The toy continues.
PSPB is now up to 30 Operating System and Browser Combinations and over 50 sites. It’s a still a bit Windows-centric at the moment (though, of course, so was a lot of the tech sector back then) but this is improving as I branch out into other operating systems.
I’ve been watching the RetroManCave YouTube channel for a while and, when Neil Thomas (the chap who runs it) announced that he was going to launch an edited volume of his interviews with various pioneers of the computer and gaming industry, I figured that it was time back my first Kickstarter.
It looks like it should be a good quality product on an interesting set of topics and I’m looking forward to receiving my copy in November.
Anyway, the Kickstarter for Volume One can be found here. Do hurry, the backing ends on the 13th of August.
So, I’ve built a new toy. It’s called PSPB (Period Sites in Period Browsers) and it pulls pages out of the Wayback Machine and renders them in various period specific browsers and operating systems (stripping off all the Archive.org rubbish as it does so).
As of launch it only has a half-dozen Operating System/Browsers combinations and around a dozen source sites – and the site that it posts them too is rather austere – but that’s likely to change as I poke around with it and get things up and running.
While I have no real idea how long it’ll last, PSPB can currently be found here.
A short but sweet link on why someone has gone back to running a personal website – rather than rely on the mess that is social media and external hosting.
The web was better in 2004 than today; it was more personal and more compact yet, somehow, oddly bigger too. Today I see the same layouts, the same themes the same themes, the same algorithmically curated content on so many pages.
And it’s not like the algorithmically curated content is any good; if I’ve just bought a toaster or a USB cable or a hoodie then it’s unlikely that I’m going to want another one tomorrow. Yet, again and again, the same thing appears in my feed and follows me around the internet.
Of course the internet has far more users today than it did back then (from hundreds of millions to 3-4 billion today), but most people end up in a corner that reflect’s them and theirs and there is no reason that these small corners cannot multiply and thrive away from the big content providers.