I feel like Dr. Frankenstein. I’ve turned the power on again. The creature lives!
My baby. My first and only website for a long time, between ’96 and ’98, the inimitable animated GIF wonderland of the ZOO ZONE, or ZooZone, or however I did write it. (I still own the zoozone.com domain, although it’s parked.) Just what it is, is hard to say. The Official Horned Obelisk Answer Engine (probably the longest such animation you’ve ever witnessed) is a good place to start, if that link works for you, and it might, because I’ve just uploaded the old site to two different directories on my iDisk, which more people might try if uploading weren’t slower than watching a tree grow. We’ll try what might be the best one first, but in any case, it’s alive!
You have probably never seen such an ugly mess in your life. The navigation is byzantine: there are six different ways to enter the site, and early versions of “click here” buttons in German. I built the whole thing with hand-coded pages and GIF animations like the one at the top of this post. Those required a zillion individually-drawn ClarisWorks frames! You’ll want to check out Rancid Baboon Animations, although the first two items there may or may not play for you, but most of the ones in the Graveyard of the Animations will run — give them time to load, and something will probably happen. Some of the layouts have shifted, because modern browsers render certain bits of HTML differently than they did a dozen years ago. The content is ridiculously juvenile and reeks of what used to be called “Mac evangelism,” but I was having enormous fun and learning a lot — I remember how happy I was when I first learned to link one page to the other. (Ooooooohh!) Our computer at the time was a Mac LCII with 8 MB of RAM and a mighty 16 KHz processor and cost as much as this 3.06 GHz iMac with 4 GB of RAM I’m using right now.
There are secret links embedded on the opening page. If you click on the skull, you’re taken to the Arcturan version of the same thing. No, really. So have some fun with this if you can stand it. There’s a lot of very weird business to shake your head over. I can’t believe I ever made such a thing. It was a years-long art event, actually, and I even duplicated it physically at a special art opening I’ll have to recall for the masses.
Oh! So why am I doing this? Just for a hoot, I guess. I realized I had the “free” unused hosting available, and with three planets in Virgo, you know I have a whole bunch of old websites all stashed away. Maybe I’ll start a website museum. Or maybe there’s something in there that will horribly embarrass, incriminate, or destroy me.
I did say I felt like Dr. Frankenstein, right?
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Indeed it is alive… It even lets an unwashed MSIE 8/Windows XP user like myself bask in its glory. Congratulations….
Something reminiscent of Space Invaders about some of it.
This is the 1st comment I’ve left in awhile and I used to complain about not being able to see what I typed. I don’t know when you changed things, but I can see what I’m doing, now. Whether this is beneficial is for others to judge!
J
Hey John! How’s the new house working out?
The complaint you had before was for the FotoFeed site, and I’m afraid that’s still in the state that led to your original frustration. Oh well.
As for the ZooZone, what a weird mess, eh? But it was exciting to dump the site folder onto the Apple server and watch it come to life again. Amazing how far we’ve all come in such a short time, too.
You’ve come a long way baby
And thank God, too! I’m kind of amazed that I did all that, though. In some strange way, it reminds me of a prisoner decorating the inside of his dungeon.