Update: Site’s back to the “normal” theme.
It’s no joke, I have an obsession with nostalgia. Most notoriously, there’s my love of baseball and the rich history of the game and it’s traditions. But there are plenty of other examples of nostalgic indulgences, like typewriters, black and white film photography, and (most recently) fountain pens.
But I’m also prone to actual nostalgia — not just the faux nostalgia of surrounding myself with the old school.
Every time I revise my résumé and realize I’ve been on the Web for a decade and realize I’ve been messing around with HTML and Web design/development for almost as long… Well, I can’t help but feel a little nostalgic about those humble roots. And with good reason — while most of the things I’ve worked on since 1998 have disappeared (account inactivity, group disbanding, hosting change, site redevelopment…), my first site, somehow is still live (albeit in a limited capability).
Today, I’ve invoked that feeling from that first website of mine and recreated that very plain, styleless HTML into a Wordpress template. In a sick and twisted way, I actually enjoyed writing the tag soup of <font> tags and pointless <hr> and <br> tags… You know, the same way you’d enjoy hearing an old Backstreet Boys song you haven’t heard in years — that is, before you realize what it is you’re actually listening to.
(I also get the strangest feeling I’m going to regret linking to that ol’ site…)
I recently read an article (I can’t seem to remember where) about the increase in faux-90’s retro Web design, like the one used on Radiohead’s site. I smiled to myself because I remember making plenty of pages and sites that looked like that in my day. When I was like, 15. Retro-trendiness is a sad, sad thing.
So cheers to April Fool’s Day and cheers to good ol’ nineties Web nostalgia.
