That time a Geocities fanatic called my layout 'too corporate'

I was showing off my new Angelfire page in an IRC channel back in 97 and this guy named PixelPunk42 goes off on me. He said my layout looked like a bank website and had no soul. I told him I spent 3 hours on the tile background and he just laughed. Then he sent me his page with a flaming skull gif and a guestbook that had 200 entries. I felt like a total poser after that. Anyone else get roasted by the old school HTML purists back then?

2 comments

2 Comments

anthony9891mo ago

Man I remember that feeling. I used to think my GeoCities page was fire because I found a cool way to tile a star pattern. Then some dude named CyberWizard called it "newbie trash" and sent me his page with a bunch of MIDI files and a visitor counter that went up to like 500. That stung for a bit but honestly it kinda woke me up. Made me realize there was a whole different level of effort people were putting in and I was just phoning it in.

faithb741mo ago

Your visitor counter memory is a little off, GeoCities counters stopped at like 9999 not 500 lmao. But yeah CyberWizard sounds like a jerk, there was always that one guy who thought having a guestbook made him a god. Still, those run-ins taught me more than any tutorial ever did though.