Malarkey is Andy Clarke, a creative designer with a passion for accessibility and web standards. This is his personal website.

.net magazine September 1998

Hicks’ (justifiable) excitement about his logo design article appearing in .net magazine (#152 August) has brought back memories for Malarkey.

Way back then, when web sites squeezed themselves into 28.8K modems on their way down to the information super-highway, my very first site design hit the interweb.

Adventures in Malarkey World

Until the middle part of 1998 I worked at a small design agency where I had my first taste of web design. In my spare time I put together my first site on a creaky Pentium 100 PC with 16Mb RAM. I used a borrowed totally legitimate copy of Photoshop 4.0, Picture Publisher 7.0 and guess what; Frontpage 98. Later that year, ’Adventures in Malarkey World’ was picked up by .Net magazine and amazingly appeared as their ’Star Site’ late in 1998 (#49 September) along with sites about card tricks, carp catching and bird box cameras.

.net magazine September 1998 (240Kb)

I still have that site on a CD, saved so that it can come back and haunt me at times like this. With code like this, you can see why. ;)

<body bgcolor="#000000" topmargin="0" leftmargin="0"
background="background.jpg" onclick="dynOutline()" bgproperties="fixed">
<div align="center">
<center>
<table border="0" cellspacing="1" width="600">
<tr>
<td width="496" style="padding-top: 20">
<ul style="color: rgb(255,0,0)" dynamicoutline>
<li>
<b>
<b>
<font face="Trebuchet MS" color="#FFFF80">…<br>
</font>
</b>
</b>
<small>
<font color="#FFFFFF" face="Arial">…</font>
</small>
</li>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
etc:

Replies

  1. #1 On July 1, 2006 04:11 AM Craig C. said:

    Nested bold tags make it double-plus-bold.

  2. #2 On July 1, 2006 07:08 AM Steve Ganz said:

    You’ve come a long way, baby. :)

  3. #3 On July 1, 2006 07:52 AM Jon Hicks said:

    And you wondered why you were the star site? Did you look at the competition?!! :D

  4. #4 On July 1, 2006 10:25 AM Karl said:

    So glad Big Ozzie didn’t take exception and hunt you down!

  5. #5 On July 1, 2006 11:25 AM Seb Duggan said:

    I was doing a bit of freelance writing for .net magazine round about then (I worked on the company’s websites).

    Interesting to look back at what I wrote…

    I’m actually quite impressed by how well my Top 10 Golden Rules for graphics has stood up to the changes in the Web!

  6. #6 On July 1, 2006 12:30 PM Richard Conyard said:

    Old code haunts us all. The most frustrating part looking back is thinking about all the effort that was put in and how much simpler it would be to do it again using todays’ techniques.

    My favourites have to be (some not by me):
    Nested TD tags to get extra bevel type effect in IE
    RecordSet filter use
    Objects containing HTML code
    12 frames on a site synchronised through JavaScript

    However if I feel too bad I can at least bring out the "browser" I wrote to connect to the old Spitfire BBS. Nice C parse system :)

  7. #7 On July 4, 2006 07:28 PM Kalle said:

    Hah, that’s some funky code! What is "dynamicoutline" in the UL tag?

    Nice article as well, how does it feel to look back and see all the time you "wasted" on something that you probably wouldn’t give a dime for today?

    Cheers

  8. #8 On July 4, 2006 08:24 PM Malarkey said:

    @ Jon Hicks: Oi! That competition was stiff. Did you not see the Rocky Horror show? ;)

    @ Seb Duggan: Nice article there mate!

    @ Kalle: dynamicoutline (if I remember rightly) was used for a Microsoft FrontPage DHTML extension that collapsed lists ;) Oh my goodness! How will I live THAT down?

  9. #9 On July 5, 2006 12:05 AM Sean Fraser said:

    "A cartoon world where you meet different characters ’ some good, some bad ’ answer riddles and die horrible deaths."

    My! How little has changed.