Ahh, now I remember why these kinds of websites died out.
It's exciting a lot like Minecraft, in that we can make our own little worlds. We exercised both sides of the brain by learning how to write HTML and maybe some Perl, all while writing actual content.
But just like Minecraft, that world is isolated and lonely. Nobody visited our sites, that's why we stopped updating them. They were inherently isolated from the beginning.
So we built social networks to replace them. We have new places to go to share our random thoughts. Places where it's slightly more likely they'll be seen by someone.
I have to say that this time around the ramp is pointed way higher. Like ~mathowie is doing wheelies right out the gate, content-wise. So I'll be heading back there and I just created a category for Tilde Club stuff in my bookmark database.
What if you linked pages together in a sort of map.
In Minecraft, the world is segmented into 16x16 block "chunks". In this analogy, a chunk would be a web page.
Create a front-end application like Google Maps that allows you to navigate the map of web pages. You can submit a request for a web page at a specific location, e.g. I want the page located at (13, 37). Hyperlinks could be used to teleport users around the map.
I'm not sure. Some of the most informative pages were available under Tripod, written by people into obscure subjects. They were typically ugly (the pages, not the people), but were informative. They were a source of more interesting information than today's social network's "here's a picture of me eating something". You could actually learn something from reading the pages instead of just observing someone else's behaviour / possessions.
The home education community in the UK had a huge amount of information up on Tripod and similar sites, pointing to all sorts of useful resources for those who wanted to teach their kids at home. I'm not sure where they post information these days. Probably in Facebook groups.
These seem to be still around. Sometimes I'm looking for specialized info on non-technical software and there is usually a really ugly but highly informative page from an enthusiast around (who only got into basic html). (See bonsai care for example)
Actually, I meant that Minecraft is more interesting that the current crop of social networks. These types of pages are interesting, social network pages are not.
It's exciting a lot like Minecraft, in that we can make our own little worlds. We exercised both sides of the brain by learning how to write HTML and maybe some Perl, all while writing actual content.
But just like Minecraft, that world is isolated and lonely. Nobody visited our sites, that's why we stopped updating them. They were inherently isolated from the beginning.
So we built social networks to replace them. We have new places to go to share our random thoughts. Places where it's slightly more likely they'll be seen by someone.