otherwise, the same logo and color scheme persist. The date at the bottom has been updated as recently as 2020, but there was no bright idea to reinvent the place. It’s perfect as is.

Cat Fanciers Web Site

I admit, these articles are a good fallback when I’m out of ideas, but man, do they take forever to research. Anyway, we’re onto the last link. I’ve culled the dead links to save time, which is why we’ve seen so much apparent success.

Cat Fanciers has been online since 1993, if the banner is to be believed—and I have no reason not to. They are also still online, even if my work connection flags it as a potentially malicious site. Those rascally cats. What I can see via the Wayback does show some decent info, including breed information, shelter, and general care. There was a mailing list, since continuous communication in the early days wasn’t an easy thing to achieve. Few people returned to old sites, and that was a way to keep the community alive.

I like how they called the site an internet forum. I wasn’t sure when that term fell into use, but it must have been pretty early on.

Well, that does it for now. I’ll get a small break until March or so, when I need to figure out what links have been added and then sift through those. Sigh…