Buy European

Please tell me it had a visitor counter on the front page and blinkies in the footer?

:) (Nodding knowingly, kids have no idea these days)

But no it did not had these, not in the early days at least. Back then, it was already something for young (and ignorant me) me to be able to display text and put an image... thumb-sized, because dial-up Internet was slow and anything but cheap. A little later, I started (over)using gif like many, also learning to create my own (I'd rather not remember any of my 'creations' :p). But I never was obsessed with that. The moment I fell in love with my website, wanting to make it even more uniquely mine, is when I first heard about and tried CSS. That came later for me, but I could not tell how much.

It was a clumsy learning process, all done by hand through trial and (soooo many) errors, but that was mind blowing. I madly fell in love with CSS... Flash forward quite a few years later, when they finally managed to make me run away from the complex beast they had turned CSS into, and even steer away from the idea of handwriting my own website like I had been doing for all those years.

On that note, Neocities is still alive and the websites there remind me of the walkman and pez dispenser I had, love it!

Thx for the link!

I remember neocities. A bit like I remember Lycos and even more fondly remember my very first Walkman (Sony's very first model, my uncle brought me back from Japan back then). I have been using that poor thing for countless years. It was beaten to death, paint was gone in so many spots there was not much left to be read on it but it worked well. I loved it. I often listened to cassettes on that beaten up Walkman while I was trying my hands at writing HTML and CSS up until years later when it died of one last fall on the ground. No matter how silly that is, I was sad losing it. If I remember well, I also managed to get my hand on a compatible DC adapter, so it would eat that much batteries.

Disclaimer: I'm not that old.

edit: typos.