What was your favorite website from the 1990s?
I'm too young to remember any specific website, but I'd like to know about your old internet habits, webrings and such. I wonder how many of them are still active.
Everything2.com. Yes, it's still around, yet I've always found that the really interesting, amusing posts are from circa 2000, so that would appear to be its golden age.
I've never found anything quite like Everything2's formula, which I think remains inspired. The trick is that the 'softlinks' at the bottom of each page is a list of the most common pages people visit after visiting that page in descending order; this includes if you use the search box to go to another page. What this means is that if you read a page and it randomly reminds you of something else on E2, and you go and visit it, an association is created. Then others can click on the new softlink at the bottom of the page - it will rise or fall by the popularity of the link.
What this leads to is some very weird serendipity and randomness in browsing. Combine this with the informal, personal atmosphere in which E2 nodes tend to be written - many articles are random personal anecdotes, strange takes or pieces of weird fiction - and it makes for something really unique.
The engine the site is built in is also interesting; it's an "everything is a node" design written in Perl. As I understand it the engine is very flexible and much of the logic of E2.com itself is written in Perl scripts stored inside a database, though I may be mistaken; I never looked into the details.
slashdot.org (before it went completely downhill with synthetic, commercial stories much like reddit is today, or at least the top subreddits)
dejanews.com (before it was bought/killed by Google and when Usenet used to carry interesting discussions; interestingly, Usenet seems to occasionally have new good content in recent years after spammers and whackos have left)
I spent so many hours on "Fravia's pages of reverse engineering" and "Fravia's search lore" (mirror here, original is gone: http://www.darkridge.com/~jpr5/mirror/fravia.org/index.html)
A cavernous den of practical info, and mystery!
I was sad to hear that Fravia passed away - they were such an inspiration to a kid learning about computers.
Astalavista and other "sibling" sites on its parent domain were my favorites. I used to be a silly borderline criminal kid.
Growing up I would read NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) which is still running! https://apod.nasa.gov/
Slashdot and Fark were good and still exist
If I have to pick just one, Hothothot.com! It was the first live e-commerce site I ever saw, the first site that accepted credit card payments, and the first (other than perhaps some technical demo site) that used HTTPS. It also had a very distinctive graphical design, and, of course, an amazing assortment of hot sauce with funny names like Dave's Insanity Sauce and Bat Out of Hell.
I'm pretty sure I originally found it via Cool Site of the Day, which back then was the first page I went to every morning.
Earliest capture I could find (warning: popups): https://web.archive.org/web/19990830033735/http://www.hothot...
*Slashdot*. I spent so much time on there.
happypuppy.com (happy puppy games). Used to have all sorts of shareware in the 90s, and free demos. Sadly gone now apparently, but here's a reddit thread discussing it 10 years ago about how someone hadn't thought about it for 10 years previous to then!
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/at1ux/anyone_rememb...
Albino Blacksheep, slashdot, and of course the amazing Homestar Runner!
All kinds of abandonware sites. I used to download games and record them on CDs in internet cafés, even before I had my first computer:)
Newgrounds, Gamefaqs.
Both are still around, but my interests have changed since I was a child, so have not visited either for at-least 15 years.
Memepool was my favorite source for interesting or fun links to follow. For "more intelligent" links (related to Web dev. IA, programming, etc) I frequented Tomalak's Realm. I see several mentions of Slashdot, Kuro5hin was a descendant from it that also got traction.
Edit to add K10K which was design inspiration.
Without question, Bill Beaty's http://amasci.com/ -- still up and running after all these years!!
Had a huge impact on me; it encouraged science exploration, investigation, skepticism, curiosity, and hands-on experimentation.
After altavista.com, it would have to be Urban75, which is still online (but sort of mostly mothballed; mostly a museum now): http://urban75.com/
Edited to add parenthesis, now that I have flicked through it a bit.
(It may be early 2000s.)
I really miss IRC.
DMOZ - the Open Directory Project.
It stopped in 2017 (I think) but there is an archive at https://dmoz-odp.org/ which is frozen content but otherwise working.
Bill Beaty's "SCIENCE HOBBYIST" site, http://amasci.com/ I really learned a lot there as a kid and I still reference and link it to others today.
Word.com. It was sort of a postmodern literary magazine. So many funny, interesting and weird stories were on there. One of the columns called Work got compiled into a book called Gig, but the rest of the site is lost to history.
yahoo.com
I was a child back in the 90s and growing up in a lower middle class family in a developing country, we didn’t have the luxury of a consistently good internet connection. But whenever I have the chance to connect, Yahoo was perfect for me because you can see everything in one page, specifically the top international headlines + the search bar.
In the early 2000s, I’d say my favorite is stumbleupon.com.
www.google.com but it's changed since then
altavista.com was the one that made you feel like you could find anything.
altervista had cracks for windows shareware.
cdnow.com, playboy.com, my.yahoo.com
cartoonnetwork.com
There were a lot of fun Flash(Shockwave, as it was called back then) games!
JNCO jeans website, Angelfire sites, Homestar runner (‘99) to name a few.
zeldman.com, alistapart.com. Oh, those heady standards-seeking days!
Yahoo's curated, hierarchical directory of web pages.
Make James Earl Jones Speak
Find the Pope in the Porsche
sidewalk.com
flipcode.com was the first website I would visit on a daily basis.
halfbakery.com - and it's still (half) going.
goatse
(nws if you end up googling it)