Spent 4 hours digging through a 2001 web design forum just to find out how to center a div

I was trying to restore this old fan site from 2004 that was still online but totally broken in modern browsers. The layout was a mess and I couldn't remember half the CSS tricks from back then. That forum had threads from actual developers who built sites for Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer 5. It took me 4 whole hours to scroll through 20 pages of outdated advice but I finally found a post from 2002 that explained table-less layouts with pixel widths. Has anyone else gone down a rabbit hole of ancient tutorials just to fix one simple thing?

2 comments

2 Comments

christopher_singh9211d ago

Back in 2018 I spent 3 hours on a GeoCities archive trying to figure out why my old site's guestbook script was throwing a 404 error. Turned out the host had changed the path for the Perl script and nobody updated the original tutorials. That stuff was gold though, real people just trying to make things work with what they had. I still miss how easy it was to find someone who actually built the same thing you were fixing. Now you get a YouTube video from 2 years ago that's already outdated.

reese_lane299d ago

Actually it was a little earlier than 2018. GeoCities shut down in 2009 so by 2018 you were digging through the Yahoo archives or maybe the Oocities mirror. They saved a bunch of stuff but the paths were all messed up. I remember finding an old Perl guestbook script that needed the CGI-BIN path changed from "/cgi-bin/" to "/cgi/" and even then half the time the permissions were wrong. Those old tutorials were great though. They were written by someone who actually ran into the same problem and just wanted to help out. Now you get a 15 minute video where half of it is someone rambling about their sponsor.