When you have more than a handful of pages on your site updating anything shared between them becomes tedious. Things like your site menu, a copyright footer if you have one, perhaps the default header and meta tags.

There were options. You could use a tool like Macromedia Dreamweaver, GoLive CyberStudio, HoTMetaL, or HotDog (one of New Zealand’s .com boom success stories!) to author all your HTML and copy the files you could use their built-in templating features, or copy/paste the changes.

If you weren’t rich enough to use those tools - they did cost quite a bit - you’d either have to roll your own using local scripts, or rely on server-side features.

The most obvious is PHP. This is one of the reasons PHP was created, PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page and was a CGI script. The original PHP syntax was very different to what ended up being PHP3, in fact it was very similar to what I’m about to use.

I’ve updated my website with all the pages, common elements brought to you by Server-side Includes!

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The next instalment in building a website like it’s 1999 - adding some interactivity! After all if people can’t submit things on your website how else will you hear from them?

I’m going to add two critical parts of a 90s website - a hit counter and a guestbook.

The counter is on the homepage, as it should be.

The guestbook page now works! It has a completely different style from the homepage, as was the fashion at the time. You have to show off all your design skills.

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Yesterday’s post was getting a bit long, so for those who weren’t doing web design in the late 90s/early 2000s here’s some background.

The constraints of 1999

The late 90s were a time of rapid change in the world wide web, the first big browser war was brewing. Netscape Navigator browser got bloated with the Communicator product they were pushing and Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows rapidly pushed Netscape out of the market. Both implemented parts of HTML4 and CSS 1 and 2 in differently buggy ways, and they both had different ways of using JavaScript to animate elements on the page. Back then we called it Dynamic HTML!

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I’m not going to keep up the narrative style from the last post, so from now on it’s back to first person.

In this post I’ll go through the design updates, and I’ll post a follow-up detailing the constraints that went in to this.

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To change from my regular ramblings about healthcare and reading one to many rose-tinted reckons about how things used to be, let’s make a website like it’s 1999!

What this is and isn’t

My aim is to show how you got your site online in 1999, but not to be historically accurate, so

• I will be using modern HTML and CSS. Quirks mode belongs in the past
• The server software will be modern, because if it wasn’t the server would already be compromised.
• I will be using secure methods rather than accurate ones, but I’ll note where this is different.

But I will show how we made websites dynamic and the compromises made when you had limited space!

I’ll make another post on the server setup if you want to follow along. Ask nicely and I might just give you access to TheaNET.

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So to follow along at home with my website like it’s 1999 series you’ll need a webserver like it’s not 1999. A genuine 1999 webserver would last about 15 minutes on the modern internet.

To set up your own server you’re going to need some degree of experience with UNIX-like systems, DNS, and domain management. I’m not sure if there are many tutorials on this out there, I learnt them a long time ago.

I’m using a virtual machine on my home server, because I’m the sort of person who has a home server. But here’s what I did:

Create a virtual machine to run the server

You could use whole physical machine if you have one handy. I created a VM with 12GB of disk space, 512MB of RAM and 1 vCPU.

An ISP would be able to afford a system with more disk space than this in 1999, but a single core of my 3.5Ghz Intel core i5 4690 would far outclass anything an ISP ran in 1999, even if it is 10 years old at this point.

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